History Adventuring

Although I've spent all of my adult life in Arizona and California, I've never lost that strange sense of humor that I grew up with in Minnesota. But I have learned to try to watch myself, because it can cause some serious confusion with many of my friends here. The Midwestern sense of humor is sometimes described as "dry", or "dead pan". If you're old enough to remember Johnny Carson, his humor was classic Midwestern. He often referred to his childhood in Nebraska, so it's obviously not limited to Minnesota. His comic delivery was done by saying something outrageous, and silly, without smiling. At all. That's a "dry" delivery. A "dead pan" means a face with no expression. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder, "Is he kidding?" Yes, he is. And when he cracked up, it was wonderful. Because it's at that moment that even people who didn't get the joke understand that he was joking. An example o

I've lived where the weather is nice, and I've lived where the weather is harsh. In other words, I lived in Santa Barbara, California, and I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona. And the most miserably uncomfortable I've been is where the weather is nice. If that sounds strange, please hear me out. Here in Phoenix it gets insanely hot. Like over 120 degrees sometimes in the summer, easily over 115, and 100 is pretty much nothin'. So having air conditioning isn't just a luxury, it's the first thing that someone like me thinks about. And I have an awesome heat-pump A/C on my house, and the world's greatest General Motors air conditioning in my car. And since I've never had an outdoor job, I've been wonderfully comfortable. When I lived in California, where the weather is nice all of the time, I've lived without air conditioning, or heat. And when the weather isn't nice (which actually does happen) I've been miserably cold, or miserably

I moved to Arizona when I was 19. I had been planning to get out of Minnesota since I was a kid. And the only reason was the cold. In High School I would talk to friends about where I could go. I remember that I thought of moving to Australia, probably because I had seen a documentary showing the deserts. And then I saw the cars zooming through the desert in "Gumball Rally" and I figured that I could move out west. Of course I had no idea what Arizona looked like. It could have had sand dunes, and cowboys and Indians and stagecoaches for all I knew. But that didn't matter - I just needed to get away from the cold. For those of you who didn't grow up in Minneapolis, I will share a few things that even to to me sound like I'm making it up. • Delivering newspapers on Sunday mornings in the dark in the winter. Even people who live in Minneapolis probably don't do much of that nowadays. The temperature could easily get to below 40, and I made a note o

I've owned the house I'm in, in suburban Phoenix, for over twenty years now. And when I talk to my neighbors there's always a concern about "renters". People point at houses on the street where renters are. Of course, the implication is that renters are bad, whereas owners are good. And it's made me think about our attitude towards the places we live. I rented a place in Tempe in the 1980s while I was going to ASU. It was a little converted garage with a tiny kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a bedroom. I lived there for a little under two years. While I was there, I wanted it to be a nice place to live. I tried to keep it clean. I also arranged for the irrigation to be turned on after many years, I bought a lawnmower at a garage sale, I planted some shrubs and trees. I even painted the place, inside and out. I even remember painting color-coordinating trim on the hot water heater (which you can see behind me, matching the trim of the "house&

When I bought my house in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) over 20 years ago, I wondered what the neighborhood would look like in the future. I had seen how quickly neighborhoods had deteriorated in Phoenix, and I just hoped for the best. Unlike most people that I talk to, I am not interested in an increasing market value for my house. It's not for sale. This is where I want to live. I like it here. I don't want to move away. As an old Californian, I know that exploding home values don't help people who want to stay, they only help people who want to leave. The people who stay just have to pay more property taxes. Google "Proposition 13" if you want to see how terrible it can be for people. I live in a patio home neighborhood. The houses are very small, the lots are very small, even the streets are very small. For me, as a confirmed bachelor, this was perfect. Mostly I wanted a garage for my car, and a little bit of backyard. And I watched the neighb

The Sahuaro Ranch (yes, it's been misspelled that way for over 100 years), which is between 59th Avenue and 63rd Avenue and Peoria and Olive (south of the Glendale Main Library and north of Glendale Community College) in Glendale, Arizona has a lot of amazing historic palm trees. If you live in Phoenix, you see palm trees all of the time, and it you may be wondering what I'm talking about. Come to the ranch with me, and let's look up. Most of the palm trees around Phoenix, which are commonly called Mexican Fan palms (Washingtonia robusta ), come from Sonora and Baja California. They grow very quickly, and are the ones that you see along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. And because they grow very quickly, they became much more popular after the 1920s. The ones in the photo at the top of this post aren't fan palms, they're date palms. And the difference is in the structure of the leaves. A date palm has leaves that I like to describe as looking like a feather du