Lively Streets 2 - Foodservice Al Fresco

The rains are beginning to thin out ... the clouds are fewer ... and the days are growing both sunnier and crisp. A great combination for outdoor dining or just coffee-and. I'd guess we have a good month to enjoy our food al fresco up here in the mountains.


The outdoor creekside dining offered by El Gato Azul is delightful. For years, a non-food business occupied what I always envisioned as a prime restaurant location; it seemed a pity that the neat little yard next to Granite Creek was not used for pleasure.


Streetside food -- even a simple ice cream cone -- helps keep streets lively and thus safer and more entertaining. There's nothing like watching the passing parade of pedestrians. It's one of the secrets of Continental European charm; it surely has taken a long time to become fixture in our semi-Puritan world.

But then we're a offshoot of the English culture, which was never big on sidewalk cafes. Besides, American city fathers are more inclined to give space to autos than to walkways.


Today, even our local Thai take-out over on Goodwin at the Park Plaza has added a couple of tables and chairs to keep customers happy.


You can enjoy your coffee and a paper up the hill on Gurley at the Apple Pan or over on Cortez Street (below).



Maybe the anti-smoking crusade is part of the reason for the increasing popularity of outside tables and chairs. For example, this cast-cement table at the title company at Gurley and Grove is a hang-out for smokers as well as for brown-baggers.


Outdoor seating seems almost always to be a winner -- except at this setting on Montezuma. Hugo's customers overwhelmingly prefer the picnic tables out back. But it's still outdoors!

Note on Progress: Luddism & Pick-Ups

At times, I'm inclined to believe in synchronicity or at least dumb luck. My daughter and I wrote about progress and its price yesterday. Today, what should show up in the Courier classifieds but this curious personal:

WANT TO LIVE much like the Amish but be allowed to own and drive a pick-up, serve in the Armed Forces, vote, serve on juries and, if you aren't blue collar, be able to practice you profession or run your business in town? Contact SCLALN--socially conservative, law-abiding, neo-Luddites. Send long SASE to SCLALN, POB 783, Prescott AZ 86302.

Sounds awfully contradictory to me -- no Ted Kaczinsky's, they, even on their compound, where? Up in that vast, water-poor Juniper Woods subdivision, maybe? If you can't bash a Cray, what fun is Luddism? By the way, the poor old Google sibyl don't know nothing about this crowd.

New & Improved

My daughter, suffering from a Katrina of a cold, is now popping antibiotics and other nostrums recommended by her doc. And naturally, the subject came up at her blog, where she requested that her readers send her comments on the good -- and the bad -- changes that have happened all around us in the recent past.

This is my contribution: the typewriter. This old Oliver was sitting behind the counter when I went into the Goodwin Street Pharm to pick up my own meds yesterday. Hey -- it predates me by quite a few years and that is saying something. I've never used one -- but I'll bet you really have to pound those keys to make an impression.


A picture of that machine is about as good a punctuation to the end of an era as I could hope to find. I lived and worked through the days of the typewriter -- lovable old Royals and Underwoods and the later slick little imports from Italy. I even have a portable down in the basement, as an amulet to ward off any possibility of our electricity disappearing. And, yes, my bright red IBM Executive is still around somewhere.


The age of the typewriter was the age of carbon paper (and making corrections by hand on six carbon copies!) It was the age of ditto copies that got purple all over your clothes and mimeograph machines for duplicating one's work. You've absolutely no idea how revolutionary the Xerox machine was when first introduced -- as the People's first publishing machine, it probably was a part of the new order that brought down the old USSR.

The typewriter age was the also age of perfection. You got it right the first time -- or you started over again. Oh, eventually somebody came up with the idea of white-out (which I use today on my Sudoku bloopers) and IBM did add to its deluxe electric typewriters a gizmo that fed a white cover-up tape to fix errors.

But oh! How easy it all is today. In my little home office, I can publish limited editions of essays, directories or picture books. And in 4-color, yet. Needless to say, I love it.

The down side? Perfection is a lost art. In spelling ... in syntax ... in writing ... in publishing generally. Too bad. I miss it. It was a good discipline.

Come the Carnivals

This is a thank-you note, dedicated to both civilians and bloggers (folks who write blogs.)


For starters, there's Mommy the Maid, who posted a link to the tale of granddaughter and her Day at the Races in the weekly Carnival of Family Life. Took top place, which won a prize -- macademia nut candy, being shipped from Hawaii by Kailani. Mmmm! My thanks to both of them -- and to the granddaughter and the Memphis niece, who had the starring roles!

Let me back up and explain a little more: the Internet is chock-a-block full of blogs, a few written by pros but most others by amateurs like me. There are blogs on all manner of politics, of teen angst, of (shh!) S-x, of books and writing, cats and cars, as well as shoes, ships and sealing wax.

In short, think of a subject and there will be several (or hundreds of) blogs treating that subject from all angles.

The carnivals are periodic showcases of some of the more interesting posts on a particular subject. And Walking Prescott has been among those featured on a couple recently:

Miss Kitty's Cat House and Angry Cats both made The Carnival of Cats (here and here) ... and Critter Sightings was mentioned at the Friday Ark, which deals with all sorts of mammalian animals. There will possibly be others in the future.

Why don't you go to these sites and take a look -- you'll find a lot of new and interesting places to visit!

Snail Trails

These nocturnal pests regularly come out during the day when it's as wet as it's been lately. One problem with our summer rainy (monsoon) season. Some science:

The brown garden snail (European brown snail) Helix (Cyptoomphalus) aspersa Müller, was described by O.F. Müller in 1774 from specimens collected in Italy. This plant feeder has been disseminated into many parts of the world intentionally as a food delicacy, accidentally by the movement of plants, and by hobbyists who collect snails. It was introduced to California in the 1850s as a source of escargot. It has adapted well to California and is very troublesome as a pest of crops and ornamentals.

Escargot yet-- now that's something new to me! If I were French, I'd be in garlic and butter heaven with my very own garden pests. Do you suppose there's a market among the better restaurants hereabouts?


But my original intention was to talk about those funny little trails that these hungry fellows leave behind on the concrete (above and below). To really display, you need a thin film of water -- which will result in little dry spots where the snail puts down his slimy foot as he inches along. (No, these trails are not shiny, like the slime trails left on flowers and leaves.)


Funny fact I picked up from The Google researching the life and times of snails: the little elongated spiral type of snail that fed on Mom's garden down in Sun City "is sold as a beneficial predator; however, if there are no garden snails to feed upon it can become a serious pest of emerging seedlings and bedding plants."

Thus spake the Maricopa county agent. I can second that observation!

Saturday Afternoon Postscript: I was just visited by a nephew who seldom leaves SoCal and the subject of snails came up. He reports that some citrus growers have equipped their trees with catch basins so that well fed snails can be shaken out, caught and shipped to, you guessed it, France for a pretty penny. As he hears it, citrus-fed escargot are a particular delicacy -- as are avocado-fed snails.

Federal Architecture From Depression Era

Officially, it's a U.S. Post Office. On the top floor is a federal district courthouse. Of course, this is not the Prescott post office -- that's over on Schemmer Drive, just off Miller Valley Road. Not in the middle of town, which is where the main post office ought to be, in any proper city.

It took an outcry from the downtown merchants, the city and county fathers to keep this historic post office open. Built in 1931, the structure is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places. When the city outgrew this facility, the Miller Valley PO was was built in the early 90s; the feds had planned to turn the Cortez Street building into an federal office and court house building. Thank goodness sanity prevailed -- I have a box there. Also, it's a lot more convenient for all those tourists to stamp and mail their post cards.


The windows are pretty grand, although these around on the Cortez Street side may need some TLC of the kind that cost Uncle $166 Gs up at the third-floor court house. According to the Courier, "officials knew they had to do something after a window fell apart in a judge's hands." However, that kind of money bought a real restoration rather than some mismatched or slap-dash repairs.


I wonder how long it has been since modern post offices bothered with decorative brass boxes...


...and drawers (for those with a serious flow of mail.) I vote in favor of decorative brass over brushed stainless steel any day.

It's curious -- when I was in my impressionable 20s (and this building was about the same age), I was quite caught up in Mies van de Rohe chic. I would have poo-pooed the Goodwin Street post office as hopelessly mundane and outdated.

Chicago, long proud of its architectural heritage, boasted a couple of stark, "structurally honest", clean-lined apartment buildings by Mies. By the time we left the big city in the early 80s, those monuments to modernity were looking a lot tattier than this local building looks today, nearly 30 years later. It's much more interesting, too. Maybe that's because Mies would never have used decorative brass.

Post Postscripts

It happens every time. Once a post is published, more information turns up ... you finally get the picture that would have completed your little sketch ... or you simply have deep and cogent afterthoughts.

Take the recent monsoon weather, with which I am obsessed. (If you don't believe me, look here, here and here!) We can thank the rains for the lazy look of Granite Creek above, with grasses flattened by recent high water.


Not to mention this unexpected Arizona sight -- a big supply of sandbags over in the Sharlot Hall parking lot. I think these arrived with all that talk of Hurricane John possibly drowning Yavapai County. It hasn't -- yet.

I didn't need to get sandbags, but I did consult with The Google about Arizona hurricanes. Found out a lot. There's a even Wikipedia article on the subject, complete with a list of tropical storms/hurricanes that have hit the state since 1958. Another article details storms since 1902 and two others (here and here) also provide lists (each different, of course.)

What it all adds up to is that those "100-year" storms that happen every couple of years ... and those "400-year" storms which occur at least once a decade ... turn out to be the remains of a hurricane or a tropical storm. Some have been nasty killers.


But on to other additions to past posts. I was reminded of a lovely photo I had seen of a backlit sunflower when I spotted this little guy, less than a foot tall! For a lot more sunflower talk, you might check back here.


This is such a neat example of civic graffiti I had to include it with these post post scripts.


You may recall my report on the woolly bears that stripped the leaves completely off my fancy South American butterfly milkweed. Guess what -- the leaves have grown back quite happily. I certainly didn't expect that to happen!


As for this car, it is further reminder that I was really, really wrong about how dull car colors are these days. Admittedly it's a VW which, together with PT Cruisers tend to come in more colors than the usual Detroit or Tokyo cars.


And I close this update of previous posts with an excellent example of the Well Organized Bulletin Board. You'll find this one in the deli section of Arizona Natural Foods over on Gurley Street.

Marked Down in Prescott

The stern moralist side of me says, "About time! What could they have been thinking!!" The futurist part is concerned about tomorrow's fallout from the real estate run up in prices. My motherly instinct is to worry that my daughter's family might have to sell in a panicked real estate market if husband lands the job he's shooting for.


Properties in these three pictures were actually the only visible mark-downs at the big real estate operation on Gurley near Montezuma. Lots of high-priced houses and land still posted in the window there. (Sorry about the reflections -- that's the price I pay for using a snap-shot camera.)


If you enjoy housing gloom and doom talk, there's a blog up in Flagstaff that will satisfy your cravings! It's called, appropriately enough, The Housing Bubble Blog. Click here.

The Arizona Cypress

We lived south of the Prietas in Wilhoit when my husband and I first came to the Prescott area. In case you don't know that area, it is about 400-600 feet lower in elevation, has a hot southern exposure and grows chaparral brush, not trees. Rain? Only 12-14" per year. High desert.

When we talked "tree" to the nurseries, "Arizona cypress" was the answer we got. Fast growing, minimal water, few pests -- all the good characteristics.


I don't know if this native to Sedona and the southern part of the state is still being planted in today's new suburbs. It was certainly a favorite in earlier times -- you will find the tree growing all over the central part of town. Examples: Sharlot Hall (above) and Vista Drive (below), where the Christmas tree shape shows up well.


You'll also find tall cypress in rows out in the countryside; it was favored by ranchers for windbreaks in the old days.

Says the Natl. Christmas Tree Assn.: "The Arizona cypress covers the largest natural range of the North American cypresses. It is found in west Texas, northwest Mexico, southwest New Mexico, south California, and southern Arizona. It has been successfully grown in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Florida panhandle, Tennessee, and in the Carolinas."


And more about the tree from the Yavapai county agent: "These trees are part of the Sedona's native plant community and can be found thriving next to intermittent streams and in the cooler canyons. A short geology lesson gives insight into the current [spotty] distribution of native Arizona Cypress. During the Pleistocene Epoch, the desert southwest was much wetter and cooler than it is today. Arizona Cypress was widespread over in the prehistoric southwest landscape. Botanists think that when the Pleistocene ice retreated northward about 10,000 years ago, the distribution of Arizona Cypress began to diminish and fragment. Today, this plant dinosaur only clings to scattered sites in the southwest where the microclimate permits its survival and reproduction."

By the way, if you want to see the cypress in its native heath, drive north and west on Dry Creek Road out of Sedona. I don't know how badly the current drought may have affected the woods, however.


The beautiful bark is one of the striking features of the Arizona cypress. It shreds in long lengthwise strips and reveals a sometimes brownish, sometimes purplish smooth surface. You can get a good look at bark from the Gurley Street sidewalk next to the log cabin at the Sharlot Hall grounds (above) -- or over at Prescott College's Crossroads Center, where a stump (below) serves as a natural sculpt.



Here, a view of the scaly leaves.


And the seeds. In nature, according to the references, these hard seedpods wait for fire to open. It's different in Prescott. Here, the pods drop, open to scatter a lot of seeds -- and around the trees at Sharlot Hall, lots of little cypress plants spring up every year. And they keep coming up over by the United Methodist Church on Gurley -- several years after their magnificent old tree had to be cut down.

It doesn't happen at Chez GrannyJ -- I've collected these pods for years, planted the seeds, watered them. Nada. Nothing. Too bad. I'd like a cypress.

Sunday in the Park

The weather gods smiled at the Sharlot Hall Museum this afternoon. A temperate, sunny day for an ice cream social and music by the Territorial Brass Band. Enjoyed by a sizeable crowd.


When I arrived, the musicians were still tuning up, but the line for ice cream cones being dished out by ladies from the Victorian Society already snaked around the bandstand area.


Don't know what it is about this brass band's music -- it gets me in the nostalgia-for-a-past-I-never- knew gene. I wouldn't be surprised to see the musicians evaporate in a mist even while playing one of those melancholy love songs of the late 1800s.


The audience was well sprinkled with Victorian ladies and their gents.



An important, long-forgotten feature from the past: parasols to protect one's delicate complexion from the sun (as well as provide a means for possible flirtation.) Only one modern member of the audience remembered that an umbrella creates instant shade in the hot Arizona sun.


I say bring 'em back next year and the year after that and ... you get the picture!

Wild, Wild Weather & More to Come?

It began with a few "plonks!" then speeded up to a big racket. Hail. Not your newsworthy golf ball size stuff, just ordinary hail -- but lots of it and fast.


After pounding for a while, the clouds relented and mixed the hail with one helluva lot of rain water, fast.



And I see that I have a gutter problem. If I'm lucky, I can clean out the obstruction easily, once the threat of another cloudburst passes.

Speaking of cloudbursts, there were dueling predictions in this morning's papers. The Arizona Republic, in a story on Hurricane John out of Mexico City, repeated the uninformed Mexican opinion it has been carrying every day:

"John wasn't likely to affect the United States; cooler Pacific waters tend to diminish storms before they reach California."

In contrast, our local Courier gave John an above the fold front page story: "Hurricane John's left-overs could bring significant rainfall to Yavapai county and wreak havoc on holiday weekend campers."

It added "the Weather Service doesn't expect Hurricane John to affect Arizona as heavily as Hurricane Nora did in 1996, when remnants from that storm dropped 5.75 inches of rain in Bagdad, west of Prescott, and even more in Peeples Valley to the South."

Sunday A.M. Note: Courier & AZ Republic both gave us credit for 0.01" of rain ! Go figure.

Scenes From a Walk: Discards & Cast-Offs

You might call them the dirty underwear of a city -- those cast-off odds and ends of yesterday's material world that have no place in today's tidy, upbeat society. Sometimes these discards are the result of sheer laziness, like the plastic cups above.


But this scene leaves me with a small lump in my throat. What caused this little guy to be abandoned in an alley? Too many toys? Family moving & left behind? No one will ever know. He sure looks forlorn.


I saw this truck cab upper in a vacant lot on a side street. No telling if it has a future or not. On the other hand (below), here's a pick-up bed that found a home, as a sculpture garden seating area behind one of those arty, painted houses on McCormick Street.

It takes all kinds.