Baron of Arizona and Lost in the Barren Desert

Since it is my birthday weekend Amy decided to let me go Geocaching. Which I love to do, but it's not Amy's favorite. We also have been wanting to go see different ghost towns in Arizona to learn a little more about our state. Our first and only Geocache called 'The Barony of Arizona.' Apparently back in the late 1800's there was a con-man who sent notices to everyone in AZ that he was the rightful owner of the territory and all businesses and residents needed to pay him a fee for living here. Well, he made out like a bandit. He made a name for himself as something he wasn't and built a huge mansion here in Casa Grande. He also was able to travel the world and meet the queen of England. Well, it didn't last long, I think it was in 1895 that they found out what he had done and threw him in prison. His mansion was still standing until the 1980's when it was torn down, but here's the monument.

After that we went looking for our first Ghost town. The directions we had were very scanty at best. We asked people in gas stations, rangers on state land and drove around aimlessly for a couple of hours. Our directions said that it was not far from the picacho resevoir....wherever that was. Well, after many hours of driving, passing an Ostrich Farm, Monster Truck Tours, The Nut House (selling pistachio's), the Picacho National Park ranger station and freeway construction we found the resevoir, but we never found the ghost town.

Here is us arriving at the resevoir. We ended up leaving a geocach here for others to find.

Happy Birthday Andrew!

Well, I turned 24 this week (Amy just interupted to tell the truth...28 years). We had a party with my family on Monday and then on my actual Birthday I came home early from work and Amy and I spent the rest of the day together going to the Farmhouse Grill, going shopping, and playing new board games on the Wii.

I just wanted to put some pictures of me opening my presents because these are all the pictures I took.








Amy got me two new pair of sandels, a Wii game that has a bunch of board games, which is way fun. I got some new clothes also, as well as money from my family.

YEEKS!!

Amy spotted a small nasty little critter crawling on our wall. I took a picture of our little friend to make sure it isn't a brown recluse. What we found out is that if it has little hairy spines on it's legs then it's not a brown recluse....apparently. Take a look at this picture, especially if you live in Casa Grande and let us know if you know what kind of spider this is.

Renaissance Festival '09....Hazzah!

Renaissance Festival!



















A few weeks ago we again went to the renaissance festival....Hazzah!!!!

The Renaissance festival is a magical place where everyone's style of dress is like a prelude to some S&M, men will joust over the slightest social infraction and where giant smoked turkey legs are the standard diet of everyone.

This is mine and Amy's second time of going, and we had a good time.


I have tried and tried and tried to get video in with our pictures and text, and I'm going to try it again, I hope this works. Here's a couple of videos of us walking around. Update, the red text is me again 5 minutes after I posted this and realized the videos were again not working. I am going to just link to them in photobucket. It doesn't look as good, but it works better.








If those videos work, then it will be a godsend. Here is us at the torture chamber. They showed all the ways that they used to torture people back in the day. It was pretty awsome, but it was so dark that we couldn't use the camera.






Here is a picture of me looking stupid with my oversized aviator glasses.

Ummm, I don't know what this is, so I'll call it our 'artistic close up/make out' picture. Of course it could also be called the 'Andrew makes gorilla lips and slobbers over Amy' picture.

Then we went to the joust. It wasn't too bad, sort of fun, but not my favorite. My favorite part about the joust was the guy sitting on the other side of the arena. He was this huge guy sitting there by himself surrounded by a big soda and snacks. (The 3rd clip)

Now it was time to play some games. Here's me with some silver ball that you have to balance. It looks kindda cool when someone does it that knows what they're doing, but it's not really very fun to do.

The Axe Throwing was much more fun, here's me standing around waiting to throw, then actually throwing. I thought I did alright, although I lost my focus after the first 2 axes. There was a wacko next to me with a dragon mask on that was doing it with two axes at a time. He played about 3 games in a row and you could tell....he really loved the renaissance festival.

The neclace I am wearing in this next picture denotes that I have just left the renaissance feast. An over-priced, vulgar romp through five delicious meals.

Here's the video of us at the feast. It's pretty dark, so not great quality video.

Here's a catholic cardinal carrying a jar of candy for young boys that are hungery.





















Here's Amy in front of a creepy tree.



























We took a picture of this owl because Amy likes Owls and because one of my favorite things about the Renaissance Festival is the 30 minute bird show. It sounds totally lame, but I really enjoy it for some reason.

Here I am playing with sicks. We played around with this for a while and seemed to get worse and worse the longer we stayed.

Here's us both looking sort of dopey as we fondle a wooden wizard.

So, that concludes our adventure to the Renaissance festival. Hopefully you enjoyed the blog as much as we enjoyed actually going. And hopefully those cursed videos showed up like they are supposed to.

The Tree Root....OF DEATH!

We have had in our front yard a beastly tree/bush/demon from the 5th circle of Hell that has festered and grown since I first bought the house a few years ago. It's attacked Amy a couple of times and put me in a three day coma once when I tried to trim it down.

Last month the day came to remove the beast from our yard. Cutting down the top wasn't too bad, but digging out the root was a nightmare. It took about 4 hours and broke 3 of my tow straps when I tried to pull it out with my truck. Regardless, at the end of the day it was man vs. nature. Man: 1, Nature: 0.