Monsoon Activities

Get Cereus...

The Summer Monsoons are in high gear and all the beauty and danger that accompanies them are here too. There recently were swaths of the city without power due to 60 and 70 mph gusts and temporary road closures due to flash flooding were abundant. Yesterday a motorist was swept downstream after being caught by a flash flood that crossed a major roadway. He was rescued without incident. Although there are the inconveniences, there are beautiful things happening too.

The desert is turning a vibrant green and this is the start of the annual bloom season for the various types of Night Blooming Cereus. There are many species of cereus but none are more famous and more flighty than The Queen of the Night. We were fortunate to have a neighbor with a keen eye and a much better camera than our so she captured the images below. Beautiful indeed...




This is the Queen of the Night. We have one in our front yard but it has not bloomed yet this year. This beauty was showing at Tohono Chul Park. The Lovely Gail and our neighbor, Carolyn, went up one evening the the hoards of "petal peepers" to see a few of their many specimens in bloom.



This is a Cereus, but not at all the same as above. This just popped out one evening. It's right outside the front door, in front of a stack of windows that start at just about floor level. It was strikingly beautiful and delicate. It was a good thing we photographed when we did, the wild rabbits came by later that night and nibbled it all the way down to the cactus and it was but a nub the next morning.

Weather Central

We bought a weather station the other day. It’s not terribly sophisticated but it’s proving to be fun none the less. It measures temperature, both indoors and out, and it measures rain. We’re still getting familiar with it and experimenting with placement of the various components. However, the fun is in seeing what it has to tell us throughout any given day.

It is all wireless and operates on batteries using a weak 433 MHz radio. We can place the temperature sensor and the rain gauge up to 100 meters (328 feet) from the base but we think we have found locations that are much closer than that. The cool thing is that the rain gauge is self-emptying! Just set it and forget it, more or less.

It does not store data and we can’t hook it to our computers or home network, but it’s a good starter kit. We’ll no doubt learn a few things by taking this first rudimentary and inexpensive step. It’ll be fun and interesting.

This is the wireless, self-emptying, rain gauge. It has captured 0.67 inches of rain since this photo was taken.

This is the base, or receiver. As you can see, we like it warm indoors. 85.3 degrees in the office is just about right.

This is the outdoors temperature sensing unit, the least interesting of the three but useful none the less. Right now it resides on the BBQ island, until a more permanent home can be found.