This July has been a month all about literal movement – an adventure in LA, seeing family in Fresno, showing my brother Arizona and even starting to really launch a big idea (after a lot of time just thinking about it). Then August turned out to be a month of life movement including big changes in my daily life and little but promising changes in my professional world (hello, freelancing!). There’s been so much movement, in fact, that it’s been a little tricky to pause and record all of it.
But one of the cool things about having people visit is that you get to play host – you may end up looking at where you live with new eyes, a traveler’s eyes and end up seeing, hearing or even tasting things about a familiar place that you never knew were there. We got two great examples of that in the last few months.
This July was my brother’s first visit to Phoenix since I moved here to start graduate school. If there’s one thing my brother is always up for, it’s a good sports event so we took him to see the Diamondbacks take on the New York Mets – and ended up literally right next to the Mets bullpen. While I’d briefly been to Chase Stadium once before for a company party, experiencing it filled with baseball fans, the sounds of the game and tempting food smells was a brand new experience and surprisingly comfortable for the triple digit heat thanks to the stadium cover. It’s something we probably never would have done without my brother and made the day an adventure instead of a regular weekend in town.
The same thing happened when Steven’s sister and nephew visited earlier in the summer. We hit the Desert Botanical Gardens with an active, inquisitive toddler. Once I got over my fear that he would run headlong into a cactus, I got the chance to see the desert through his eyes which made me so much more aware of details at ground level – and especially excited each time we saw a rabbit, chipmunk or lizard.
And no matter who they are or how long they’re here, we’ve kept our streak of getting all our guests to Rosita’s alive and well.
So it’s been crazy and interesting and I’ve gotten behind, but there’s a few more summer adventures I have to share that will be showing up here soon and hopefully new ones to come this fall, because even if I disappear for a bit, I always have my eyes open for what to share when I make it back…
