I want some coffee!

 ... so let's fix some roads! The contractor(s) brought all the big guns for this job. They stripped the black-top down to the dirt... the top row got new pavement. Road work happens every year around here. And they time it for just before the really hot weather sets in IIRC. This year they repaved the top row. Before they started there were huge gaping cracks in the asphalt (!) and the tar patches intended to hide them hid absolutely nothing. Then we got a surprise. A few days after they finished replacing the pavement on the top row we were told they were going to apply a fresh oil coat to the 2nd and 3rd rows. Turns out they had announced the work via our Goggle-based park messaging system. No one got the message cuz apparently Google is having a network-wide failure of that system. Oops. Happens to the big kids too apparently! So it turns out they had planned to apply a new top coat to those 2 streets from the git-go. First coat on Main road decorated with lots of heavy equipm...

  Under the shade of the mesquite tree It was a nice spring morning with clear skies. The weather made for a delightful stop under my favorite mesquite at the Cactus Garden.  Just looking around here in San Pedro Valley, mesquite is most often a bush. But if you prune it right you can train it to be a nice shade tree. Our across-the-street neighbor on Lot 259 - back when we first moved to our own lot - was Bud Miner; his wife went by Dot. Bud took it upon himself to tend the Cactus Garden by attacking weeds, planting small cactus, pruning trees, whatever. He was pretty bored I guess because he spent a lot of time making The Cactus Garden what it is. It's my favorite stop on my morning walk. By comparison I find Founder's Park at the opposite end of the same street a rather sterile pole barn (a 35' - 40' roof with no walls). I believe the space for the Cactus Garden was originally planned to be an RV site but it just wasn't big enough to meet the park's criteria....

  In case it's too obscure, I'm whining about the rising price of green coffee. Well... coffee and just about everything else a person needs to survive! When I started roasting coffee in December 2003 a pound of green coffee in small lots was about $3 - $8 per pound depending on how 'special' (or not!) it was. Years later in I think 2022 I tried a 50# bag of green coffee from a merchant in Mississippi (still a customer) which was less than $5.66/lb in 50# lots. Prices have crept up over the 3 intervening years and now that variety was $9.02/lb in 50# lots when I last purchased it in Mar 2025. That's close to double for the really nice green coffee I buy from Chiapas, Mexico via the Coffee Bean Corral's Rancher discount program. Now we can look forward to even larger price increases for coffee as goods from our trade partners increase as a result of tariffs added to the cost of what they supply. Import duties are supposed to cause us to 'buy American'. Bu...

Winter tried again to take over the weather but must have been sorely disappointed. Got down to freezing for a few nites but the lowest day-time high is 59°F this week.  So we're getting closer to whining about how ^^%%$$##@ hot it is. No pleasing some folks! 😇 Sunrise is getting too early for me to get any pre-dawn shots (what can I say? I'm old and need all the beauty sleep I can get!). But I did manage a few daylight shots of interest... Looking pretty much due West from the park. Starting to see a little activity but no real rain yet. Looking Northeast from the RV storage yard in the park toward Mae West* Peaks (yeah, really!). Looking across San Pedro Valley to the East from the park- those are the Dragoon Mtns. including Mt Glenn at 7520+ feet.   Mt. Glenn is in the Dragoon Mtns of the San Pedro Valley in Southeast Arizona... about 75 mi East of Tucson Not much going on as snowbirds start gathering up their belongings and head for other parts of the country. It'll be...

  Like all the Fall/Winter/Spring seasons that have preceded this one, it's also the season of the Snowbird.  Junco- the real snowbird according to the National Audubon Society Unlike the photo above a snowbird can also be a critter that takes flight in the fall and doesn't land until late spring flowers are on the trees and bushes. Their wings are their RV. Or maybe just a car with overnight lodging at a motel or a relatives house.  Before the USA pissed all over the Canadians with our politics they were frequent winter visitors here in SKP Saguaro Co-op and in Benson. Dunno about this year but those Canadian dollars were (are?) an important percentage of the annual budget for this park.  The reality is I've launched into something I'm not qualified to address since Economics was my worst subject in college. Mmm... actually that's not true. My worst grade was in Business Law. So apparently my son had his genetics-cards stacked against him when he chose to become ...

A rainbow! Inferred proof we had a little bit of wet stuff. Benson got some rain! Not monsoons yet... that doesn't happen till early July. It's been months but it finally happened. And today was perhaps the 3rd time this month of March 2025 that it has happened. The poor old weather gauge feature for measuring rainfall is apparently plugged with tumble weeds or maybe a bird's nest and refuses to give us a reading. But I know wet concrete when I see it so I don't need a rain gauge for confirmation! Conveniently the landscaping crew had made a pass thru a couple days ago and took out some weeds and about 5+ unwanted yucca plants. All prettied-up for this photo-op.

  Freight cars moving thru the San Pedro Valley toward he Dragoon Mountains East of Benson Benson, Arizona has been home base since December, 2010. More specifically the RV park named SKP Sagauaro Co-op on the Southeast side of town. The San Pedro Valley - and the San Pedro River that gives it it's name - runs from Mexico to a location just East of Saguaro National Park. It is perhaps 135 miles from the border to its terminus to the north of Benson. The San Pedro River runs thru the valley and is kind of special: it's the only North-flowing river in the US originating in Mexico. Not a lot going on here other than winter RV tourists... that's when the local population swells from 5,000 to about 10,000. There are ranches and small farms in the valley; they make gun powder and explosives just to the South of Benson at Apache Powder; there's some mining; significantly there is Fort Huachuca to the Southwest in Sierra Vista; and there's the railroad.  Southeast of Benso...