I’m just now getting around to looking at the pictures from the Arizona trip last month. Lots of flowers, bugs, birds, and lizards.

Palo Verde

Sacred Datura

Saguaro

Male Broad-billed hummingbird (see also the in flight picture from a couple years ago)

Ornate Tree Lizard

It’s pedalpalooza and there are dozens of rides and gatherings every day. We haven’t been on a bike with Ronin yet, but I finally ordered a kid carrier and helmet for her so we should be on the road by the end of the week. She’s still pretty small so we decided to start with the ibert and move on to a trailer or maybe an extracycle when she gets too big for it.

Anyway not having a way to transport Ronin, we drove to Cirque du Cycling, which is pretty lame I know. We watched the parade, met with friends, juggled a little, and left when Ronin started to get grumpy.

1 candle power



This trike is pedaled with a running motion. A few other bikes in the parade were built by the same person including the wolf bike below.






Wolf Bike.



There are lots of home built tall bikes in this town.






Whenever bikers gather in Portland on a sunny day you can bet it won’t be long before a bunch of naked riders show up.



Aphex Twin?



The parade was followed by Criterium races. We watched the warm up laps but had to leave before the start because Ronin just couldn’t take it anymore. I liked watching this guy on the rollers. Going full speed on that looks pretty scary.

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Ronin has her own room now that we are living in an actual house. Right now she doesn’t play too much in it and so it retains a fresh uncluttered feel. This will surely change soon and forever.

We bought a cheap crib off Craigslist and spent about a thousand hours sanding and painting it a bunch of colors. It was a royal pain in the ass and I do not recommend it to anyone. But I think it turned out cute. The raindrop mobile I also made.

I’ve since replaced the window curtain with a heavy Guatamalan textile, red with embroidered animals all over it. It helps keep her room dark in the mornings when it gets light at 5-freaking-AM. The butterfly ball is just one of those IKEA paper lanterns with 3-D see-through butterfly stickers all over it. The photos on the wall are of Joshua as a baby and my dad in his 20s. (We also have a photo of Grandpa Jeff over by the door.) The “table” is made from a large box containing a desktop computer we likely will never use again ever (not bitter), which I couldn’t find a space for; I covered it with a Mexican textile and put a basket of toys on top of it. The large thing to the left of the table is a giant book of baby animals. Ronin is more than a little obsessed with it.

Opposite the crib are her dressers (IKEA; painted using the same paint as the crib) with wooden toys from Mexico that she miraculously has managed to not break (and she does play with them) and a Subcomandante Marcos doll from Chiapas. The wooden machine to the right of the dressers is a rolling ball toy made for Ronin by our friend Kerstin. On the wall are real and painted butterflies, and a child’s huipil from Guatamala hand embroidered with lions.

More butterflies and a framed Ibis card.