Saturday, March 23…Dog Poop on My Shoe (Anthony Lee)

Gracious, but it was a slow-moving morning! Jumped out of bed to answer the phone, talked for over an hour while sitting at the table, then got dressed and sat back down at the table. Finally went out to watch the birds and paint a rock. Slow moving…it became the theme of the day.

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   The day started out warm again but cloudy; we decided to go to Sabino Canyon in Tucson to walk instead of going for a bike ride. Somebody has been going crazy installing geocaches in this area and we’ve found a couple of them. There is one down by Picacho Peak that I’ve been wanting to find; it’s not in the state park but nearby. Since geocaching is best done in a vehicle, not on a bike, we made that our first stop…two big ditches stopped our approach from one direction and a big mound of dirt stopped us from another direction. Might have to do some walking to find this one…we didn’t want to spend the extra time today, but before we leave, I’m going to try again.

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   Ate lunch at the Arizona Pizza Company before heading to Sabino Canyon, which is just up the road.  The sun stayed under the clouds and there was a slight breeze which kept our walkabout from being unbearable.  We’ve learned that walking in Arizona is best done earlier in the day. Walking in the early afternoon means carrying extra water because of hotter temperatures.  But with it being cloudy and breezy, I grabbed just one bottle of water, which was enough for the hour or so we were out walking. 

   Sabino Canyon was a busy place today.  Split our time between the paved roads and the off-road trails. I was on the lookout for critters and birds but was excited to see a saguaro with two flowers at top. Have only seen a flowering saguaro our first year out here. We did see several birds on saguaros and a lizard skittering along the path.  At one point, I saw a bird on a tree limb and asked Kim to check it with his binoculars.  He thought it was a small hawk, which was my conclusion also.  It didn’t fly away as we got closer; as I looked at it, I asked Kim to check it out again. Yep, it was a broken off branch on a tree, not a small hawk.  We had a good laugh at ourselves over that one and had fun coming up with names for the new species that we’d found. 😎

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   About ten days ago, we saw crews out on the highway doing clean-up. After a clean-up weekend in Michigan, there might be a couple of bags every half mile or so laying alongside the highway and it seems like they're picked up rather quickly.  Along I-10 between here and Marana, there is a mound of

bags maybe every tenth of a mile or so.  And as of today, the bags are still heaped alongside the road. Don’t know if they stopped at the city limits of Marana or what, but the stopping point is very obvious in the amount of trash scattered in the median of the highway. There’s so much trash along I-10 in this area…I wonder if it’s due to the wind blowing trash around until it snags in the weeds and bushes along the highway or if people just don’t give a hoot about littering. All I know is that the big heaps of garbage bags along the road are just as unsightly as the trash in the median.

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   On our way to Agua Caliente the other day, I noticed a strange ad at several bus stops.  It said, “We scoop poop”.  There was a picture of a dog on the sign along with some writing that I couldn’t read because I was driving. I wasn’t sure if this was a real thing or not, and I wondered how scooping dog poop could be a viable business. Forgot about it until I saw the same ad on a yard sign today.  And because I wasn’t driving, I was able to do a deep Google dive into the world of ‘poop scooping’.  It is a real thing and there are several businesses available in Tucson to take care of all of a homeowner’s or commercial business’ dog poop scooping needs. 

   The names were the fun part: Scoop Soldiers…Poo Guys…Poop 911...DoodyCalls…and Scoop Doggy Logs.  There’s also Loren’s Pooper Scooper, which claims to be the pioneer in the poop scooping business in the Tucson area…in business since 2001. Most of these companies offer a variety of pick-up options, as well as sanitation and deodorizing add-ons, to residential and commercial customers and some will pick up after cats or other small animals also.  There’s low overhead which makes it a great side hustle with the potential to become a full-time business. And this isn’t just a Tucson thing.  There are Scoop Soldiers franchises in major cities in 16 states. Isn’t picking up after one’s pet part of pet ownership? My mind is reeling from this.

   While thinking about this, I may have questioned out loud how it seems like there’s laziness on the owner’s part that they would pay someone to come pick up dog poop on a regular basis instead of doing it themselves. Kim said it didn’t seem much different, in concept, from someone wanting to hire a live-in maid for 3 months so they can fully enjoy their time in Charlevoix over the summer. Vastly different jobs but yes, maybe the same mindset.   

   Suffice it to say that I spent way too much time today thinking about dog poop.

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   Started needle felting a new critter…a hedgehog. I went for realism with the hammerhead shark (Basher) and the swan (Blanca).  Not going for realism with the hedgehog…I’m aiming for cute.  And when it’s done, Clayton will have naming rights.

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    Clouds lingered into the evening, so Kim isn’t imaging tonight.  The wind also picked up, which means the cell camera is probably going to go crazy with notifications.