Even in Kyoto

The advent of central air conditioning is the leading factor contributing to the huge number of people moving to desert areas such as Las Vegas, NV and Phoenix, AZ. Probably also other cities in other southern states in the U.S., like Houston. Places where things are fine, until they aren't.

The house where I'm staying has the benefit that it actually has two central AC units, so when one died, the other could at least keep half of the house at a tolerable temperature. And the chances of massive, extended power outages like the one recently experienced in Houston are lower here for a number of reasons. I do not consider this sufficient reason to move to the desert, just noting the overall situation.

In any case, when central air units die, it is very expensive to replace them. But at least mildly entertaining to watch.

Shiny new unit arrives:


Craning out part of the old unit:


And old swamp cooler also got taken out at the same time since it hasn't been useable for a while now.


Whee!


Swamp coolers are far more energy-efficient than air conditioners. They are basically just giant fans that blow across water, using evaporative cooling to lower the local temperature. However, they don't work as well once the desert hits the monsoon season, so they've generally fallen out of favor. In addition to their energy efficiency, they offer the advantage that they can be used with the windows open. On the other hand, because they rely on water, they tend to rust out over time.

One of the other historic climate control methods in this area is flood irrigation. Flood irrigation is not particularly water-efficient, but it is quite nice in several different ways. For one thing, it provides deep watering that is beneficial for keeping large shade trees alive. Shade from trees is rather precious in the desert. For another thing, the evaporative cooling of flood irrigation does help keep flood-irrigated neighborhoods cooler than non-flood-irrigated neighborhoods. You can feel a noticeable temperature difference when riding a bicycle from a non-flood-irrigated area into a flood-irrigated area.

Much of the flood irrigation water travels to different neighborhoods through a network of canals. The original canal network was created by the Hohokam more than 1400 years ago, but then abandoned at around AD 1450 for unknown but likely climate-related reasons. In the recent past, many of the canals in this region were tree-lined, and served as places where people could go to swim and cool off during the summer heat. At some point that ended, I believe under the thinking that the trees were causing a lot of water loss, and maybe also the canal structure changed to the point where it no longer seemed safe or prudent for people to swim in the canals. Not sure. Some more specific history can be found here, in any case. But now the canal network forms an alternative transportation system that is tangential to the street grids, so the canals remain a great and lower-stress place for riding bikes or walking the dog. At least until a person reaches a road crossing and has to play "frogger" across 4-6 lanes of traffic traveling at speeds of 45 mph or more.

Anyway. The house where I'm staying has flood irrigation, and was scheduled to receive water yesterday. At the Farmer House, a Zanjero (just learned the term!) opened the valves, but here, the homeowner is supposed to open the valves. Except the current homeowners are down in southern Arizona, so I'm in charge.

My inner five-year-old was pleased.


12-second video of water coming out:


The second valve:


The second of the two valves for this house, which is in the backyard, supplies the front yard, via a small "creek" that forms alongside the house.

I was trying to read papers while sitting at a desk, but got distracted by some of the small drama of the flood irrigation outside the window next to the desk, where the flood water chased a bunch of beetles out of their hiding places and onto a small rock island (center of 20-second video below):



I didn't get this part on film, but periodically a beetle would just decide to take the plunge and would jump off the rock into the water, swimming away towards the other side. I don't know why more of them didn't just try and get closer to the house, where the ground was higher, but maybe staying in the shade was a higher priority than staying dry.

At one point, a desiccated (ornamental) orange with one side punched in floated past, looking like a small boat, and 3-4 beetles tried to jump into it, capsizing it.

Typically, the flood irrigation waters take a day or two to sink into the soil, and then it's back to desert life as usual.

Mostly posted for scrottie's benefit.

The Farmer Market has morphed. Again. It is essentially now a coffeeshop by day, a bar by night. I tried to go have lunch there, but apparently they are getting food starting up at the end of the month, so no luck. I will henceforth go there for coffee, instead of Cartel. Nothing in particular against Cartel, just, I'd rather continue supporting the Farmer Market.

I punted to the next plan, riding to campus and eating at one of the Charlie's. On my way, I couldn't help myself, I rode all the way down to 13th and Farmer.



The Farmer House still looks great, from the exterior. Neighbor G's former house next door looks barren and terrible, which is kind of no surprise because it has long been a Rentals Tempe property (why she moved).

I planted the tall, organ pipe-type cactus just to the right of the Farmer House walkway shortly after R and I moved in, in 2008. I love going back to visit and seeing that it's still there and thriving. Amazing that it's now taller than the tree right behind it.

I had that thought about killers revisiting the scene of the crime, while going back and taking photos of a former home, but after all, it's a natural impulse.

There have been changes on Farmer Ave, but overall the character remains the same.

The Charlie's in Hayden Library was closed, so I just went to a Qdoba in the MSU instead.

I appreciated spotting this on my ride to downtown Tempe this morning.

As the subject line says, I'm at about a 50% batting average right now when it comes to getting up early to exercise. Yesterday morning, I failed, but this morning I succeeded. Today I took Princess TinyBike out in the opposite direction on Highway 83, just to see what was out there.

It's hard to see, but in this photo there's some sort of small blimp hanging out above the Huachuca Mountains, in the center of the image. My guess is that it's associated with Fort Huachuca. It was there the entire time I was out riding.



This was the coolest wildflower I saw this time, although I'm not sure what it is. The leaves look like they're the wrong shape for this to be Arizona summer poppy.




I'm so glad the temperatures are cool here in the mornings.


After a certain point, I became curious about how close or far away I was from reaching Parker Canyon Lake. A check of the GPS suggested it wasn't too far away, so it seemed like a worthwhile destination.

It wound up being *mostly* worthwhile.



There was a low crossing shortly before a final climb to the lake. At the nadir, a dog burst out and gave chase, and I heard multiple other dogs barking as well. It did eventually respond and turn away when I yelled at it, but still. It was there again on the return. The loose dogs in Arizona aren't as bad as in Texas, but I don't really feel like I need to ride that last mile out to the lake again if it's going to involve a risky dog chase.

The rest of the ride was fantastic. I saw a couple of wild turkeys, and there were deer, ducks, and a heron at the lake.

The lake is too small to be much fun for rowing, but the perfect size for tootling about and swimming and fishing.


The outbound leg also involved some elevation gain, so it was also fun to descend and enjoy the views on the ride back. There isn't exactly the same "top of the world" feeling here that I sometimes get in places in the Midwest and New York, but in parts of Arizona you definitely get a sense of the vastness of the Central Valley (or other things) from certain vista points.



Other pretty wildflowers:




I also figured out that maybe part of why exercise is seeming unusually tiring is because the elevation here is around 5000 feet. I've been acclimated to sea level.

And now, to work.

Yesterday, JH noted that they have a blacklight here. Unbenkownst to me, he set it up last night, hilariously using Princess TinyBike to hold up the sheet.



Since I only got to take a look at it this morning, I missed some of the more interesting visitors, but there were still ample subjects for practicing some macro photography.



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The routine I aspire to here: get up, exercise, have breakfast, work on academic work/writing, have lunch, more academic work/writing, dinner, then kick off and enjoy drinks on the patio in the evening. At the moment there are excess beverages in the house, so someone should really do something about the situation.

Utterly luxurious, really.

But in practice, I would also like to work in some time for artistic aspirations. Maybe I can work on drawing and painting as a semi-social late afternoon or evening activity, for instance.

And I really want to learn how to use this Panasonic DSLR camera while I'm here, too. It's a great camera, a gift from scrottie but so far I've been just a little too overwhelmed to sit down and really learn to use it. There are lots of wonderful things here to photograph, though, so this seems like a good time for the project (although argh, I should have brought along my mini-tripod! I almost forgot I own one!).

Last night we discovered that the resident seed-harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, are reproducing. I have a small backlog of videos I need to upload, including one that's hilarious (to me) because I tried to record queens taking off to mate, but got distracted by the workers who came out to defend the nest. I'll get to that soon.

I set the bar low for this morning's exercise, after Monday's overly hot bike ride: a walk. Morning temperatures are much more pleasant here than in Arizona's Central Valley anyway, but whenever I'm in a new place trying to establish a new routine, I need to allow myself a few days to get established. And I'll need to go back through all of my strength training notes to get myself set up with a strength training routine with the tools and resources at hand (resistance bands, etc).

Also, I needed to get a sense of what's out here.

Anyway, my initial photos with the Panasonic are too dark because I couldn't figure out how to adjust the exposure, but come along for the walk, anyway.

New seed-harvester ant nest tillings:


I was hoping to get a photo of the queen in the act of digging, but when she noticed me, she decided to wait underground until I left.

I had an audience while I tried to take ant pictures:


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(post title is a periodic reminder about one of my all-time favorite pieces of installation art, which I hope more people will get to see in person some day)

When in Arizona, this is a blog that talks incessantly about the weather.

On Thursday, the Tucson branch of the National Weather Service twittered some commentary about a large impending monsoon storm:

THREAD: We're heading into one of the more active monsoon patterns we've seen in many years over the upcoming few days. Follow along as we take a deeper dive into the meteorology behind this event and our expectations. #azwx 1/

— NWS Tucson (@NWSTucson) July 22, 2021

(side note: They weren't able to get this thread to thread properly so if you actually want to read it you'll need to dig)

Things started to get interesting here last night at around 9 pm, with very strong winds. The torrential rain then got strong enough to cause water to build up in both the front and back yards of this place. I started having flashbacks to the times that the Villa Maria house flooded, but thankfully, this place was built juuuuust high enough that no water made it inside from the flooding. The water level reached around 2 inches in the back, and maybe an inch out front. Some water DID make it inside through the bathroom ceiling vent, which I think mostly just tells us how windy it was. It was interesting watching shingles flap up and down on a neighbor's shed.

The power even went out briefly, making me glad once again that I impulse-purchased this silly, cheap LED lantern in California:



After 30 minutes the power was back on again, so I went to sleep to wait and see what things looked like in the morning, when I'd been planning on a bike ride and coffee with friends.

...as of right now, it's still raining, complete with lightning, and I suspect the storm activity is going to continue into tomorrow. So the bike ride definitely didn't happen, and I doubt I'll get to go rowing tomorrow morning, either.

Instead, Emma and I have been enjoying the storm from inside the house. I am SO GLAD I finished labwork yesterday!







During a small lull:


We're almost up to 3 inches already in the part of town where I'm staying. Interestingly, the Tucson NWS just posted a write-up about an epic July 2006 monsoon storm, that dumped up to 8-11 inches of water in various areas. I can only imagine what that must have been like, if this is what 3 inches looks like.

This has been quite the summer for climate-change-related weather events, generally. I have to assume you've seen photos of the flooding in parts of China. I was chatting with a colleague yesterday who noted that over the last 3 years, Arizona has seen some really terrible wildfires that have wiped out a lot of old-growth forest (keeping in mind that it takes around 100 years before a saguaro starts to reproduce). I'd heard about some of the fires, but still didn't have an appreciation of the full extent of the carnage in the Superstitions. I'm nervous about the smoke levels I may encounter while driving to California, but it can't be helped. This is our new normal. I almost feel like it's a good thing that some of the smoke from the fires has traveled all the way out to the East Coast so more people can really understand what these fires mean. Human beings are generally terrible about extrapolating beyond individual lived experience.

Not that I'm optimistic that this year's weather events will actually get people to change profligate lifestyles or anything.

This is my first time existing in the Greater Phoenix Suburb-o-Politan area where I have ready access to a motor vehicle.

The experience of this city from behind the wheel of a (not-so-large) automobile is so vastly different from the experience of this city on a bicycle, the bus, the light rail, and on foot.

It is two- and three-lane grid roads and traffic lights; a vague sense of terror while constantly jockeying for position among other vehicles; enormous, fast-moving freeways to nowhere.

Yes, it means everything in the far reaches is accessible, but by that very same token everything in the far reaches greatly loses its lustre.

I am sure the vast majority of the inhabitants living here are utterly unaware of this aspect of the poverty of their circumstances.

I biked to the Heard Museum yesterday, as much for the bike ride as for the museum (the museum is exquisitely wonderful). Oak Street is a well-worn groove in my mental map of the area, since it was the backup route while the light rail line got put in on Washington and the initial route we knew best for transiting between my house in Tempe and scrottie's house in Phoenix, before we discovered that the Grand Canal was superior and faster.

When I ride my bike to destinations in downtown Phoenix, arrival is an oasis.

The rate of construction of new townhomes and apartments out here continues to be incredible. I imagine the spaces being filled with the same sort of furniture and things as the place where we're temporarily staying. The place where we're staying is filled with the things that would be expected for conventional guest accommodations. Serviceable but impersonal. Do these spaces simply act as shells or cocoons for the inhabitants as they watch TV? Does short-term hedonism start to feel hollow after a point after the best restaurants and amusements have all been tried and the adrenaline rushes wear off? What happens after that? Children and families, hard drugs, or just numbness? Lives I struggle to imagine.

It is hard to keep images of the coal-fired power plants on the Navajo Reservation proximate in one's mind. You can pretend it's solar power if you'd like, but those plants are still very much active. It is hard to look at fountains and sprinklers watering sidewalks and remember that a thousand small things like these are siphoning down the Colorado River to nothing.

I suspect the agricultural fields will dry up first, although I could be wrong. When we crossed back over into Arizona from California, gasoline prices dropped by a full dollar, so in the short term it seems to me the throngs will continue to flock here and fill the streets and houses, not knowing how life could be different. Different certainly doesn't mean better - perhaps it doesn't actually get better than this. But I'm glad to remember the ways that I found to live out here, to know the possibilities.

After almost all of our seed-harvester queens died, I made plans to go back to California. Picked up the rental car yesterday morning, picked up the students, and drove straight back to Pine Valley. Our first 30 minutes of searching were disheartening, but then, miracle of miracles, we found a heap more queens! The students were especially thrilled.

We stayed overnight at a motel in Wynola, with pizza (and for me, good beer) for dinner at a fancy pizza place. In the morning we ventured back over to Lake Henshaw and got another decent haul of queens from there, too.

Shortly afternoon, we set sail back to Arizona (metaphorically speaking; this time the rental car was some kind of Kia - definitely my least favorite of all the cars I've driven recently).

Now we are back and I am exhausted. Tomorrow we'll be back to respirometry in the lab again.

Saturday morning I checked the Pima County rain gauges: enough rain to trigger leafcutter ant mating swarms. I went down to the lake for rowing practice, but screwed up the time and was 30 minutes late, so no rowing after all. Instead I toodled around the lake for a bit and through chance bumped into an old randonneur who provided support on the brevet where our friend RG flatted 7 times on his Brompton before throwing in the towel.

Then, campus. I finished prepping the leafcutter nest dishes that I'd brought with me to Arizona and attended to the seed-harvester ant queens. Then back to the house by way of the auto repair shop, where I picked up the Honda with its new radiator. When I got to the house, I checked the oil and noted the oil level was still low, so I walked back over to the closest gas station and picked up a couple more quarts of oil. Put those in, packed a couple things up, then told my smart-o-phone to point me to Tucson whilst avoiding the highways, and got on the road.

I made it about 5 miles when the engine coughed hard and blew a bunch of smoke. I somehow got myself into a left-turn lane at Broadway and McClintock, waved people around me, and sat through a light cycle with the engine off. When the arrow turned green again, I managed to limp the car into a shaded parking spot at a Burger King and then called my uncle.

While I waited for the tow truck, I booked a rental car from the airport rental place (nothing else open due to the holiday weekend) and put my bike back together (borrowing a bike from a friend). Instead of just taking the light rail over, I decided to bike there, not realizing that the airport rental car place is a whole separate facility several miles further down the road from the airport.

Regardless - made it there, stuffed the bike into the rental car, and got on the road to Tucson. I made it there by 6:30, which was enough time to drive the usual roads and check to see whether there was evidence of queens having already flown. Seeing none, I drove back to my aunt's house, where she spoiled me with a lavish and delicious dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I can't even begin to describe how wonderful it was to get to catch up with her and my cousin D. They have been so good to me over the years, and it was also a real treat for them to get to catch up because they haven't been able to go much of anywhere. My cousin D is on immune-suppressing drugs and still has to be extremely careful about It.

If the queens had already flown, I would have needed to go back out at night to try and pick them out of their new nests. Instead, since they didn't seem to have flown, I got to go to sleep, setting the alarm for 5 am. I woke up at 4:59 with a start because the first light of dawn penetrated my brain and made me think there was a chance I'd overslept. I made coffee and got on the road by 5:20 am. As I drove towards the intersection of Sunrise and Skyline roads, I started to see the little forms of ant bodies flying through the air: an auspicious sign.

When I reached one of our sweet spots along Sunrise, I knew I was right: perfect timing to catch a big swarm.





Field notes for myself: Swarm began shortly before 5:30 am, so shortly after sunrise. It continued to grow until around 6 - 6:15 am, with a fairly even sex ratio. Queens and males would fall to the ground to mate, and then they would fly up again into the swarm. I was thinking I'd wait until queens started to tear their wings off, but as time went on, the swarm became more and more male-biased, until the ants on the ground largely consisted of big balls of males mobbing a small number of queens. Therefore I conclude that after they've mated, the majority of queens fly away from the swarm to nearby locations to search for places to start new nests. Walking around the immediate vicinity of the swarm location, I did not encounter any queens starting to dig, confirming my sense that the swarm location is not surrounded by ideal leafcutter habitat.

As the swarm wound down, I drove over to the corner of Sunrise and Swan, stopping in at a convenience store to use the restroom and get some chocolate milk. When I drove to Swan the night before, I discovered that the road has changed a ton in the last couple of years, with a lot of new developments having gone in. That has also meant that places where I've searched in the past aren't so fruitful anymore. Regardless, I walked up a stretch of road to see what I could find. As I returned down the road back towards the car, I hit a second jackpot: a patch of desert landscape that was perfect nest-starting ground. So in addition to collecting a number of queens out of the mating swarm, I was also able to collect 60 queens as they started digging new nests (means they are fully mated).

Then: back to my aunt's house for breakfast/brunch and more time catching up (so amazing to get to catch up with family!!), back on the road to Phoenix, to the lab to set up what nests I could, to the house to pick up the students, to the airport to drop off the rental car just in time, and then RG picked us up for some pool time at the Graduate and a Fourth of July fish BBQ feast at their house.

I'm not sure the feast or crowd were quite the cup of tea for the students for a Fourth of July experience, but that is what it is.

Now back to the lab.

Amazing phrase I encountered last night in the book I've been reading:

"yuppie taco-deco ranchitos and golf courses of Sierra Vista"

The quotation is by someone who lives right along the Arizona-Mexico border, in the book A Great Aridness, which is about forecasted impacts of climate change on the desert Southwest.

Border politics factor in heavily, for good reason.