Back from spring break

Not me but the blog is back.

I'm aware that I could have continued to write while I was on break, but I just didn't feel like it. I'd say that I've been neither busy nor lazy. I graded all the tests I had sitting around, some for a few weeks, got enough of my taxes done to file an extension, eliminated a decent chunk of the paper that besieges me on a daily basis, went to a couple of ballgames, did a Seder, all that kind of stuff. But the break had no flow to it because various scheduling things chopped it to bits, and having a day taken away at the end didn't help.

But now I'm sitting in a friend's backyard in Scottsdale, looking down at a pool and up at a mountain.

This trip is a follow-up to our Bat Mitzvah visit back in February. Because we enjoyed visiting with the friends whose kid was celebrating, we decided to come back here when we had a moment. And five days seemed like enough, even with travel soaking up one of them.

These folks are Ronnie's friends from high school, who I met only a few weeks after I met Ronnie. And I've always enjoyed their company and they mine. So why not? 

The flight here was the usual flight crap- stuffed into little seats with virtually no service of any kind, rationing whatever snacks we could find in the incredibly bereft Terminal A at PHL and smuggled on board, and trying to read/sleep our way through 5 hours. We made it. That's the best I can say.

These folks live near the end of the road, on a cul-de-sac where the edge of Scottsdale bumps up against some hills. It's really hard to drive around here and understand why a huge sprawling metropolitan area sprung up here. Certainly nothing else springs up here without great difficulty. I'll try to get pictures of a couple of things to give you an idea, but aside from the apparent law requiring all buildings to be squat and adobe-style, there a lots of places that really look like they've been plopped down where they are simply because there was open space. Maybe that's what actually happened. So you get commercial buildings with nothing but flat desert on 3 or even 4 sides of them. It's just kind of weird.

I don't begrudge people living here, though I'm not sure what they'll do when they run out of water. And we got to go to a cool place for dinner, an old bar called Greasewood Flat. It's in an old junkyard, and had old mining equipment lying around, plus some animals and a well-used horseshoes, well, what do you call a place where you play horseshoes? A court? A field? A course? It's none of those. I'll call it a pitch, which is really the word for a soccer field, but that's what you do with horseshoes, I think. They have burgers and beer and live music and fire pits. They even made a matzah grilled cheese. And of course it looks like it's in the middle of nowhere, even though it's across the road from the Four Seasons.

So our trip is off to a good start. I'll keep y'all posted.