“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Thanks for visiting this personal website/blog o’ mine. Its’s nothing fancy. It’s basic. But it is mine.
Who am I, you may or may not wonder? No one fancy, I’m basically a Southern California expatriate who, for the past twenty-or-so years, has lived in the Sonoran Desert of the United States of America.
The Sonoran Desert covers Southwest Arizona, part of Southeastern California, most of the Baja peninsula in Mexico, as well as part of the Northwestern corner of mainland Mexico.
I left California during the reign of the Terminator, with my family, when it became apparent to me that the quality of life was no longer going to be what it was when I grew up there. To give you some perspective, I was born when Ronald Reagan was governor.
Not that the standard of living for everyday people in Southern California was that great when I lived there, but at that particular time, it was a pretty great place to grow up…I can’t lie about that.
But that seems to be the way of the world these days, doesn’t it? Places that were once good still exist, but they are no longer the same as the were before. Not to keep busting on my homeland, but there seems to be quite a few cities in Southern California that fall into that category nowadays. Unfortunately, most of the coastal cities are there.
A famous Southern California native, Gwen Stefani so melodically foreshadowed the notion of this downfall in way back in1995 when the band, No Doubt released “Tragic Kingdom”, a blatantly obvious word-play on Southern California’s beloved Disneyland theme park, also know as the Magic Kingdom.
In many lifelong residents’ eyes, Southern California had by that time, already become a tragic, if-not-once-magic, Kingdom. The 1980’s in Southern California, that was really the golden era, where life had reached it’s zenith and began to descend in the early 1990’s. The Los Angeles Riots in 1992, were a turning point or mile marker or sorts. That’s where things really began to slide down the hill in regards to the quality of life of every day citizens of California.
It took a while to accept that if I wanted to continue to live the lifestyle I and my family had lived, we needed to go. We left a lot of family and friends behind, but stayed close enough to visit often. It took some time but I’ve come to appreciate and love this desert region, and I’m holding my breath that it doesn’t slide down the tubes like California…
The Sonoran Desert is a hot desert in North America and ecoregion that covers the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the southwestern United States (in Arizona and California). It is the hottest desert in both Mexico and the United States. It has an area of 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 sq mi).
Scirocco is a Mediterranean wind that comes from the Sahara and can reach hurricane speeds in North Africa and Southern Europe, especially during the summer season. The wind originates in the Arabian or Sahara deserts and mixes with cooler, wetter air of the maritime cyclone as it moves eastward across the Mediterranean Sea. Siroccos are most common during autumn and spring.