My first day in Arizona involved driving a 15 ft truck laden with my earthly belongings head first into a monsoon. Apparently August is “monsoon season” in Phoenix, (a fact that no one bothered to mention to me before I decided to move there.) A monsoon is a collection of strong dust storms, incredible lightning shows, and blinding rain. Beautiful to watch from a distance, but terrifying to drive into, which is exactly what I did driving the last stretch of road an hour from my new home. After driving white knuckled, with rain pouring in the poorly-sealed driver’s window, I exited the highway and looked back at the storm I’d just passed through to witness a double rainbow. It almost made it worth experiencing it! It occurred to me (always one to find a lesson or two in the worst situations), that the monsoon/rainbow experience is a metaphor for life. Hear me out…

Life is peppered with stormy times, where we can’t even imagine what the sun looks like anymore. When we finally come through, and we eventually do, there’s a rainbow or two waiting for us on the other side to make us feel like the storm was worth it. Also, the storm brings life-giving rain from which beautiful things bloom and flower. Without the storm, life would be dull and dusty.

So let me get back to tarantulas and road runners for a second. Apparently Arizona’s desert has an incredible array of wildlife I was unfamiliar with. For instance, I discovered this week why we are supposed to love tarantulas: because there are worse creepy-crawlies… and tarantulas eat them. After two weeks of crickets in my house, I learned that it’s best to get my house sprayed to get rid of them. It’s not just that they are darned annoying (but a GREAT protein source for my cats), but they are a food source for (shudder involuntarily when you read this)… scorpions. Remember the children’s song “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, I guess she’ll die” (Jeez, the morbid things we sing to our kids!). Well, it’s all about a food chain, and in AZ the scorpions eat the crickets. Guess what eats the scorpions? You guessed it: tarantulas. I toyed with the idea of getting a few pet tarantulas, but I imagined the cats eating them, or me stepping on one in the middle of the night ::eeewwww::. So instead, I’ll be having my house hermetically sealed. I’ll be the girl in the bubble. (Hey, with a computer and Internet, and a good stock of Riesling wine, dark chocolate, and Fred Astaire movies, who needs to go anywhere?) I actually met a tarantula up against a house a few weeks back (I named him “Bob”. I don’t know why, he just looked like a “Bob”).

Now on to road runners. We’ve all seen the cartoon with a large ostrich-looking bird thing that can’t fly and says “beep beep” (I DARE you to make that noise out loud right now!). Well, a road runner is actually the size of a large pigeon with a goofy orange feather curled over his forehead. And, get this… he actually runs across the road. I’ve even seen them look both ways for traffic before sprinting across! I asked someone if they can fly and was told… “Well of course. They just prefer to run!” Of course, they don’t rack up many frequent flyer miles that way and must go through jogging shoes like mad! So there’s a new twist on the old joke about the proverbial chicken and it goes like this:

“Why did the road runner cross the road?”
Post your wpuch line to this universal question on my blog and I’ll pick the one that makes me laugh until milk squirts out of my nose. I’ll email the winner something cool.

Ok, dear friends, enough for now. I just finished up a 34 hour marathon west coast swing dance weekend and need some beauty rest. If you want to see a foto of me and my beautiful niece, I’ve added it to the right.
Till next time,
Barbara