From New York to Arizona: Month 2

Week 5: Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Apartment Tour

College started up this week here in Tucson, so I got a taste of what it's like to work at both the community college and the University. I'm also up to 4 agencies that I work for, so the work has been coming in. I've already worked at the Air Force Base, one of the casinos, and the Desert Museum. Soon, I have a job at the Biosphere! I've also been doing the typical doctor's appointments and business meetings.

This weekend was teacher appreciation weekend at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. They have special summer night themes and events to draw people despite the heat. It started later in the day (5pm) so it was a little cooler, but it was still pretty hot out. Many of the exhibits close at sunset, or earlier, so we had to run to catch a few things, one of which was the hummingbird aviary. I think I could go and spend an entire day in there!! It was like a butterfly house but with hummingbirds. They had about 5 different species and lots of flowers and hummingbird feeders. The hummingbirds would come up so close, it was spectacular. However, they seemed to know just when you were taking a picture because they would whiz away just as you hit the button.

The next exhibit we hurried off to was the Javelinas. They're like wild boars but they're closely related to rodents. They can be pretty vicious in the wild, but these guys were just hanging, rooting around for food and water. Next door, the coyotes were hiding and nearby the ocelot and bobcats were napping in some nooks up in the wall of their enclosures.

The prairie dogs were super cute, sitting on their hind-legs, munching on grass.

Coming up to the big horn sheep enclosure, we thought that there was a statue of one of them up on a hill, but as we got closer, it was just the big male, up on the rocks, seeming to pose for everyone! A lot of cool things about the place were just the landscaping - flowering bushes with butterflies flitting from flower to flower, little ground squirrels running across the path, bats flying around during the twilight hours.

The only unfortunate part was that the light was fading as we got around to see the place, so we didn't get a lot of great pictures. But, that just means we will have to go back! We'll aim at going in the fall when it's cooler and we can see the entire place during the day.

Lastly, here's the apartment tour I promised. Never made a video before, let alone added captions, so it's not a masterpiece by any means. Enjoy!!

Update - More Photos

Thankfully, Susan was able to get some better pictures than I, so here's a few more pictures from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum! Plus, snakes freak me out, so I didn't even try taking pictures of them.