Been a crazy week around the Richard hacienda. First of all, we’ve got this hot new Dell Inspiron laptop to replace the Inspiron desktop that head crashed just after we got back from San Diego. You would think we of all people would have been smart enough to be backing up all our data, but we weren’t – fortunately, Seagate was able to recover all of our data and will be sending us a new disk, but the tech guy who took a look at the PC’s insides says it looks pretty bad inside. I guess that’s what happens when your PC shares a room with rabbits. The fur I guess really raises havok with the internals. But I’m not getting rid of the rabbits, so we’ll just have to get smarter, faster.

Warner the tree guy came and gave our queen palms a manganese treatment to try and save the runt of the litter which we really like (both it and its healthier companion really give the swimming pool its tropical look) but he’s only giving it a 50/50 chance of survival. For some reason, queen palms are really popular here in the Valley of the Sun but they don’t like the kind of soil that’s here and often struggle. I told Warner that if that pal goes I’m replacing it with a more AZ-friendly Mexican Fan Palm, which not only require less H2O once their settled in, but make a lovely sound in the wind.

The Lowe’s windows install folks are coming next week to replace all our windows with energy-efficient double-panes. The only concern we have is that, because these windows eliminate ultraviolet rays our light-sensitive houseplants are all going to suffer. Still, it’s worth it considering the fact we’ll be able to rid ourselves of the brown screens that make the place seem like a cave. It won’t be healthy natural light for the houseplants, but the natural light will be nice and we won’t have to worry about our furniture fading because of the sunlight pouring in.

You want to know what a tough job is this time of year? Carmelo and the landscaping crew, who try to show up as early as possible before the temps go into the triple-digits. To day Carmelo knocked on the door and was excited to show me that the bougainvillea in the prayer grove have grown enough for him to create the first arch of the year by which the “altar and statues are all visible under a lovely arch of green and red flowers. If I can get a picture up in the next few days (once I get my Blackberry software loaded on the new machine) you’ll see how nice it looks.

Tomorrow the monsoon season in the Valley of the Sun officially kicks off, but for all intents and purposes we’re not going to see thunderstorm action here for a few weeks yet. You can already see the clouds building in the afternoon over the Supertition Mountains to our east, though, so the action isn’t that far away. It’s my favorite time of the year here. Arizona monsoon lightning is unlike the thunderstorms you get in the east – lots of dry storms with incredible displays of lightning.