Mesa Verde, CO

We left Rexburg, Idaho nearly two weeks ago to start a new job at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. The shortest route would take us over some of the higher passes of the Continental Divide and through Denver and a number of toll roads. However, I had wanted to see the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings for some time, so we decided to go through southern Utah/Colorado and take a little longer rather than driving with no reprieve. I drove the Uhaul the 134 miles to Malad and then turned it over to my parents to drive the remaining 1300-some-odd miles while I drove the minivan. Debra's brother Barry and his family graciously came along also as part of their summer vacation. I can't say that it would have been much of a vacation, but we were grateful to have their help throughout the move.

Turns out we still didn't plan our trip very well, and the four hours or so that we were at the Mesa Verde National Park were grossly insufficient--although I blame some of that on the National Park Service. When we arrived, we learned that we would have to buy tickets to visit some of the more popular ruins. So much for having an annual pass to visit the National Parks. It did save us the $15 entrance fee to enter the park, but it offered no relief for the $4 a person to visit a cliff dwelling. All the early tours had already been purchased, so we were left with a time slot for the Balcony House at 11:30 a.m. That tour lasted an hour but was not as informative as I would have expected. With all the required driving and going at a snail's pace for the tour, we had little time to view much else, except for a brief glimpse of Cliff Palace from a distance. Of the more than 600 cliff dwellings, we got to see two from a distance and enter one on a "guided tour."
 

The Balcony House shown here required a 30-foot climb up a ladder as well as some other short climbs and squeezing through a small tunnel. Maybe that is why we were still able to get tickets for the tour. This image shows one of the two large kivas found in the Balcony House.

The dwellings sit under a cliff overhang that protects them from storms. Several of the dwellings, including Balcony House, had a seep spring inside to provide water.

I loved what we got to see, but unless you have a couple days and a few wads of cash, don't plan on seeing all that much. Each of the less-expensive tours is $4 per person. If you have a little more (i.e. $12 to $25/person), you can do "Twilight Tours" or a "Backcountry Hikes".

They say that the National Parks are America's "Best Idea", which I'll agree with to an certain extent, but many aspects of this visit just seemed like an amusement park--pay a lot of money to stand in line for brief moment of pleasure. The National Park Service does a great job at preserving the parks, but I'm convinced that they could do a better job at making the experience more accommodating and enlightening.

If I get to do it again, I'll still do it. In fact their are Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan ruins all over the Four Corners region. I hope to visit a good number of them during my annual pilgrimages back to Utah and Idaho to visit family, but I think I'll plan to camp rather than stay in the overpriced hotels in the area. That way maybe I'll have enough money to pay to take my family on the tours through the ruins! With luck, I might even see more wild turkeys.

San Xavier del Bac

The more things that we do in Tucson, the more I realize how few places we have visited. You probably know how it goes, you have some amazing places within ten to twenty miles of where you live and you never visit them. Meanwhile, some people travel thousands of miles to see them. Last year we visited a number of Indian ruins and cliff dwellings in central Arizona. This last Saturday Debs and I decided we had to visit the Mission of San Xavier del Bac while we are still here in Tucson.

I can't believe we almost missed the opportunity to see it, especially since it's closely related to many of my own studies, including some colonial courses that I have taken.

Father Eusebio Kino founded the mission in 1692, and the current cathedral was built between 1783 and 1797. It is the oldest edifice in Arizona of European influence. The east tower was left unfinished because of the lack of funds. Over the years the mission has been visited by the likes of the Mormon Battalion, and much later, Ansel Adams.


Despite its historical significane, this amazing edifice in the middle of the desert continues to face a shortage of funding for restoration projects; nonetheless, a lot has been accomplished in preserving it in the last 25 years.

The iconography on the facade of the cathedral and all throughout rivals that of most European cathedrals, even if some of the artwork and materials used do not quite match the skill and resources available in the Old World.

The mortuary chapel filled with candles and numerous figurines of saints lies to the west of the cathedral inside a small enclosure that features a wide variety of cacti.



Here Gabs and Bells stand by one of the doors on the west side of the cathedral.


The west tower has been restored and whitewashed and stands in vivid contrast with its surroundings. It should come as no surprise to learn that the mission is also known as the White Dove of the Desert.


A docent took us on a free guided tour, which was fabulous by the way! Our guide pointed out the iconography throughout our visit as well as the mozarabe influence in the construction of the mission. I could have stayed for hours, but with temperatures reaching 105°F and no air conditioning in any of the buildings, we had to cut our visit short before Sammy Jay got too hot. I've already planned another visit to the mission before we leave Tucson in a few weeks!

Baby, Ride Your Firebolt

Okay, so a lot of my friends don't like Harry Potter; perhaps it's not academic enough. I, on the other hand, am crazy about the books. A guy can dream can't he! ;-)



Chanté, one of the apartments in the video looks a lot like one of the complexes you lived in--is it the same one?

Red

From June 11th to the 19th I went to Cincinnati Ohio to grade Spanish AP exams; something I've done the last two years. It's a great way to meet professors and high school teachers of Spanish from around the country. Each day after grading exams, the readers can find a wide variety of activities to entertain them. Last year I enjoyed a trip to the Freedom Center, a museum on slavery. This year on the evening of June 17 I walked down to the Great American Ballpark with Jeff Turley—one of my former professors at BYU—and three other professors.

Earlier this summer I took Bells and Gabs to a couple of minor league baseball games to see the Tucson Padres before we move back to Idaho this fall. I hadn't been to a baseball game in about fifteen years and the last time I went to a major league game was about twenty years ago when I watched the Oakland A's while visiting my oldest sister and her family in California. It's been fun to get back to a few games.

During the 6th inning Drew Stubbs of the Cincinnati Reds hit an inside-the-park home run that had the more than thirty thousand fans on their feet. Now that's not something you see every day! That night as I walked into my hotel room at the Millenium, Duane Rhoades, my roommate told me that my wife had gone into labor and was at the hospital. I was in trouble! :-)

Thanks to a feature on Gmail, I was able to call Deb's cell phone and learn that she gave birth to a 6 lbs. 11 oz./18 in. baby boy. He came three and a half weeks early. It's a good thing he came early though, or he would have been even bigger than his older siblings. The following day during the AP reading, the room leader announced my "dedication" to about four hundred other readers. Believe me, had I known she would have gone into labor that week, I would not have been at the reading, but at least I got to see an inside-the-ball-park home run!

On Saturday night, June 18, Deb's mom took the kids to the hospital to see their baby brother. Erik suggested names like Pooh Bear, and after a bout with hiccups, Hiccup.

Erik also insisted that the baby try on his cowboy boots while at the hospital.

On Sunday afternoon when I returned home, Debs and I settled on a name. When we announced it to the family, Gabs decided that Sammy Jay, after a character in Thornton Burgess' Bedtime Stories, would also work. None of my suggestions survived. I guess that's what happens when you miss the birth of your son. Aside from William, which is a family name, I suggested Red or Cincy since I was at a Cincinnati Reds game watching an inside-the-park home run, which by the way, happened at about the same time as Sammy Jay's birth. I can always tell my son that I was on my feet cheering vociferously during his birth! Can you?!

Bells's Graduation

Two years ago Gabs, our oldest, graduated from kindergarten. This time it was Bells's turn. She loved her class. Ms. O'Hare, her teacher, was kind enough to provide us with a lot of pictures from throughout the year.

This picture is from the start of the school year, when Bells was still four.


Here she is in her graduation cap and gown! We loved watching the graduation program that included several dances and songs that they sang! They just keep growing up.

This is her class on one of their field trips.

If we ever get a job and move out of Tucson, we are going to have to do our best to find a good teacher for Erik and his brother-on-the-way. Wish us luck! It will be hard to replace them.

Ride 'em Cowboy

Erik loves the time that he gets to spend with his friends twice a week at preschool. Four kids participate in it and the parents generally alternate on who will do it each week. Toward the end of February it was held at the Francisco's home. As part of the Tucson Rodeo that comes to town each February, the kids learned about cowboys, donned the necessary western wear, and made their own horses out of a wrapping paper tube and a cutout horse head. From the pictures, do you think Erik enjoyed it at all? Erik loves wearing his six shooter, Tombstone sheriff badge, and cowboy hat around the house, but this time he even got to carry a lasso and sit on a real saddle. Oh to be a kid again!

In the following two pictures, three of the gang of four get together for some memorable pictures.

Kira, Erik, and Robbie are ready to get outside and show what they can really do.

Here Erik patiently soothes his newly tamed horse.

Tucson Festival of Books

Two years ago we attended the first annual Tucson Festival of Books. The festival has grown each year and just gets better and better. For the last couple of years it has been one of our favorite springtime activities as we climb into the van and drive the 4.5 miles to the University of Arizona campus to attend the wonderful event. The Festival of Books brings hundreds of authors to the campus each year for book signings, lectures, and storytelling. It also offers numerous activities for people of all ages. Since we have three kids, we spend most our time in the kids' area and at entertainment venues.

This year we got to meet the Berenstain Bears. Bookmans, a local store that buys and sells used books gave out the hats that our kids are wearing. Gabs, Bells, and Erik also received numerous other free gifts from the different booths in the children's section. Several of the hospital booths gave out reusable grocery bags, slap-on wristbands, night reflectors, and reading buddies (adorable little stuffed animals). Another booth gave out free children's books. Our kids got three hardbound books (Snow White and two Dr Seuss stories: Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose and There's a Wocket in My Pocket).

We love going to one of the main storytelling tents, where authors do a superb job telling short stories. This year we only managed to listen to one storyteller, Joe Hayes, as he told the stories El Cucuy, The Lovesick Skunk, and one or two others. Gabriela especially enjoyed the stories.

The Lindley Lopez Literary Circus was also very entertaining with a contortionist, jugglers, acrobats, etc. They also did several fun Alice and Wonderland scenes (unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of that).

In the science section, the kids got to make DNA strands using two pieces of licorice, which they put together using toothpicks that had colored miniature marshmellows on each end. Gabs got to sit on the long end of a teeter totter as they taught kids about fulcrums, levers, and pulleys. Bells and three others rode the short end of the teeter totter. The kids also got the chance to try to lift 60 pound weights before having the chance to raise them off the ground using pulleys.

Here the kids wear their turtle hats that the Tucson Medical Center gave out.

And after five-and-a-half hours of a fun but warm 83° day, we finished things off with Frog and Toad.

Learning New Tricks

About two months ago my wife asked me if I thought I could make a website for her Scentsy business so she could expand beyond the Tucson market. I had never made a website before then. Sure I've done a blog or filled in pre-made templates with a couple pictures and text, but I had never really made a website from scratch. But, what choice did I have? She could spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to have someone else make it, or I could stretch myself to get beyond my basic knowledge of a few html tags for bolding or underlining a text. Since then it has been like drinking out of a fire hose, but it's been fun! I've learned some more html, some css, a little javascript, and a very little about Flash. I've now finished the basic design of my wife's website, but we still have to edit the text and spruce up the appearance some. Here is a page grab of that website.

In the last week and a half or so, I decided I would use the template I had created to update my own website for school. The old one I had was quite atrocious and was made on a very simple template designed for all the new people in the Spanish program at the University of Arizona that had no idea what they were doing. At least I was able to choose the colors on the page.


I replaced that website with this one that uses the same basic template that I used on Deb's Scentsy website. While not perfect, I think it is a marked improvement over my former site.

I have begun to upload image collections and the Richard Tyler plot summary collection that I wrote about in an earlier blog post. The intent of the site is to obviously present myself as I go on the job market this year, but I also hope to provide a number of materials about Golden Age Spain and Latin America including images of playwrights, 15th-17th century maps of a number of the cities, pictures–of cathedrals, stage machinery, tourist attractions, etc.–taken on a 2005 trip with some good friends from my BYU days (when we finished the trip we put all our pictures together, so I'm sure several of them are theirs--if so, and if you don't want me to share them, just let me know which ones you would like removed). I considered using Adobe Flash to show some of the images, but it makes it difficult for people to copy them for use in class, so I decided against it.

The experience has taught me how much work goes into a simple website. It has also taught me that I have a lot to learn to improve the sites and make them function exactly how I want them. If anyone has any suggestion on aesthetic changes or even code problems, I welcome your comments!

Human Kindness

From the evening of June 22nd until the morning of July 1st, I suffered from the longest flu I have ever had. During the last few days I was able to get out of bed and do a few things and feel somewhat productive. By Saturday morning, July 3rd, I was feeling quite well and decided to go play in a weekly game of soccer--an ongoing activity that I have been participating in for almost four years now.

From the very start I realized that I wasn't going to have the normal energy that I have, so I stayed back by the goal and primarily played defense. Even though I was taking it easy, it didn't take long before I was throwing up in the bushes. A little while later I was on my back with my head and shoulders experiencing a tingling sensation much like when you lie on your arm and it "falls asleep." After about fifteen minutes I thought I would have enough energy to drive the twenty-five minutes home. I was wrong--I only made it about ten minutes before my entire upper body started feeling the tingling sensation and seizing up. My hands curled up and became rigid. Very concerned, I managed to pull the car off into a small cul de sac where I stumbled up to the door of the nearest house and pressed the doorbell. A clean-cut, middle age man opened the door, and I explained as well as I could my predicament and then asked if I could use his phone to call my wife so she could take me to the hospital. Barely able to stand and with my hands and arms curled up in front of me, I watched in astonishment as the man said, "Sorry," before closing the door on me. I have read numerous times when people just walk by a stabbing or shooting victim without offering any help, I just never thought I would live to see such calloused behavior myself.

I spent the next four or five minutes stumbling to the nearest house, where a kind lady dialed our phone number and asked my wife to come pick me up. I thanked her and managed to get back to my car where my symptoms became much worse. For the next fifteen to twenty minutes I was unable to move and I was concentrating as hard as I could to maintain consciousness. If I had been physically able, I would have returned to the second house and asked the lady to call 911--something I should have done the first time.

My wife finally arrived and took me to the Emergency Room at TMC. Fortunately, I regained a little of my movement by that time and was able to climb into our other vehicle. Just before getting out of the vehicle I started throwing up again, this time into a grocery bag that my wife handed me. As you may know, however, grocery bags almost always have holes in them, so I was a mess when I walked into the ER. A good friend of ours watched our kids while the doctors did a variety of tests including an EKG, blood tests, etc. After four hours and the first IV I have ever had, they indicated that they thought I was suffering from heat exhaustion. My brother has suffered similar symptoms in much cooler weather, so initially I was skeptical, but I now think he was probably right in my case.

Since this all happened yesterday, I have repeatedly thought back on the behavior of the first man who refused to offer any help. What kind of person is he? How could he simply close his door on someone who was in obvious distress--particularly when that person was asking so little? Did my staggering and my slurred speech make him think I was drunk? If so, couldn't he still have called the police to tell them about a drunk person stumbling around in his front yard? If I had passed out before making it to the second house, I could have been lying on the very hot Tucson pavement. Even if someone had found me in such a state, would they have bothered to call for help? This case and several like it makes me wonder how I or any of my friends would respond in a similar situation. The answer seems so obvious, yet just a couple months ago a homeless man who intervened to help a woman being robbed in Queens, New York was stabbed. Although a number of people passed by him, it took almost an hour before anyone bothered to call for help. Surveillance cameras showed one man take a picture with a cell phone, but he didn't bother to stop and assist the dying man or even press a few more buttons on his phone to call for help. What is going through the minds of people like this?

An Opportunity Gained

On June 21st we began our trip home after several weeks of vacation in Utah and Idaho. We have made the trip eight or nine times since moving to Tucson, and we have always made the 850 to 1000 mile trip (depending on whether we stop in Utah or Idaho) in one day. We planned this trip to be the same long, boring drive. However, as we approached Flagstaff, a large forest fire on the surrounding mountains closed Highway 89. Consequently, we were rerouted through the Southern Rim of the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, we drove 33 miles past the detour road and had to drive back to it. We noticed that the detour road had an electronic sign, but it was turned off--so 66 miles later, we drove through the Grand Canyon.

When it was all said and done, we had added nearly two-hundred miles to our trip! Tired and beat, we got a hotel room in Flagstaff, hoping to get a little rest.

The next morning we decided to visit some of the Indian Ruins in the area--Toozigoot (pronounced two-see-whoodt), Montezuma's Castle, and Montezuma's Well. We headed down the scenic Highway 89A through steep mountain valleys until we finally arrived at the Toozigoot ruins, located on a hilltop near Clarkdale with the meandering Verde River running in the fertile valley below.

Mountains along Highway 89A.

Toozigoot from a distance.

The ruins that remain today attest to a bustling culture of the Sinagua (Spanish for 'without water') society. The dwelling had 77 ground-level rooms, some with multiple stories and was constructed between 1150 and 1400, when, for reasons unknown, the Sinaguas left. At its peak, the dwelling housed a couple hundred people.


From there we made a short drive to Montezuma's Castle, where Sinaguas from the same time period build several dwellings on and along a cliff. Montezuma's castle, located near the top of a cliff and once accessed by a series of ladders, is five-stories high with 20 rooms. A larger structure, measuring six stories high with about 45 rooms, was gutted by a fire hundreds of years ago. Little remains of that structure.



Arifacts left at the site show a trade system that brought items such as shells and parakeets from a distance of several hundred miles.

From Montezuma's Castle, we drove a few miles to Montezuma's Well, a depression in the ground with a 55-foot deep pool of water in the bottom of the bowl. One and a half million gallons come from the spring each day. Additional dwellings line the cliffs that surround the bowl.


Cliff dwellings can be seen near the top of the cliff in this picture.This close-up provides a better view of the cliff dwellings at Montezuma's Well.

The water in the bowl that makes Montezuma's Well flows 150 feet underground and comes out here. This escape keeps the bowl from filling up. The park ranger invited our kids to cool off from the near-100° heat by putting their feet in the cool waters.

The Sinaguas made a mile-long-canal where the water comes out to water their crops. The picturesque canal measures three feet deep and was constructed with primitive tools. I think it would be difficult enough using a modern shovel. I can't imagine making and lining a canal of this size with stones using the tools they used. This picture shows the water flowing under a tree. A sycamore near the outlet is 300 years old.

While we hadn't planned this detour in our trip, it turned out being a great experience. We purchased an annual park pass, so if any friends and family are in the area, you're welcome to join us on a visit to some of the nearby ruins.