Walking pictures

The weather is getting cold, and it looks like my lunchtime walks are gone for the season. We’ve been running a little colder than normal for December, if we get a sunny day though I’ll be back out there. This morning when we got up it was 27f at our place. Driving in to work there was an area where somebody’s sprinklers went off, leaving a frozen trail of puddles on down the hill from their house. We are on watering restrictions here in Vegas, we can only water once a week, but since the plants still grow and we don’t get any rain you’ve got to keep your sprinklers going. It’s supposed to get up to 56f this afternoon – so that does provide us with an almost thirty degree swing from low to high.

My walk takes me past a big field that was graded this past summer in preparation for more office buildings. The lot has sat untouched for the past four months or so, but a few weeks ago a big crane has appeared.


In the lower right corner is a part of the crane that hasn’t been attached yet – they can add pieces to the boom that let a crane like this reach up to the top of a ten story building. Each piece comes on a separate truck, they only add as much as will be needed by the job. You can’t get a feel for how big this thing is from the photo – but the blue objects hanging from the cable are power generators. It’s common practice on construction projects to hang the generators to prevent theft – these are popular things to steal. The tires on the generators are about the same size as car tires, with the generator box itself being about six feet high when sitting on the ground. So the top of the treads on the crane are about head hight. The buildings to the left are probably similar to what will be put on this lot.

Off in the distance beyond the crane are some boxed trees. Some of them have already been planted around the perimeter, but these are still sitting. They have watering systems hooked up to keep them alive.


The boxes for these trees are four feet high, with the trees themselves probably thirty or forty feet (ten meters) above that. Not like the little things I buy to put in my yard. But hey, this is Vegas – where Steve Wynn put sod down on his new golf course back when – yes, an entire golf course, not just the greens, in sod. Guess they didn’t want to wait for grass to grow. Just as they don’t want to wait for trees to grow, just bring in the big ones.

And here’s the last shot for the day – E picking tomatoes last week.


You can see a little green one in her hand. She likes picking her own tomatoes and grapes, but nothing ripe right now. Grapes are all gone, and that’s the last try for tomato – with the freeze this weekend the tomato plants are flat on the ground now, no more picking from this batch.