Author Archives: momdude

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About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
March 20, 2023 · 23:47

Close Call

(We’ll get back to the airshow pictures, I promise.)

I was going out into the back yard early this afternoon and I saw something on the Dodgers doormat outside the door. I got closer and realized it was a hummingbird.

I think that it was Little Bastard, the extremely territorial hummingbird that chases off all of the others that come to “his” feeder.

He body was shaking, vibrating, but that’s it. His wings or head weren’t moving at all.

I poked him very gingerly – nothing. Then he stopped shaking and was still.

He was on the ground right at the base of the sliding glass door, so my best guess is that he flew into the glass. I figured he was dead.

I’ve seen questions by people on Twitter who find birds that are stunned after flying into a window. The advice I’ve seen is to make them comfortable and warm someplace and hope that they’re just stunned. (Insert Monty Python’s parrot sketch here…)

I took a bunch of pictures of him in a bowl full of napkins. The colors are astonishing. I figured it would be the only chance I got to get this close to one of these delicate and beautiful creatures.

No movement at all. But for whatever reason it looked like there was an alertness in the eyes.

I decided to not bring him into the house – what if he recovered and started buzzing around inside the house? The comedy levels would have been awesome, but still…

So I put another napkin over the top, covering him fully, hopefully to keep him warm, but loosely enough so that if he recovered he could get out from under it. I left the bowl out on the patio table.

About 90 minutes later I was fixing lunch and needed bread from the outside freezer. I opened the door and was immediately buzzed by a hummingbird.

The attacker flew right back over to Little Bastard’s normal perch. Then he started clicking and barking at me with some vehemence.

I checked the bowl. Maybe it wasn’t Little Bastard. Maybe it was one of the other hummers. Maybe I was hallucinating.

The bowl was empty.

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Filed under Birds, Photography

March 19, 2023 · 23:35

Sixty-Seven

Today was my sixty-seventh birthday. 🎂🍾🎁🥳🦆 I celebrated by going off to the Point Mugu Airshow in Ventura County with some family members and friends.

NOT the sort of thing you want to be driving through on the way to an airshow! I had doubts that we would see any flying, but we persisted.

When we got there about 09:30, it was quite…moist.

The Navy Blue Angels were there. So were the Air Force Thunderbirds! It’s something like only the fourth or fifth time EVER that they’ve performed together at the same airshow.

Thus the urgency to get out there – it’s like if the Beatles and Rolling Stones were doing a double bill concert. You would stand in the rain for that, wouldn’t you?

Our local CAF SoCal Wing was there with static displays (the SNJ in yellow, the PT-19 on the right in grey, others not shown) and our PBJ bomber, F6 Hellcat fighter, and Zero fighter all flying.

A Harrier on static display.

The business end of an F-18 Hornet, both for going fast and for stopping faster.

One of the local F-18s that’s stationed with one of the Point Mugu squadrons.

An E-2 Hawkeye on static display.

Despite my doubts, the CAF SoCal planes, a biplane aerobatic routine, the Red Bull helicopter performance, a California Air National Guard C-130 demonstration, and most importantly, the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels all flew.

It was spectacular!

It was amazing!

It was wonderful!

It was REALLY FREAKIN’ LOUD! (Which is really freakin’ great!)

Followed by the current leader so far for worst traffic jam of the year. From the time that the Blue Angels finished their show until I got to my car was 25-30 minutes. From the time I got to my car until I got onto the road outside the base gates, another 90+ minutes. From the time I left the base until I got to the 101 Freeway (normally 10-15 minutes) another 30+ minutes. (Worth every second of it.)

My thanks to those who sent birthday wishes. I had a great time at the airshow and took a gazillion pictures and videos.

If you don’t care about seeing any of those airshow pictures, this might be a good time to mute this website for the next week to ten days. Just sayin’.

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Filed under Airshows, Paul, Photography

March 18, 2023 · 23:39

Green Redux

Yesterday I gave you a bunch of VERY green moss for St. Patrick’s day. While I was out there I noticed the new, spring growth on some of the other garden plants are a much different shade of green than the older leaves. I’ve got a suspicion that I’ve noticed this in previous years and posted about it then, but it’s late, I’m marginally brain dead tonight, and I’m just going to go with it.

Let’s all hope for clear skies and no rain tomorrow in SoCal, particularly in the Point Mugu area of Ventura County. (If you know, you know!)

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Filed under Flowers, Photography

March 17, 2023 · 23:48

Green

Not a surprising theme, given the date.

Yesterday I showed you some odd, bright red plants that are growing in my back yard and I mentioned that they might be some kind of moss. This more conventional (at least to me!) moss has always grown in the damp, shadowed areas of the garden, but right now we’ve had a TON of damp for months, so it’s doing really well.

The best part of these pictures was the way, after I had been kneeling on the sidewalk for a minute or two to get the close-up, the juncos and hummingbirds were totally confused and all flocked into the bushes and fruit trees right over my head to make a racket. I don’t know what they thought I was doing or what threat they thought I presented, but I swear I was innocent and (mostly) harmless!

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Filed under Birds, Flowers, Photography

March 16, 2023 · 23:15

Unusual Growth

To recap (it might help solve the puzzle):

  • We normally had a normal, green, suburban lawn.
  • We got hit with a three-year drought, the worst on record.
  • Water restrictions got put into place and about 99% of the grass died.
  • We’ve now had one of the wettest winters on record.
  • Some grass is growing back, but most of what is now covering the dirt is some clover-like green stuff, with heavily shaded areas getting covered in a dense, bright green carpet of moss

Are we caught up?

Today I spotted something odd growing out there. “Odd,” you say? Well, for starters, it’s bright red…

The whole area is maybe 8×11 inches, the size of a piece of paper. Red stems, red leaves.

It’s ground hugging, not sticking up at all (yet??), so probably not red yucca, which does grow in these parts.

I spent a couple hours tonight trying to google what it might be. I downloaded a couple of “plant identification” apps and they all came up with no matches.

Maybe it’s a moss of some sort? “Red moss” or “red rock moss” pictures look a bit like this. Sorta?

I’m open to suggestions.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much “The Last of Us,” but I’m half expecting to go out in the morning and find a junco or squirrel caught up in those red branches and stems and tendrils, slowly being digested…

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Filed under Critters, Flowers, Photography

March 15, 2023 · 23:48

Fog In The Canyon

This current storm was trying to leave this morning but had filled the canyon below us with fog.

Some think the fog is spooky or ominous. I understand the dangers while driving in the fog, or landing a plane, but I find it calm and quiet.

Through it all I could hear mourning doves crying in the trees. But the sounds of the traffic were muted, dim, distant.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

March 14, 2023 · 23:36

Stability

Going to be another long night if you live below one of the burn areas. Fortunately, we don’t. It’s just going to be wet. Still a lot of evacuations up in NorCal as they’re waiting to see if the hills slide.

Image: Wunderground

As I’ve noted, California is getting clobbered for weeks now with storm after storm. The snow pack in the Sierras is at over 225% of the average. There are levees breaking and flooding and mudslides all over, especially in the mountains.

Yet we need the water, desperately. This comes after four years of massive drought. The problem is that, while all of this rain and the snowmelt runoff will go a long way to refill the reservoirs, it would take years of this to replenish the groundwater. So the drought really isn’t over, just a little bit better.

And in the bigger picture, the thing that we’re losing in climate change is stability. We used to have variations from year to year of course, but now things are getting wackier by the day.

The Arctic ice pack is at near record lows and over time is going down every year. The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting. The jet stream and the ocean currents like the Gulf Stream are shifting and showing signs of breaking down. Which will in turn bring hot, tropical air up near the poles and “polar vortex” cold air down to the mid-latitudes. Which in turn can melt the Arctic ice faster, and the permafrost, which releases methane. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas, so that feeds temperature increases, which melts more ice and permafrost, which destabilizes more weather systems that we’ve relied on for millenia, which in turn…

Can you say, “positive feedback loop?” Sure, I knew you could.

The big question is whether we’ve actually stumbled past a point of no return, a tipping point. That might have happened without us even knowing it and from here there’s no way to reverse the trends in time.

Other systems in our lives have similar issues. How do we know when things are irreparably broken and how do we know when to keep fighting to fix them?

I’m stubborn (otherwise known as “too stupid to know when to quit”) most of the time so I’ll keep fighting, but things are looking unpleasant for the future. Let’s hope there’s enough of us clever monkey descendants to fix what we’ve broken.

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Filed under Weather

March 13, 2023 · 23:37

Random Old Photos – March 13th

Ten years ago.

I was stuck someplace I didn’t want to be (Coalinga), trapped (car had died at the beginning of a holiday weekend), trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying not to do anything stupid that would make it worse.

This gopher was my entertainment, minding his own business in a local park.

Plus c’est la même chose, as the kids say.

Happy Monday!

 

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Filed under Critters, Photography

March 12, 2023 · 23:44

Titles Are Hard

I don’t know what to call this – I’m out of clever, it’s been a weekend, my brain is fried. I’m in Monday-adjacent mode.

Around 17:00 this afternoon (PDT – have I mentioned how much I despise Daylight Savings Time? Hint: I have.) I was out in the front, looking for F-18 fighters. I found them, they came right over our house, loud and high, probably at 20,000 feet or more, after they buzzed the Oscars opening down in Hollywood.

I noticed that big chunks of the lawn has been taken over by these little yellow flowers. Remember them? There was one right next to the driveway and my car’s tires all last summer through the worst of the drought.

Now with all of the rain, there’s a little grass coming back, but tons of these little guys.

There was one solitary bee out there, going from flower to flower to flower, just staying a few seconds at each. I watched for a while to make sure it didn’t miss any. It didn’t, except for one. But after it got to the edge of the field, it hovered for a second, then came back to find it. It hit the one it had missed, then flew off toward a neighbor’s yard.

Go get ’em, Mister Bee!

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March 11, 2023 · 23:45

Scud Running

If you’re a pilot, you’ll be familiar with the term “scud running.” In more formal terms, it means trying to squeeze between low clouds (scud) and the ground or minimum altitude restrictions. (That “hard deck” they’re always talking about in “Top Gun?” It’s that.) One’s often flying under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) where you’re not necessarily talking to Air Traffic Control (ATC). One might not be rated for Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). One might not want to be bothered with all of the paperwork and control and planning involved in IFR flight and want to stay in the “easier” VFR flight rules.

In more snarky terms, it means “maintaining visual contact with the ground while avoiding physical contact with it.” To be legal in most controlled airspace you need to be 500 feet away from the clouds and 1,200 feet above the ground (depending on what airspace you’re in) with three miles of visibility. But if you can get into Class G (uncontrolled) airspace it’s 500 feet from the clouds and one mile of visibility. So if you get down low and can squeeze between those hills and mountains and the ground and that lowering cloud deck…

This is dangerous. Often VERY dangerous. Legal? Probably. Sometimes. Maybe. -ish.

Lots of things can go very wrong very fast. There are more and more things like cell towers, power lines, wind turbine towers, and buildings out there to make something very hard and very bad to fly into. At such a low altitude, if anything goes wrong (like engine problems) you have very little room for error or maneuvering. Scud is often found near the edges of thunderstorms and that can mean downdrafts that just reach out and slap you out of the sky. The clouds can close in and leave you in IFR conditions, blind, close to the ground, and in a world of hurt.

Got the picture?

The same thing happens in life. You take a “small” chance and get away with it. You know better, but it’s convenient and you just need to bend the rules a little bit, not really break them. Then the next time it’s easier to do it again. And the next time you bend the rules just a little bit more. You keep getting away with it. Again, and again, and…

…and then things go pear-shaped and sideways and you’re seriously up the creek.

I think this is basically the overall story arc of “Breaking Bad.”

Admire the scud in the sunset. Avoid the scud running in a plane or in everyday life.

Just something to think about.

 

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Filed under Flying, Photography, Sunsets, Weather