Birthplace of Hostile Lookout

  This is the birthplace of Hostile Lookout, Apartment A at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.  As mentioned in a previous post, I lived here for nearly 18 months when I first started working for BTA and my family was in Pine, Arizona waiting for our house to sell.    If the clouds, planets, and Arizona Diamondbacks were properly aligned you could almost pick up one television station, and the only radio available was talk radio and sports radio.  Not being inclined to listen to faceless voices getting grotesquely overpaid to spew hatefulness regarding subjects they knew nothing about, I listened to A LOT of Arizona Diamondbacks and Phoenix Suns games.
  The building, built who knows when, probably somewhere around the time of Prohibition, was actually a triplex.  A co-worker, Pete, lived in Apartment B, and Kenny B, a volunteer lived in The Dorm.  At the time, I was leading music occassionally for our church in Pine, so when I wasn't writing, I was playing guitar.  Kenny B played bongos, so I would go over to the dorm and practice the next Sunday's playlist with Kenny accompanying on the bongos.
  Kenny was an interesting guy.  I think he still lived in the '60s.  He was prone to bad language and torn clothing, but had a very big heart.  He also had some sort of disease in which his muscles were slowly wasting away. 
  We had a rock squirrel, or something, that lived in the attic of the triplex, and one day Kenny declared war against the squirrel.  The problem was that the squirrel would race around the attic at night, when we were all trying to sleep, and even though the squirrel only weighed a few pounds, it sounded like an elephant running around up there.  Kenny was convinced that the squirrel was getting in and out through a hole under the porch steps of my front door.  So one day Kenny filled the hole with gravel.  Of course, the squirrel dug through the gravel.  The next day Kenny placed as large of rocks as he could fit under my porch into the hole, and then filled the rest of the space with gravel.  Amazingly the squirrel still managed to find space between the boulders to get in and out.  Kenny then built a small brick wall under the steps, and back filled with boulders and gravel.  Well, the brick wall did it. Although, we don't know if the squirrel got trapped in or out of the attic, but we did know the herd of elephants stopped waking us up at night.
  We had all kinds of creatures that lived around the triplex.  Rattlesnakes, gila monsters, red racers, scorpions, and terantulas were all relatively frequent visitors to the triplex.  Pete once had a terantula walk into his apartment when he left the door open one evening, and one night I found two rattlesnakes mating in the space between the propane tank and the prickly pear cactus.
  When I stayed in Apartment A a couple weeks ago, some wonderful improvements had been made.  It was now carpeted and had a cover over the ceiling light, rather than the bare wires and light bulb I had enjoyed living with.  The apartment had received a fresh coat of paint and the outside water heater had received a new out-building to enclose it.
  I get Asclepias back from the editor this afternoon.  It should be available next month!