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
October 2, 2022 · 23:30

Meet Gandalf

It started after I had brought in the groceries. Carrying bags in I had cut straight across the grass, but then I had to come back out and move the car a bit. (Not my best parking job – I blame the COVID vaccine. Because I can.) After that I was going to walk to the front door on the sidewalk, but found my way blocked.

I don’t know if it’s one of the new batch of “nature’s popcorn” from the back yard. It’s the right size, but god knows there’s enough of them around so the front yard lizards and the back yard lizards might have totally different populations.

Most of them scatter if I get within ten feet, but this one wasn’t budging, even when I got within five feet or so and pointed out that it was extremely exposed should the raven up on the telephone pole spot it.

Even when I knelt down to get a better shot and wasn’t more than two or three feet away he wasn’t budging. He had his warm spot in the sun and that was that. I thought that he might actually be deceased, but his head kept swinging back and forth to keep an eye on me. THEN he started doing those “lizard push-ups,” which I understand to be a territorial display. Okay, duly noted!

I talked to him for a minute or two. I told him I admired his attitude and hoped to keep him in mind as a role model as Monday rolled around tomorrow.

Then I stood, walked back around the car and went to the front door via the lawn, leaving him still sunning himself and blocking the sidewalk, exerting his dominance.

Of course his name must be Gandalf. Which, I guess, makes me the Balrog.

Fair.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

October 1, 2022 · 22:31

Side Effects

When last we left our plucky hero, he had chosen to get both the flu vaccine and the latest bivalent COVID vaccine at the same time and at least for the first few hours there were minimal side effects…

Okay, maybe not THAT bad, but the thought to use this occurred to me at about 02:15 when some side effects were kicking my ass, and it seemed funny enough then. Things have been slightly foggy since, so it might be as close as I get tonight to an original or coherent thought.

From 02:15 until about 09:00 I was up every hour with MASSIVE chills. Like, teeth chattering so hard that I thought that I was going to chip a tooth. Meanwhile, on the outside it felt like I was on fire with fever.

Yet, on the couple of times that I was semi-coherent enough to think at all, when I checked my temperature it was fine, never even hitting 99°. And the house wasn’t particularly cold, with the living room thermostat showing about 76°. Yet I was going to pull a muscle I was shivering so hard

Whatever it was, it was over by 09:00 or so. Since then I’ve been a bit foggy and tired, but not like I couldn’t think at all or couldn’t stay awake. Right now a handful of short naps have helped and I’m really hoping for a better night’s sleep tonight, but all in all, it hasn’t been that bad. And, obviously, even with the few hours of last night’s issues, it’s been many, many orders of magnitude better and easier than getting COVID, the flu, or both.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Make good decisions.

Welcome to October! We’re almost holidays adjacent!

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Health

September 30, 2022 · 23:16

September In The Rear View Mirror

After trying for a while to find the new bivalent COVID vaccine booster, suddenly our local hospital had appointments up the yazoo. It’s also flu season, and while I’ve heard from a number of friends that getting both at the same time will kick your ass, we didn’t have any plans for the weekend, so when we went in we decided to roll the dice.

The flu shot side.

The COVID booster side.

So far, so good! Tired and a touch of a headache, but that just means it’s a day that ends in “y.” The injection sites are sore, the flu side much more than the COVID side, but it’s far from debilitating. Minimal body aches, no fever, no chills…

Knock on wood, and we’ll most certainly see what tomorrow brings, but the first signs are hopeful. And, of course, even if it gets worse, it’s still orders and orders of magnitude better than either getting the flu or getting COVID.

Stay healthy, stay safe, stay cool out there!

 

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Health, Photography

September 29, 2022 · 23:02

Pillars Of Sunlight

A different job, a different life in many ways. It was way, WAY too early on a day that was going to be way, WAY too long.

But at least at the beginning, there was this bit of beauty and spectacle.

It’s always there if you look for it.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

September 28, 2022 · 23:49

Keep Color In Your Life

One thing I noticed in watching all of the news coverage of Hurricane Ian slamming into Florida as a Category 4 storm was the lack of color in most of the scenes. The clouds and rain are white and gray and the lack of sunshine makes everything that does have color seem washed out and pale. The sea not only turns angry and threatening, but it turns gray and black with the whitecaps showing up as the winds explode.

Colorful signs and storefronts and home turn to debris, brown, gray, black, with occasional splotches of color which are quickly spun away and scattered by the storm, to be sunken into the brown and black storm surge.

I think that’s a good analogy for the way our lives are going right now. We want life to be colorful, filled with blue skies, green fields, yellow sunshine, white clouds, multicolored flowers. Instead, some days so many things feel like a hurricane going through our lives, leaving everything broken and reduced to various shades of white, black, gray, and brown.

Keep the color in your life. Fight for it. Cling to it. Share it with others. And if everything’s gray and black and white and brown for you, ask others if they can share some of theirs.

 

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Filed under Art, Deep Thoughts, Photography, Weather

September 27, 2022 · 23:53

No Context For You – September 27th

How can we possibly be at the end of September?

Time seems more fluid, more flexible, more fungible than ever before. I don’t know if that’s a product of my age or this age, whether I’m changing or the world is.

Or all of the above.

But I’m not sure I’m that happy with it. Perhaps if I were more able to see how things were getting “better,” as opposed to “different.”

In the end it all comes down to figuring out what you want, how to get from here to there, and then doing the work to get there.

Tomorrow’s another day. At least we’re not in Florida. Or Cuba. And if you are, be safe.

 

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Filed under Photography, Random Blatherationings

September 26, 2022 · 23:02

Sunset Again

It’s a few days past the autumn solstice and we had just enough clouds and atmospheric smoke and dust to make the sunset interesting.

Meanwhile, the incoming Hurricane Ian that’s about to hit Florida made my day “interesting.”

Our payroll provider is in the Tampa Bay area. Our payroll would normally be processed Wednesday & Thursday.

So we played “52 pickup” with my work schedule for the week.

Happy Monday!

At least the clouds were pretty for ten minutes.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets

September 25, 2022 · 23:57

Vandenberg Video

This was a shot in the dark. There were so many unknowns. Where would the rocket be rising over the mountains? How loud would it be? How fast would it move? How big would it be? Which direction would it be going?

I had some good guesses for some of those. If you look at the video, my eyeballing of the map and directions said “over that white barn with the brown roof out there.” It actually came up directly over that telephone pole to the left of the white barn.

I had my iPhone set as wide as possible in order to increase the odds of catching the rocket – but that also means that when it did, the rocket was just a dot. If I had been actively controlling the video recording, I could have done much better, zoomed in, etc. Next time.

It was windy out there. You’ll hear a LOT of wind noise, and I don’t know if anyone makes a wind sock to slip over the bottom (i.e., the microphone end) of an iPhone 13. Probably should Google that, they probably do. Or I should probably make one, patent it, and get rich.

Lessons learned.

If you can zoom in to see portions of the video, do so. You can actually see the rocket pretty well since this is a high-definition video. I’ve also got some reasonably fancy video software that I’ve never used that says it can do that and give me a video output of that – we’ll see how my learning curve goes. But not tonight.

Through the wind noise, in the background you can hear the launch comms (the guys in the foreground had a radio) and you’ll hear “Engine start,” then “Liftoff,” then at 0:24 you’ll hear people say “There it is!”

At about 0:37 you can start to see the rocket as a glint, heading straight up from that telephone pole toward the sun, and at about 0:47 you start to hear the roar of the engines.

At about 1:18 you see a vapor condensation trail start to appear just to the right of the sun and you can really start to hear the “ripping” sound from the engines.

At 1:48 the vapor trail stops but you can still see the dot of light from the engines as the rocket starts to pitch over to the left, headed south over the Pacific Ocean.

I gave the camera a nudge to the left to keep tracking it at about 2:00, and you can follow that dot all the way to the left edge of the frame, about the time you hear a helicopter go by at 2:39.

The vapor trail starts to drift, down at the bottom you see a cloud of exhaust start to rise from the pad, over the hill, and there’s a ton of wind noise as the video wraps up.

A lot of room for improvement, but it doesn’t suck for a shot in the dark.

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Filed under Space, Video

September 24, 2022 · 23:57

The Final Delta IV Heavy From Vandenberg

There are stories to be told, maybe, but if so, later. Today was a full day, and a day full of ADVENTURE! The good kind.

Tonight, just the pictures. I’ve had enough time to see what I have and what I missed and clean it all up a bit.

In short, I made it up to Lompoc, about 135 miles north of where I in western Los Angeles County.

The second I opened the window to take this picture, a large, weird bug flew into my ear.

To orient us, the launch site was at Space Launch Complex #6 (Slick-6) as marked on the left side, right near the coast. I was where the blue dot was in the middle right, just barely outside Lompoc city limits. The “heart” pins indicate places where I had flagged from online articles as good places for Vandenberg launch viewing. I was headed for one of the two on Ocean Avenue to the west of where I stopped, but the police had the road closed before I got to either.

I was guessing that we were about eight miles from the launch site. Whatever! This was a new experience, a chance to learn how to do this more in the future. I got settled.

Next to us was a guy working on his field. I have no idea if he loves rockets or hates the crowds. In the background you can see some of the fairly large crowd parked aside the road between his fields.

There was what I perceived to be a large crowd, even if it wasn’t gargantuan. (Try getting out of the Rose Bowl after an N’Sync concert!) Folks were lining all of the roads all the way back into town and beyond, plus any open side road.

There were turkey vultures flying overhead.

There were turkeys taking selfies. Off on the horizon on the left, my best guess by eyeballing the map said that the rocket would come up over one of those two peaks behind that barn.

I was right. (For all of these rocket photos, I haven’t cropped them. They’re all shot with a 300mm telephoto lens – click on the photos to blow them up to full sized, there’s actually some decent detail in the rockets and plumes!)

The rocket cleared the hills about 18 seconds after liftoff. We had plenty of folks with radios who were listening to ULA Launch Control, so we knew when it lifted off.

Remember my guess of eight miles to the pad? That was pretty close, it was just over 40 seconds before we started hearing the engines.

From our vantage point, the rocket seemed to go right next to the sun, which was a rude surpose to those of us (i.e., me) who were looking at it through a telephoto lens.

For a brief time around then there was a really nice condensation trail, which made it much easier to follow.

Here’s a wider angle view from a video screen capture. I’ll have to play with the video to see if there’s anything else that’s salvagable.

Back at SLC-6.

And then there was traffic. And other adventures to tell about later. And maybe video.

Was it worth the three hour drive each way?

HELL, YES!

 

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Filed under Photography, Space, Travel

September 23, 2022 · 23:55

Nature’s Popcorn Dritter Teil

Yesterday, after I saw the tiny dude from the previous post, I went walking around the back yard and spotted another tiny dude.

This guy was not nearly as calm as the first one, skittering and running like hell when I was still twenty feet or more away.

He got off of the grass and onto the dirt very quickly, letting his natural camaflouge work for him.

If I hadn’t seen him skitter over there, I’m not sure I would have noticed him as I walked by if he didn’t move.

He only waited a few seconds before moving to make his escape over the edge and down the hill, even though I had frozen.

Not sure why he thought I was such a threat. I think it has something to do with the “popcorn” title and the idea that everything and everyone is trying to eat you.

And there he goes, just the tip of his tail left! Total time of the encounter, from first picture to last? Twenty-eight seconds.

Tomorrow, with luck, an adventure!

As many times as I’ve talked about going up the coast about 150 miles to Vandenberg to see a launch, it’s never quite worked out. But tomorrow, the final Delta IV Heavy launches from the west coast (there are two more scheduled from Florida before the rocket is discontinued and replaced with the Vulcan rocket) and my schedule is otherwise clear. No super critical work deadlines, no more Wing activities for the CAF, no travel, no Chiefs game – “no obligations.”

So, footloose & fancy free, I plan to wander up the coast to Lompoc, see if I can find a wide spot off of the road near the base entrance or on the beach if it’s open and not foggy, and watch a really freakin’ big rocket take off.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

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Filed under Critters, Photography, Space, Travel