December 26-27, 2022 Organ Pipe National Monument, Arizona

 80 degrees and sunny.

This is the best one so far. 1 3/8 in across. Beveled polished dichroic glass with a beaded bezel. This one you really need to see in person, it so many different colors. Neighbor doing some late Christmas decorating. 

Cute little bud on an organ pipe cactus. Saguaro with arms. 

Crescent moon on an organ pipe looking south. Sunset. 

Really pretty colors tonight in sunset looking west. This one is from our front door.

75 and partly sunny. We hiked the Palo Verde trail to the visitors center to stock back up on chili chocolate. John approaching the cholla forest.

Cholla forest. Ocotillo blooms and a cholla fruit.

Organ Pipe cactus and Mexico at the south end of the park.

Cool clouds today. We thought sunset was a bust from the clouds on the horizon, but at the last minute it did this. 

64 and mostly sunny. It started raining last night and we woke up to rain. They predicted it to rain all day. But the black clouds went  away and it was a lovely sunny rest of the day.

I put the finishing touches on Tortoise in a Basket today. It is 7 x 7 x 1 1/2 inches. Made from dyed and natural pine needles, polyester thread and hand made beads from necklaces John bought in Chile years ago and now live in the garage. I should have brought more with me, they are great on baskets. The center is a tortoise about 2 x 2 x 1 1/2 inches  piece of glass I cast  from recycled wine bottle. It is 1 1/2 inches tall, so it is a thick piece of glass.  It came out cute.  John spent the day making broth from the Christmas turkey he smoked. He put is on to boil early, before I got up and believe it or not the smoke odor was so strong I could not breath and got up early. So he had to take it outside. The turkey had a very spicy rub, so the broth beside being smoky will be spicy. 

We walked the campground today and wrote down all the campsites we like. Usually we drive around all 200 sites a couple times and pick one. They started this year that you have to reserve and pay for your site online. Can't just pick one and buy it in the campground. They just put reserved on all the campsites and we were very confused when we got here this time The walk around the campground is actually a few miles and the scenery is wonderful. Brittle bush blooming in the campground. The perimeter trail round the campground.

We are leaving tomorrow. They only let you stay 3 weeks at a time. We love it here. So relaxing. The saguaro by our campsite with the sun behind it and a few clouds. By sunset most of the rain clouds were gone. I caught this one. 

And another of the cactus right by our site at sunset tonight.