Furious Truckstop Waitresses

Back on July 20th, I attended my first Tucson Roller Derby bout.  It was pretty cool -- serious competition.  The Tucson Furious Truckstop Waitresses (FTW) played Phoenix's Surly Girlies.  Then Tucson's VICE team had a bout with Phoenix's Bad News Beaters.

I enjoyed the challenge of trying to take some pictures of the action -- actually pretty challenging since the well-lit to the human eye arena was actually pretty dim to my flash-less camera, especially for capturing action shots.  Most of these photos were taken at ISO 6400.  Besides liking the competition itself, I like the challenge of taking photos under these conditions so I plan to return to enjoy a few bouts and work on my photo technique challenges as well -- good times.

The Tucson Roller Derby has a great venue in a warehouse just across from the Tucson International Airport.  They had food trucks outside and good seating inside.  For more information on the Tucson Roller Derby, check out their website or Facebook page.  Definitely worth checking out a bout sometime for a nice change of pace.  Here's a great promo video from Youtube.

Night blooming Echinopsis on the patio last night

The night blooming Echinopsis cactus (Easter Lily cactus) on my back patio really outdid itself last night.  About a week ago it had started expanding 12 stalks (above) which had been stalled for about two weeks.

Last night at about 6:30 PM it was clear that all twelve were primed and ready to bloom that night:

I checked on them at about 10:00 PM and found 12 fresh Echinopsis flowers, very nice!  

 Each stem is about 8 inches long from the base to the top of the flower.

PorchFest Armory Park (June 30th, 2013)

 A friend and I went down to PorchFest Armory Park Sunday evening and really enjoyed it.  This was the first (of hopefully many) PorchFest events here.

Nineteen musical acts played on 12 neighborhood porches.  Residents offered up their porches to musicians and folks just walked/biked between houses, perhaps stopping at a food truck or ice cream vendor along the way.  It was a really nice evening, great people, great music, and great weather since a summer monsoon rain had cooled the temperature down just before things got started and provided refreshing breezes throughout the evening.  I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.

The home of KXCI Community Radio, also one of the performance venues of the night.