March is a beautiful month in Arizona, especially when we get a lot of spring rains.


                     
This is the Circle Mountain neighborhood, as seen from one of the nearby hills.

I stopped off yesterday to take this picture, on the way home from a noon meeting. I'm not at a noon meeting now, because Silas has Ethel's car (taking Maia to the groomer to get a haircut) so Ethel has my car, and when I tried to crank up the motorcycle, the battery was dead.

That's not entirely true - when I first cranked up the motorcycle, it cranked, but it was running cold, and when I tried to rev up the engine, it died - and then it wouldn't crank again; not enough battery.

So I'm not at a noon meeting, on this gorgeous spring day - I'm sitting here working through lunch. That's not entirely a bad thing - there's plenty of work that I can do. And it's not like I'm needed at that noon meeting. I'm starting to get the idea that I am SUCH a dinosaur that even the dinosaurs don't understand me.

Yesterday an oldtimer explained that he doesn't pray for patience, because he finds that uncomfortable circumstances happen when he does that. I pointed out that the Big Book does, indeed, say that we are to ask in our morning meditation that our Creator shows us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love.

He spoke again (not normal in this meeting) to point out that he'd been sober for 35 years, and that the people who told him to do it that way are still sober (back in New York, I believe) and that's the way that he does it. The fact that the Big Book says that we ARE to ask for patience doesn't matter to him - he has his own way of doing things.

I'm not a newbie by any means; but I reckon that I'm one of those guys who is busy trying to find his way to a better way - closer to the Big Book's instructions - than I am currently; this guy obviously thinks "that's what they told me when I got here, I'm sticking with that".

There's a definition question: Does that make me more liberal than he is (since I will toss out what folks told me when I got here in favor of what I later learned in the Big Book), or more conservative than he is (since the Big Book existed before I got here, and before the folks whom I listened to got here)? The idea that I might be less conservative than somebody else - about anything at all - bothers me. I'm an emotional conservative.

But the sun is still shining out there, and I'm not riding on my motorcycle. We were planning on heading back up to Purgatory tonight, but now it looks like that will have to wait until tomorrow, as there's just too much to get done right now.

There's also still a hole in the backyard - unchanged since December - and still no fence around the yard - unchanged since creation. Permits are holding up the fencing and pool construction. Progress has ground to a halt. I actually had the first half of a solar-powered pool heater installed back in December so that, when the pool got built, we would be able to warm up the water fast enough to start swimming in March. However, it turns out that we won't be able to start swimming in March unless we can warm it up faster than the speed of light, causing time to flow backwards.