Entering a Void

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Driving to New Mexico

Attention: Some images had to be moved around, and additional information needed to be added to these 4-days as when I first blogged about this trip, it wasn’t in my head that exacting placement of details should be very precise as long as we had an idea of what was what. Well, here I am in November 2022 with COVID-19, repairing those bungles because I’ve got nothing better to do.

Maybe you are wondering if our destination is to the east, why are we traveling north? I suppose it was a flip of the coin as our destination of Lavender Spring Ranch in Arabela, New Mexico, just north of Trinnie, is in about the middle between Interstate 10 and 40, and the northern route probably just felt better. But we have a problem.

Well worn map of the United States which is missing the exact corner of New Mexico that we needed for our weekend trip

The part of the page that should be showing where we’re going tomorrow just happens to be the part that’s now a void. Guess we’ll just have to stop by a gas station and ask for directions or buy a map of New Mexico because finding Lavender Spring Ranch won’t be easy as it’s really out in the middle of nowhere.

Where is it?

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Well worn map of the United States which is missing the exact corner of New Mexico that we needed for our weekend trip

Almost ready to leave for a long weekend, and the area of New Mexico we are traveling to just so happens to be on the part of the page that is now missing from our map. We are counting on knowing New Mexico, the state east of Arizona, not the country south of us, well enough that we don’t need to buy a new map. The other pages are all fine, or so we thought, until we went looking for something in eastern Arizona and found the entire page missing. Good thing we planning on taking the GPS with us, except I forgot to load the maps for New Mexico and instead had detailed maps and trails from our trip to Yellowstone last month.

The Floating Garden

JWise Photo of the Day

Slow cooking jujubees, goji berries, rose buds, and chrysanthemum flowers for a tea base

A few weeks ago, I wrote of buying the ingredients for making Floating Garden Tea inspired by House of Nanking in San Francisco, California. Well, after one successful attempt it was time to make another batch and brag about it. The original inspiration for the recipe came from a now-defunct blog, but I was thrown a monkey wrench when a lady at a Chinese herbalist suggested I add jujubes or red dates to the mix and cook it all up in a crockpot – which is what I have done here on the second batch. I would have photographed the first batch but I started it late at night and by morning the chrysanthemums were haggard and had sunk to the bottom, but here you can see that as the chrysanthemums, goji berries, rosebuds, and red dates slowly cook, they are simply beautiful. If you’d like to know how to make this, click here, for my original entry.

NY 2 AZ

JWise Photo of the Day

An old fashioned New York style taxi on the back of a car taxi or a tow truck, in Phoenix, Arizona

Occasionally as one drives around the streets of America, it is possible to see quite out of the ordinary things. A couple of years ago it was a Covered Wagon doing 70mph down the freeway. When I was a teenager I saw 3 F-14’s fighter jets being hauled through downtown Los Angeles on trucks at two in the morning. And today, a New York-style taxi cab was being chauffeured across town instead of it chauffeuring people.

Coexist

JWise Photo of the Day

A bumper sticker asking us to "Coexist" seen in Phoenix, Arizona

My favorite new bumper sticker is the one above from Peacemonger Jerry Jaspar in Visalia, California. Just the other day I saw a link to an image of the sticker and then today here it is on a car in Phoenix, Arizona. A couple of years ago, the “Visualize Whirled Peas” caught my imagination and before that, I would have to go back more than 25 years when I saw my all-time favorite although very politically incorrect bumper sticker that captured the late 70’s/early 80’s with its exclamation to “Nuke The Gay Whales For Jesus!”

Gack

JWise Photo of the Day

Cockroach

Oh my god, I woke up this morning with this in my ear!!! Just kidding. But seriously, Caroline woke up with it crawling across her forehead. Fortunately, I caught it, as last time Caroline caught one I nearly disgorged the upper third of my digestive system. A little-known fact about Germans, a secret they guard due to the universal disgust most people of the world would find with this act, is that they love fresh cockroaches and will pop them into their mouths like a fresh gummi bear. Blech, it is so gross but sadly true, my wife is a cockroach-eating connoisseur. And because I thought many of you might not believe this disgusting morsel is a welcome hors d’oeuvre in Caroline’s repertoire of culinary indulgences, I have saved this roach after having it pose for the camera, just in case I needed a follow-up photo showing her munching down on this extraordinary insectian crudites of sorts. Bon appetite or as they say in German: “Fold six legs up, hold down the wings, in with the head, crunchy crunch crunch!” – of course in German it sounds much better.