During an afternoon walk, I noticed a small palo verde tree growing on the shoulder of the road out front. I made a mental note to remove the tree from that location due to proximity to road traffic. In a couple of years it would likely have grown out into the roadway.

In discussions with Damsel, we decided to relocate the tiny tree to our rock and cactus garden on the west side away from the RV drive. If the little tree survives the transplant, we will be able to prune it into a nice addition to the garden. It can be made to look like an attractive tree, like so many in Arizona xeriscapes managed by homeowners and landscapers.

I took my spade and carefully loosened the dirt around the little tree, trying to preserve most of the roots. I dug a hole in the west garden and lowered the tree into it. I brushed the soil from the hole over the roots and the lower part of the trunk. We doused it with a gallon of water, hoping that would ease the shock to the transplanted tree.

The two images above are the before and after. Click on either image to enlarge.

I have a new acquisition to my T-Shirt collection. The words and images on the back of it say it all from my perspective. And, it’s true that I was born in July. Click on the image to enlarge.

I found it in an ad on the FecesBook™ website and Damsel said I NEEDED to get it. So I did. It was a little spendy, but it is now mine to be worn on whatever occasions for which it may be suitable. I’m not trying to pick a fight, but won’t back down from one either.

Most of the time I am not actually grumpy, but that mood gets set into motion when really stupid people do stupid stuff. It could be in traffic, in the supermarket aisle, or practically anywhere else. As we have said in the past, “STUPID SHOULD HURT.”

Image courtesy of The Damsel.

This is the seventeenth anniversary of the Islamic Terrorist Attacks on America. We should Never Forget those events.

On that morning, I was in the bathroom getting ready for work. I had the radio on tuned into the local news radio station when I heard about the second attack on the World Trade Center. I woke Damsel up to tell her about the attacks and that I would be staying home to telecommute rather than drive to work. We both watched the terrible events unfold on televised news channels. We were both sad and enraged that this had occurred.

In the aftermath, American flags started to show up everywhere around the country. Patriotism was never more prevalent at that time than any time I can remember in my life. In that same spirit, my employer (TRW at the time), issued badges to all employees so we could display our pride in America during the recovery from the attacks.

American pride still exists, although diminished by time-induced apathy. On this day, we should NEVER FORGET what happened as well as using this Patriots Day to renew our pride in America.

Hurricane Florence (upper left of center in the GOES EAST animation above) is headed directly for the East Coast of the United States, probably making landfall in the Carolinas. The other two cyclones southeast of Florence are Hurricane Isaac, likely to be a problem when it strikes the Lesser Antilles, and Helene, which is forecast to drift northward over the open Atlantic and dissipate.

Florence will likely be the worst disaster to hit the Carolinas and Virginia in decades. It is forecast to make landfall as a category 5 hurricane and will be moving slow, thus prolonging the wind, rainfall and flooding. Recovery is going to be the most expensive in history for that area of the country.

Before, during and after, the alarmist Greenbats will begin their litany of misguided blame of man-made climate change. This is always predictable because of them never letting a crisis go to waste.

Pioneer meteorologist and extraordinary weather forecaster Joe Bastardi of Weatherbell Analytics penned an article Hurricane Florence: How We Got Here. These are some of the remarks he made in the article:

If I am right, this will be the most costly disaster for the Carolinas and Virginias on record. In addition, given our winter forecast, we expect the core of the cold and snow, relative to average, to be near these same areas, which for them means this could very well be the most extreme six-month period on record. A hurricane as strong as Hugo or Hazel, flooding rains due to Florence’s slow movement, the possibility of an exceptional winter — you can’t get much more extreme than that.

. . .

The 2018 Climate Ambulance Chaser Hurricane Blamefest is underway. Hopefully, if you have been following along with, you can see that this threat was a long time coming and has perfectly natural explanations. The setup for this started quite a while ago, and so I will keep clients updated and respond when called upon — and also sit back as the noise and fury hit a deafening pitch this week.

But remember the bottom line: Florence was predicted in advance, and the misery this is going to cause should be front and center. Hopefully, the response is ready to meet the challenge, which for the Carolinas and Virginias is liable to be the costliest on record when the flooding is factored in.

Joe has an excellent book he has written called The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won’t Hear From Al Gore–And Others. Although I haven’t read the book yet (I plan to soon), I am sure it calls out the Greenbats for what they are - LIARS!

Our other blog website, The Wandering Minstrel is currently experiencing problems. Something in the WordPress blog platform has become corrupted. I have asked for help from the server host, but they haven’t pointed me in any helpful direction. I intend to keep trying, but I won’t be able to devote a lot of time to the solution (life gets in the way).

In the meantime, I have put up a temporary page with a blurb explaining the difficulty and a link back to this site. None of the past blog content is available. If you have tried to access Minstrel over the past couple of days you may have seen an HTTP error 500 “Internal Server Error.”

I get the same error when trying to log in as administrator, so I am effectively locked out of my own blog. I have access via FTP protocol, so I am trying to solve things via a back door method. I have not worked with the internal structure of WordPress for several years, so it may be a slow learning process. Fortunately, I have this and a couple of other blogs still functioning that I may be able to compare the corrupted site to how things are supposed work.

Anything that we may have posted over there on Minstrel will get posted here instead. If things get too difficult and confusing, we may throw in the towel on that blog and confine our posting here. We shall see.

UPDATE: The Wandering Minstrel - Signing Off

From the minstrel site:

It has been a good run blogging here for the last Ten Plus years. I worked with the Blog Host to try and resolve the problems with the WordPress installation, but we were unsuccessful in determining the exact cause of the crash.

This page will remain here until I can fix all the links and references to this site that I have created elsewhere in the blogosphere and replace the email addresses with ones that do not use the reynosawatch url. After those are complete, I am going to terminate the host account.

We will continue to post stuff on our favorite topics on the Cap’n Bob website. Thanks to those folks that came here to read our stuff.

Our Devil’s Tongue cactus had its first open flower today. Flowers open during the Second Spring Arizona pseudo-season. I snapped this in the rock and cactus garden west of the house this morning. Several bees were busily competing for the nectar. One of them is visible in the photo.

Ferocactus latispinus is the binomial nomenclature for what is commonly called the Devil’s Tongue cactus. Wikipedia offers the following information about this cactus:

Ferocactus latispinus is a species of barrel cactus native to Mexico. It grows as a single globular light green cactus reaching the dimensions of 30 cm (12 in) in height and 40 cm (16 in) across, with 21 acute ribs. Its spines range from reddish to white in color and are flattened and reach 4 or 5 cm long. Flowering is in late autumn or early winter. The funnel-shaped flowers are purplish or yellowish and reach 4 cm long, and are followed by oval-shaped scaled fruit which reach 2.5 cm (1 in) long.

The Queen of the Night (Peniocereus greggii) cactus that grows on the slope of the hill on the west boundary of our property has had some predatory setbacks, namely something eating the green part of the stems. Regardless, it has rebounded quite nicely by growing three new stems, two longer and one shorter, over the course of the summer months.

It’s probably too late in the season to expect any flowers from this cactus, but the stems appear to be healthy. Hopefully, the predator wont be back again and maybe this cactus will flower next summer.

I found some interesting things about this cactus and it’s use for medicinal purposes in the University of Arizona arboretum pages:

Ethnobotany: Peniocereus greggii has some medicinal value and has also been used in religious ceremonies and ornamentals. Some of its medicinal benefits come from its tuberous roots which have been used to help treat diabetes and other maladies. The roots have also been used by the Tohono O’ Odham, when they boiled and drank the roots to help with respiratory problems, headaches, and digestion. The flowers have also been used in aromatherapy and ornamentally, due to it strong fragrance that some say smells like vanilla.

In the image above, the longest of the three new stems is about eight inches long. Click on the image to enlarge.