adventures at Picacho Peak

Recently I learned that if you take a picture of your husband on top of Picacho Peak, you can get bugs in the picture that, despite being about an eighth of an inch long and not in the same focal plane as your spouse, look like helicopters. To get up there, you take a really steep trail built by the CCC and use cables put up by Boy Scouts to keep you from falling off. It's a fairly popular system, based on the traffic we saw on a Monday morning.

 

Right after we started, a side peak

 Spouse (no bugs)

Part of the peak

Me going down the hardest part (it wasn't as bad as it looks)

 Pictures of flowers, mandatory for children of botanists

I can report that going down was, for once, easier than going up, entirely because of the cables. Also, the state park campground facilities are fantastic, except for the part where it looks like all the sites have electricity you don't want to pay for. I've never seen non-electric sites that have a box -- a box with a note on it and a little lock. Who knew?

reduced typing skills and medical stuff

Today I learned that I don't like switching from Linux to a Mac. Because there are more bored engineers in the family than just me (some of them are legitimately retired), there's a project, and we needed a Mac, and I got it because reasons. I'm sure I can adapt to the fact that the Finder stays open all the time, so you hit the red x when you want to get rid of it, but for any other program, you have to do that (thingy)Q deal.

Besides that inconsistency, what's really driving me nuts is all the keyboard shortcuts are a little different in the web browser, so it takes two or three tries to do anything, and then I have to read a complicated journal article, and then I fish for shortcuts, read another article, etc. I can type in two different keyboard layouts, but minor alterations to keyboard shortcuts appear to be my limit.

In other news (news with much less whining), I went to the doctor, and I'm only the third patient of his with my particular issues to have reached this one goal in the treatment protocol. I'm determined to be happy about that -- he seemed really happy -- but realistically, I have no idea how many patients have tried.  (From what he said, it sounds like I am some sort of genius at taking pills, and most people suck at it. You learn something every day.)

It can be a little difficult to remember to feel good about being a genius pill-taker, so I'm going to be all excited about getting this one supplement rearranged, and suddenly I can function pretty well again, right in the middle of pollen season. I got to go on a five-mile hike yesterday, which hasn't happened since December, and there were a million wildflowers, and I should have taken pictures.