pdx ✈️ phx, august 2025 (I)

Welp, here's the first in a series of at least four posts tagged 'flying', thanks to a bit of ongoing family medical drama down in Arizona. This isn't the sort of blog where I go into lots of personal details, but as a piece of general advice for everyone, but especially those of the elderly persuasion: If you've been prescribed something for a chronic condition (say, blood thinners, to pick a random example), and it's a bit expensive, and you run into a temporary financial dry spot for a few months, but you have people (say, your successful middle-aged adult children, to pick another random example) who would be more than happy to help you out if only they knew, the correct course of action is not to skip filling that prescription for a while and not tell us, I mean, anybody, and just sort of cross your fingers that it'll probably work out ok in the end. This is not doing anybody any favors, to put it mildly. And after all that, saying how weird it is that your kids are starting to have grey hair, right after causing more of it.

Anyway, this set of aerial photos includes some semi-snowy Cascades, then lots of empty desert, then the rocky hills around Phoenix on a hazy smoggy 115ºF afternoon, which vaguely of remind me of the photos returned by Soviet Venus probes back in the 1980s. Except with endless subdivisions stretching off to the horizon, many of them built around artificial lakes (which you can't swim in, or fish in, or go boating on), I guess just to own the libs or something. I can't explain that or much of anything else about Phoenix, really, including a.) why it exists in the first place, and b.) why nearly 5 million people live there. Ok, people keep telling me it's only incredibly hot for three months of the year and is nice otherwise. But I've only ever experienced it at summer temperatures and have come to suspect it's actually like this year-round and the idea that it's vaguely tolerable sometime in the winter was dreamed up by a few creative real estate speculators preying on people who buy propery sight unseen, and it sort of snowballed from there, so to speak.