Tucson, Monkey Ale, Power Outages and Buddies: A Little R&R in Arizona

I've fallen behind in my blogging duties.

I am enjoying a little R&R out West. This is typically the week I'd be riding horses in Wyoming, but the economy and other circumstances prevented that this year. In a feeble attempt to make up for missing Wyoming, a buddy of mine from Florida and I are at another buddy's house in Tucson.

It doesn't have the rugged, rustic, cowboy cachet of our Wyoming ranch outings, but the drinking, laughing and lie telling are about the same.

This has been a low-key trip. My buddies are actually working. Both are IBMmers and work out of their homes. My Tucson buddy has been able to put in some daytime goofing-off hours with me. My Florida buddy is a 10-hour-a-day, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy and he doesn't usually come out of the upstairs office except for a biological imperative or to grab a glass of water.

Tucson has gotten more rain in the past week than in the last couple of years. Every afternoon the clouds roll in and the sky opens up. We lost power for a couple of hours on Tuesday evening and lost the Internet connection for about 12 hours overnight last night.

We made a quick trip to the top of Mt. Lebanon yesterday. It was 30 miles, 8,000 feet in elevation and a 21-degree drop in temperature from my buddy's house. The scenery, though, was spectacular. It was truly amazing.

We have been to three different micro breweries here. We will return to one of them, Nimbus, this evening for some Monkey Ale. There are still a couple that will go unexplored. We have to leave something for next trip.

I did manage to muster the energy and motivation this morning to write an installment of my twice-a-week auto blog for Interest.com. Afterward, I had to take a nap.

I blame my lack of get-up-and-go on the elevation; I suspect it has more to do with laziness.

Oops; time for my afternoon siesta.