August 22, 2010 by Alex.

One Sunday afternoon we drove down to Tubac, a little town close to the Mexican border.

It’s mainly for tourists and weekend shoppers. There are many artists that create pottery, iron sculptures, wood furniture, etc. and sell it to the visitors. The art work ranges from traditional over kitschy to cool and just crazy.

Even though it’s a modern town, it still has an old West feel to it, including some of the buildings.

Click here for many more photos.

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August 16, 2010 by Alex.

Turns out there’s an ostrich farm about half an hour from our house. There’s lots of fun stuff to do. You can feed various critters, including ostriches, deer, goats, donkeys, and lorikeets.

You can also go on a tour of the farm and surrounding desert in a tour bus turned monster truck driven by a crazy redneck chick, with a stop to do some ostrich fishin’.

Fun way to spend an afternoon.

Click here for many more larger photos.

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August 5, 2010 by Alex.

Here are a few more photos of critters encountered in Tucson, and some of them are not for the squeamish.

A millipede I found casing our garage.

A tarantula we found on the side of our house one evening when we got home. I held a ruler next to it so you can get an idea of the size of this thing.

Its leg span was at least 6 inches/15 centimeters.

My buddy Thom, a home inspector, encountered this scorpion during an inspection and sent me this photo.

His hand in the photo for scale helps demonstrate the size of this creature.

Click here to see larger versions of the photos.

Btw, if you’re wondering about the seemingly different wall colors of the first photos, they’re actually the same. One photo was taken in extremely bright daylight with an iPhone 3G, the other one was taken with a Canon SD800IS with flash while it was completely dark.

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July 25, 2010 by Alex.

We bought a storage system for the garage including cabinets and wall organizer system, and spent most of last weekend in the garage getting organized. We moved everything away from the walls, set up the new cabinets and carts and workbench, mounted wall panels, installed the hooks and mounts. Then we organized all our stuff and decided what to store where. It was a long, sweaty job, but it was worth it. The garage looks really nice now and everything has its place.

Click here to see larger versions of the photos.

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June 26, 2010 by abyron.

While we didn’t get any electrical plans for the house, it appeared that the house was pre-wired for sound. With a multi-meter and some detective work, I was able to figure out that the wires that were sticking out high up on the patio wall were speaker wires and how they were routed to the living room.

Our receiver can handle multiple zones, so I mounted some outdoor speakers and connected them to Zone 2 on the receiver. The receiver also does Internet radio, which means we can now stream Pandora straight from the receiver to the patio for some background entertainment - sweet!

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June 20, 2010 by Alex.

There is a lot of natural desert where we live. This means there are tons of critters all around us.

We were told about javelinas but haven’t seen them yet.

We have seen many birds and insects, lots of rabbits, and coyotes.

One of the birds you see around here a lot are roadrunners. Contrary to popular belief, they do not go “MEEEEP! MEEEEP!”, produce dust clouds, or hunt coyotes.

There are also many lizards of all shapes and sizes. Here are two different ones we saw today:

There is a big brown lizard that lives apparently under our hot tub, but he’s photo shy.

Tonight as we were out for a walk around the neighborhood we saw our first snake.

Looks like a young rattle snake, soaking up the heat from the pavement.

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June 12, 2010 by Alex.

We recently got the blinds for the house. They are called upside-down blinds, no, bottom’s up blinds, or something like that, whatever. As you can see in the photo, they are pretty cool. You can either lower the top, or pull the bottom up, or both.

Sandy also got her beloved hot tub. Works great, very relaxing. She loves the jet action. To quote Tim “The Toolman” Taylor: “It has three settings: Low, medium, and who needs a man!”

Last but not least, here is the BBQ island on the patio. It’s got a massive grill, cooler, storage, with nice tile work on the top and matches the house well.

We’re looking forward to having a house warming party and putting the grill to good use.

Click here for larger versions of the photos.

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