Tucson, Arizona

I'm here. It's raining, which I'm actually pretty happy about. Why? Well, not just because the weather has to be above freezing to rain - but also because I bought a fancy new raincoat that is "ultra-lightweight" for this trip, because I expect a lot of raining once I get to Malawi - and I wore it on the plane because I was kind of expecting rain when I got here.

Costs 30 bucks (before you tip) to take a taxi from the airport to the university area.

My headache is mostly gone. It's already dark now, and I have no idea where there might be some place to eat near here, but I'm only a mile or so from campus, so I bet there's something nearby.

I'm here for a week of science meetings, so don't expect too many great photos or stories - but it's supposedly been raining a lot here (El Nino) and we do have a scheduled "break day" where we do something outdoorsy, so maybe the desert is in bloom. I'll see what I can conjure up.

Edit: Some jerk keeps setting off his car alarm right outside my room. :\

So, I tried to find someplace kind of nice to eat, but the first thing I tried was closed (it is Sunday night, after all)... and since I'm on foot here, I decided I would just wander up the block a bit - the realized the hotel has its own little restaurant (not attached to it, but in the same little complex).

When I first walked in there was a table with four elderly people sitting around and I noticed what I thought was a small dog that the lady on the end of the table was holding. I thought it was pretty weird to bring your dog to eat and hold it in your arm while you were at the dinner table, but whatever - people do weird junk. I wasn't seated close enough to see exactly what was going on.

When they went to leave, I got a better look, though, and it turned out that the lady had a puppet on her arm of what I think was a sloth. Now, I'm all for people just doing whatever and I guess if you live past 65, you're allowed to do crazy shit any time you want... but she was eating with one hand so she could animate the puppet. And when she got up to leave, the waiter who was waiting my table said goodnight to all of them and then said "Goodnight JR" to which she squeaked the sloth puppet and bobbed its head.

After she left, the waiter let out how he really felt about JR and it involved a lot of fake fur flying. I'm guessing crazy sloth puppet lady and JR must be regulars there. Hopefully I won't be eating there often - but to be fair, the sign on the outside did say "Live Entertainment"... so maybe that's what they meant.

Spent all day in meetings. The good kind, where you present science to people and then spend most of the afternoon trying to explain why things happened and how you might look at the same data differently. I won't divulge the secrets here - we'll be publishing this stuff soon enough.

The hike up to campus wouldn't have been too bad if the place I was going for the meetings wasn't as far away from this side of campus as feasibly possible. I got to see the entire main drag (see photos above) twice today - once in the morning as I was hurrying to the meeting and once in the afternoon as I was hurrying to meet with Andy and Meg about the Malawi trip. I basically walked it at full speed both times, so at least I got some exercise between meetings.

The late meeting with Andy/Meg was mostly a bunch of logistics about how the travel will be arranged and junk. Another colleague of mine, Erik, is here this week giving the department seminar, so we all went out to Gentle Ben's afterwards - and in a strange coincidence, Jasmine, Craig and Greg (the people I was meeting with all day) were at the same place. It's a little weird when your two worlds collide so abruptly - but at least everyone will know who I am talking about when I use their names with the other group now.

I decided to walk a different path on the way to the university this morning - instead of the busier 6th street, I opted to walk down the more residential 5th street. I posted 4 new images today from my walk in - each of them has a little story of their own - more interesting than talking about another long day of meetings, anyhow.

The first image is a building I saw yesterday but didn't have the camera handy and I didn't want to dig it out - it's a the outside of a building for a company called "Primarily Japanese". For some reason, any time a company integrates hedging directly into the company name, the grammar part of my brain finds it hilarious. I wonder if they were going to call themselves "Japanese" and then decided... well, we better go with "primarily" just in case we decide to make an exception.

The second image is a couple of orange trees, complete with ripe oranges, growing up through the sidewalk. I'm told you can find grapefruit, lemon, and lime trees around Tucson, so if you plan your trip correctly, you could skip the citrus section of the grocery store. This image is a two-for - the building in the background has a sign on it that reads "First Baptist Church Educational Building" - which by itself isn't that interesting, except that the building is boarded up and looks a bit like it houses the neighborhood squatters... which makes me think that the sort of "education" you might get in there isn't the sort of thing you'd normally want associated with a church. I guess they might be using it a bit like a woodshed where they take people who need some "educating".

Image 3 isn't so much curious as just pretty. I miss the southwest yard plan.

The last image is probably the weirdest - it's a bunch of metal sculptures of a mother pig and her piglets that appear to be free standing in front of a condemned adobe house (the fence they are behind appears meant to keep everyone out). And the piggies are all gathered around a blue orb. Why is it there, what is it supposed to mean, and why out front of a condemned house? I guess I'll leave you to create your own story for that.

We covered most of the meeting material over the last two days - so we are kind of running out of things to meet about now. I'm sure we'll find ways to keep ourselves working, though.

Had dinner at Andy's house tonight. His boys are getting pretty big. I spent half the trip to and from his house quizzing him about Malawi so I know a bit better what to expect. I'm feeling pretty good about things at the moment. I need to read up a bit on my travel book, though.

Not much to really talk about from today. We got a lot done - this meeting has been really useful and productive - I think we just have two major topics to wrap up - one is something Jasmine and I are going to try and work out tomorrow and the other is what we might target for future research on these topics (maybe something we postpone until we are a bit further along with the publications).

I got a call from Andy and Meg trying to sort out how we were going to arrange the luggage between the two of us - important because Meg leaves tomorrow morning, laying down the same path that I will follow when I leave for Africa on Monday - but by the time I got over to them (the campus is close to a mile long) they had already sorted it out. The logistics of even a simple trip like this one is can get pretty kinked up pretty quickly when you are working on another continent.

I hung out in Andy's lab for a bit and tinkered with some calculations for tomorrow's meeting and then met up with Jasmine, Craig, and his wife for dinner. It was pleasantly cool outside, so we ate on the patio - but the traffic from the nearby road was really noisy.

There was a coffee shop a few doors down from where we ate the offered a hookah (so you don't have to look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookah) and when I passed by there tonight on the walk back to my hotel room, there were indeed a bunch of people hanging around there huffing on it. It didn't smell like anything illegal, but it was probably some kind of pungent tobacco.

Photos from today are just some shots from around campus - I came in up a bigger road again today and there wasn't as much interesting stuff.

We had another good (half) day of meetings today. Jasmine and I worked out a pretty clever model that is going to make us rich. Well, if cool science ideas paid money, it would - instead it will probably just make me conceptually rich - which is okay.

A colleague who worked on the Malawi project with Andy and I (Erik) was here and I went to see his seminar talk. Afterwards we went over to Gentle Ben's again to hang out with people from the department. When we walked into the outdoor patio, the first table to our left was inexplicably filled with a bunch of people with yarmulkes huddled around something on the table, each with a giant set of headphones on. Not like iPod earbuds... but the kind I brought along so I woudn't suffer through screaming babies on the flight to Johannesburg. I don't have any more information on them other than no one seemed to know what the deal was. I'm going to go with... a new school for rabbi djs has opened in Tucson and Thursday night they chill at the brewpub together.

Afterward we crossed into downtown Tucson and met one of Andy's colleagues for dinner at the Hotel Congress. It's an interesting city landmark - the site of John Dillinger's arrest (the peaceful one). The wall in the restaurant near where we sat had a series of alphabetized phrases which read like macabre fortune cookies. They said things like "Starvation is nature's way" and lots of things about dying. Very odd.

The food, however, was really great. A bit pricey for my budget, but Andy paid for me. Thanks again, Andy! The evening was filled with some pretty interesting dinner stories. One that made me laugh was that Erik's aunt used to owned a pecan farm in Arizona at a place (town) called "Punkin Center". Not pumpkin, punkin. And I had to look it up to make sure he wasn't just pulling our leg - it exists.

But the best story of the night belonged to Andy, who told us about the time he was driving across Nebraska from California on his way to Ohio... and pulled over for coffee in Paxton, Nebraska. There he found a little cafe at 5am, through bleary eyes, that was filled with booths with high backs. Each booth also had the head of a dragon on one side and the tail of a dragon on the other (so you were eating in it's body, I guess)... and then all of the tablecloths were covered with leopard/cheetah skin prints... and there was a giant wooden Jesus holding an enormous salad bowl. As if that wasn't rich enough, the place was run by a lady named Diamond Cheetah and she was short, squat, also decked out in cheetah print clothes with go-go boots and had a 10-inch beehive hairdo. I am, as I write this, still laughing about the giant Jesus with a salad bowl.

I guess Diamond Cheetah had been on Johnny Carson before and so she was a person of some fame (this was 30 years ago). I tried googling Diamond Cheetah, Paxton Nebraska a few times because I was really hoping to see this place - so if anyone reading this has ever been to Paxton, please tell me it still exists so the next time I drive across I-80 I can stop there and take some pictures. Also if you can find anything online about it, that would be good too.

Since I promised that I would post some photos of desert scenes and stuff - here's around 40 that I took today from the Sonoran Desert Museum. You probably don't need me editorializing about how it's cool and what you can see, since you can check it out for yourself. I did a lot of walking around with Jasmine, Craig, and his wife Gail, both in the "museum" (it's more like a zoo, really) and then afterward.

I have some more photos I took today, but since I loaded up a ton and I'm probably going to have more tomorrow because I'm going hiking with Eric and Andy - so I'll wait and post some of these other shots on Sunday when I'm probably not going to be doing anything interesting.

We left Andy's around 11am and hiked for nearly 4 straight hours at nearby Pima Canyon. We got quite far up the canyon (not quite the top) before we had to head back down because of other obligations. I posted a set of photos from the hike. I'm kind of glad I did all this walking around Tucson this week - it kind of had me in good form for the hike - Andy really started to chug down the path on the way down.

Andy had to stop in at a friend's art gallery showing - so we headed there all covered with sweat and walked around the gallery for a while - at least it was air conditioned. They had some pretty cool stuff there - Andy's friend did clay sculpture, which I was less interested in than the paintings.

We met his family there and then ran over to a place nearby that sells gelato using some sort of "frost" processing instead of ice cream (supposedly a fraction of the grams from fat, too). I had peach - it was really refreshing, especially since I didn't have lunch and I have a strong aversion to breakfast most days.

We headed back to Andy's house, where he gave me a set of binoculars to take on the trip along with a giant (and I mean huge) brass laser pointer that works under water. It probably weighs close to 2 pounds. It's meant to make it easy to point things out to people, since you can't talk with the respirator in while scubadiving. I probably didn't need it, but it was such a funny thing I had to bring it along. Andy says it also drives the fish crazy - so I guess in that sense they aren't that different from our youngest boxer, Olive.

Erik brought me back into town, and dropped me off at the restaurant where I met Jasmine and Craig for one last little get together to wrap up our science meetings - mostly it was hang-out time and closure for the first stage of the trip.

I walked back to my hotel from the restaurant - my legs were feeling pretty heavy after 4 hours of hiking, so it was good to get another 2 miles of walking to stretch them out a bit. Talked with Karlyn on most of the walk back - she fed me updates of the Caps/Rangers game.

Tomorrow I will probably just relax and get my gear organized for the Africa leg of this trip. To this point Meg hasn't reported in (since she was in Atlanta) so we still don't know for sure that she's there and settled in - but maybe she just hasn't had a chance to get internet anywhere. I'll probably post a few random photos and stuff, but don't expect much story unless something weird happens here at the Best Western (always possible, I guess).

Heard from Andy's student Meg late last night - she left for Malawi on Thursday morning (4 days before I follow an identical path). Sounds like she had no problems traveling - even found a helpful Malawian resident originally from England to help her navigate the airport and fend off the droves of people attempting to help her with her bags (for a fee). Sounds like the hotel has internet, which you can buy on a daily or weekly rate - so I'll be able to continue posting once I get to Monkey Bay.

I start my prescription for malaria this morning (need to begin a day or so before you get to the area where it is a concern), so I'm going to go eat some breakfast (you have to take the pill with food and sitting up) and maybe run some last-day-in-the-country errands.

I was out of the hotel room to get some more cash for the trip and to get the front desk to order me a taxi for tomorrow morning - I'm headed out to the airport around 5:10 am since it takes about 20 minutes to get there and I want to check my bags all the way through to Blantyre.

I figured I should just eat while I was out, since I'm on my own today. The first night I was here I tried to go to this little (mostly) Vietnamese place that's about a block away (Garland), but it was closed - so I figured I should give it another shot. I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like they close at 3pm every day, so it was probably a good thing I went when I did. I don't eat Vietnamese very often, so I wanted to get something traditional. The menu was mostly vegetarian meals, but I went with a pork bun thit nuong. It was really tasty, so I'm glad I did.

About 2/3rds of the way through my meal, I could hear rain hitting the window behind me. It has been kind of threatening to rain for the last two days - so not a surprise. Fortunately for me, I have just grown accustomed to wearing my rain jacket everywhere - and especially now that I'm potentially a bit extra sun sensitive with the malaria prescription. It was coming down hard enough that my pants were soaked by the time I walked the block to my room - but I was otherwise dry. Walking in the rain always kind of lifts my spirits a bit.