The weather was great, in the mid 70's although with the humidity it felt like the 90's. The mexican food was incredible, as were the drinks. We almost tried absinthe for the first time but the restaurant had run out the night we were there.

One of the perks of my new job is we get to do something fun one afternoon a month. This month we hired 3 Hummers and went off-roading in the desert thanks to the guys at Desert Storm Hummer Tours. They could fit 11 people in each Hummer, luckily we were all seat-belted in because these things bounced all over the place as we drove over rocks, up impossibly steep hills, and did 40+mph power-slides in loose sand :-)

Obviously not the best way to celebrate Earth Day (whoops!) but it was a lot of fun. Highly recommended for any of you guys coming into town soon...

Photos are here.

Sunday Sally had to work in the morning (it's testing week at school and she's the testing coordinator) but we headed over to Tawni's in the afternoon and hung out chatting until late in the evening. I spent way too much time extolling the virtues of Twitter for business advertising & customer relations - I use it for my iPhone apps (@iPhoneRossCoops) and Julie & Gary saw the light so they are now at @juliewa1 and @CoastExplorer - check them out. We also got to meet some of Tawni's other friends which was great as they helped distract us all from looking at Twitter endlessly on our iPhones. And we had a great dinner thanks to Gary's excellent pork barbecuing skills, yum!

It's always fun to see you guys, why don't you just move out here and enjoy the sun year round? Well except for the 110+º days...

A lovely weekend in the mid 80's had us hiking in Dreamy Draw again, and this time I remembered the camera. Photos are here.

They allow hiking, biking and horse back riding up here on many of the trails, and the park is huge so you only run into people occasionally. Several times though, we ran into one group of people on horse back who had lost their dog after it got startled by a car backfiring. We kept an eye out for her, and tried walking up to some of the ridges for a better view, but didn't see any sign of her. Hope they found her!

Tonight was the final night of Glendale's several months long xmas celebrations, and they finished it in style by adding lots of hot-air balloons to the party already going on in the streets & parks of their historic downtown.

We hung out there for a couple of hours, along with half of Phoenix judging by the parking situation. Luckily we saw a tiny sliver of a space on a side-street a few blocks out of town, and Sally's Smart Car squeezed into it effortlessly. Then we walked around downtown checking out loads of hot air balloons, bands on almost every street corner, movies playing, and the general fun-fair atmosphere. My favorite balloon was the Spiderman one! It was fun, and we really want to go for a hot-air balloon ride now. Check out more pictures here.

If you remember from my recent post, this is Chihully glass artwork spread amongst the cacti all around this amazingly beautiful park. I remembered the camera and spare batteries, but when we got to the park I suddenly realized I'd forgotten my tripod - grrrr! Still a lot of the pictures came out pretty well, and I really experimented with the camera's settings to try & get better night shots then I had on our previous 2 visits.

My photos (here) don't even began to capture how stunning this was to experience, but if you're not in Phoenix right now this is as close as you're gonna get... enjoy them now, and start saving up for a flight for next December ;-)

We got there early so that we could hit California Pizza Kitchen for dinner. To our surprise, they had a station set up outside so you could order your food without even entering the restaurant. So we placed our order, went and set up our blanket and pillows in the park, and then CPK called me 20 minutes later when the food was ready - fantastic!

Anyway, back to the movie. It's been a long time since I last watched Psycho, and I'd forgotten that it actually starts out here in Phoenix! It was interesting to see what Phoenix looked like back in 1959/1960, it's changed a little since then :-) The movie itself still holds up remarkably well today almost 50 years later. The most famous scene of course is Janet Leigh's shower murder scene, which still has the ability to shock, especially the final shot in the sequence where the camera starts on an extreme close up of her eye and slowly pans back, almost like her soul is leaving the body. Less effective was the final reveal of Norman Bates mother, which left a lot of people in the audience giggling.

There were 2 comments I heard though which started me thinking. Firstly after the shower murder scene, Sally said "Wow, I didn't realize that happened so early in the film" and I think that's actually a common misunderstanding. People new to the film expect that scene to be the dramatic end, but it isn't, it's fairly early on and leads into the bulk of the film which deals with the investigation into the murder. Finally at the end someone sat near us said "THAT was rated R?" It is of course silly to judge a movie from 1960 by todays standards, but there's no denying that without Psycho we may never have had all the great horror movies made since, especially during the late 70's, entire 80's and re-surging again over the last 10 years. All of which got me wondering if anyone has written about the popularity of horror movies during republican administrations? Hmmm?

It got me thinking about TV too. Psycho is surprisingly similar to a lot of today's most popular TV shows, in almost exact format as well as content. I don't think it's a stretch to say CSI is just Psycho from the investigators point of view; Law & Order is Psycho from the cops point of view, as are shows like Bones or The Mentalist; in a slight twist, House is just Psycho where Norman Bates is a disease instead of a person; and the ultimate? Dexter is Psycho, finally from Norman Bates' point of view...

From there we headed over to Papago Park for their evening flashlight tour. You get to wonder round unescorted with just a flashlight as your guide. As it's cooled down a bit in the evening, all the animals start coming out again, plus they had a few displays dotted around the park with snakes and scorpions, bull-frogs & screaming toads, and lot's of scarily large insects. It was a lot of fun, walking around in the dark until the snake exhibit - I hate snakes! They had a King snake on display, which apparently they have many of roaming around in the grounds because they are immune to most snake venom, and so eat other snakes and keep them out of the park grounds - ingenious!