I woke up to the winds howling.
Out in front, it was a rough night for the flag.
We’ve seen this before. It has in the past been symbolic to me of what’s happening to our yard/city/county/region/state/nation/planet.
Looking around at today’s news, I think I’ll leave it for now. Maybe next week. After Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Depending on the news.
Filed under Photography, Video, Weather
I had to swing by the office this morning to do a quick drop off and pick up of documents. (Only so much you can do remotely.) As I left, the light was just perfect outside to have a gazillion water droplets shining like gems on the decorative tall grass that grows there.
Click on the pictures to see them full-sized! In the thumbnail it looks like a white powder, but full-sized you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I’m sure it isn’t dew, technically. It’s way too dry here, although there have been some coastal clouds and it’s been cooler the last few days.
No, this will be the work of the sprinklers.
The source of the moisture or the method of application don’t matter, however. Physics is physics.
Long, thin, wispy grasses mixed with misty water result in droplets hanging everywhere.
Add a little bit of indirect light and some shadows and you’ve got one of those little pleasures in life that I’ve been talking about!
Filed under Photography
A friend from high school sometimes referred to certain “odd” classmates as “easily amused.” It seemed appropriate at the time.
On the other hand, especially as I’ve gotten into my later decades, I’ve developed a major appreciation for the ability to maintain a childlike sense of wonder, particularly in regards to some of the simple things in life.
Today I had an experience that I initially thought was full of childlike sense of wonder, but my brain shouted at me that I was just easily amused, and it occurred to me that the difference between the two states might be an extremely fine line, indeed.
The subject in question was water temperature. Specifically, water temperature gradients in an insulated sports bottle.
Here’s a quick, crappy picture of said insulated sports bottle:
(This is my Angels bottle – don’t worry, OF COURSE I have a Chiefs bottle! But this is the one that amused/amazed me today.)
So, fill it with ice and water (or any other fluid) and it will keep it nice and cold for hours. Ditto for hot chocolate or soup, they’ll stay hot for hours. Thermos bottles have been around since I was a kid, had one in my lunch box in first grade way back before most of you were born. It works as expected and designed.
Let it sit for a day or two and forget that you put ice and cold water in it and you’ll have 18 ounces of room temperature water. As expected.
But somewhere in the middle there…
I’ve noticed a number of times that there’s a middle ground where if one picks it up without undue jostling, pops the top, turns it over and chugs it, you can very distinctly taste the room temperature water first, then getting several degrees colder, and then by the end getting much colder water.
On the one hand, that’s what I would expect as well in a “big picture” sense. Fundamental fluid dynamics says hot fluids or gasses will rise, cold ones sink. So it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the top water in the bottle, which I drink first when I turn it over, is warmer, and the bottom water, which gets drunk last, is cooler.
What DOES surprise me is that the temperature difference is so distinctly noticeable. It’s not a subtle difference. Secondly, I’m surprised that the water stays differentiated by temperature even as the bottle is picked up, opened, and upended. I would think that there would be enough disturbance there to mix the water and destroy the effect.
Yet the effect is there – I notice it all the time.
So – childlike curiosity and wonder at the simple facts of our bizarre existence on this dust mote in the infinite cosmos? Or, “You’re easily amused!”
Filed under Curiosities, Deep Thoughts, Photography
The scene of the mystery:
Otherwise known as, “It was one of those days when I was going to commit a homicide if I didn’t get up from my desk and see the outside world for ten minutes and as long as I’m doing that why not go get on a rickety 10-foot ladder in the back yard to take a picture of the scene I was describing yesterday?”
Off to the left is the steep hill. Throughout are many of the pine trees which are used as home for the evil Kong-stealing squirrel. (“Alleged” evil Kong-stealing squirrel – I don’t want to hear from their lawyer.) On the right is the chain link fence that the neighboring octogenarian would have to hurdle if she was to invade the yard to cover her tracks and plant the red herring incriminating the squirrels.
This is also where we’ve seen the owl. I could really use him to pick off that squirrel and end this whole, sordid affair once and for all.
Filed under Castle Willett, Photography
It’s been a really, REALLY busy time at work (budgeting, Board meetings coming up, quarterly closings, all of those other joys of running an eight-figure accounting department) so in the interest of brevity, a few days ago I posted a “no context for you” picture and teased that there was a mystery because of something that wasn’t there.
(By the way, yesterday was my work-anniversary, one year with the ALS Golden West Chapter. For those who might conceivably be interested, while it’s almost always “really, REALLY busy” and that comes along with some “aggressive” deadlines and an “interesting” workload, I’m truly enjoying working there. I’m part of a wonderful team, we get an amazing amount of work done to help people who need it as well as funding research, my boss is the best I’ve ever worked for, and I’m very glad to be there.)
Then, the next day, I posted some pictures with a hint that it might be related to the mystery.
So here’s the mystery.
Two Sundays ago, after doing the usual “get groceries and pick up breakfast” routine, I noticed something out in the back yard. I was looking out the kitchen window as I am wont to do (it’s a nice view!) and there was something out there that hadn’t been there on Saturday. In fact, I was trying to figure out if I remembered seeing it earlier on Sunday morning, and I couldn’t remember seeing it. So, what was it and where did it come from?
First thought was that it might be a dead critter – god knows we get enough of them around alive, some of them might meet their fate out there. But it wasn’t.
Upon seeing it up close, I wondered if it might be something left by the gardeners, who are fighting an infestation of gophers that are ripping up the yard.
Did they fill something with bait or poison and drop it down the hole and the gophers just kicked it back up? Probably not, since this was a little big for that.
It’s bigger than a baseball, but smaller than a softball. It’s very hard rubber or some kind of synthetic material. There’s a hole going through it, and there was something plugging the hole in the center.
The stuff inside looked like a piece of granola bar or candy. Which made me think that this might be a dog toy or something.
While that might make sense as to its nature, how it got here was a mystery. The neighbor on one side has a little yapper dog, but everyone in that household is elderly and we almost never see them out, let alone out playing with the dog. I didn’t see this coming over the fence by accident from that direction.
Down the hill is a younger couple with a big, younger dog so it might be theirs, but again, how did it get up here? It’s a very steep hillside, multiple fences, covered with pine trees and debris (and I don’t even want to think about how many rattlesnakes), a good 60 to 70 yards from their yard up to ours. In my youth I might have been able to chuck this thing up that hill, but only after multiple deliberate tries. It wouldn’t be getting up here by accident.
My thought at the time, which I didn’t think to try to verify at the time, was that it might be a “Kong” dog toy, designed to have a dog treat stuffed into the middle and being semi-indestructible so that big dogs can go nuts on it to get the treat out and not destroy the toy. In processing this last picture for this post, I noticed the writing on the ball. If you flip it and enhance (think of me as Harrison Ford in “Blade Runner…”):
Yep, it’s a Kong ball. But how did it get here?
With all of that in mind, look at that “no context for you” mystery picture, taken on Monday morning, the next day:
The gopher holes are still there, as is the grass. The Kong ball is gone.
No one had been out in the back yard to my knowledge. The backyard gates were all locked. I had just left the ball there. So where had it gone?
First thoughts were that it might have actually been one of the neighbors, either climbing that steep hill while climbing over those fences (and then going back down) or else the octogenarians were climbing over the bushes and chain link fence on the side and retrieving it for the little yapper dog. Both were unlikely at best – why wouldn’t they just knock and ask for their dog toy back if somehow it landed here by mistake?
None of it made sense.
Then, a couple of days later, The Long-Suffering Wife reported that she had seen something weird in the back yard. A big squirrel had been other there, carrying some sort of big black ball around in its mouth. It had run across the lawn and headed down into the trees.
I think we have our suspect!
I’ll bet that there’s a thief squirrel in the neighborhood who grabbed that Kong ball out of someone’s back yard and carried it up to ours. It might be from the folks down the hill from us, but there are plenty of other folks with dogs around. It could have come from any of them within a block or so. The squirrel giveth on Sunday, and the squirrel taketh away Monday morning. But it’s still working on that treat, not going to be happy until it gets it all, and that may take a few days.
I don’t know if that’s a “mystery solved,” but it’s plausible enough so that I’m not going to be losing any more sleep about it!
Filed under ALSA Golden West, Critters, Photography
Brain cells at minimum power, one of those days when I feel like I left about 99% of it on the field…
…I’ll have to try harder tomorrow, I guess.
Filed under Art, Photography
We know what THIS means!
The good news was that the nurse left that sweet little flap of folded over material on the end at the left there. This stuff sticks to itself so well and sometimes you get someone who cuts it off, lays it flat, and has that end piece around on the outside of the elbow where you can’t see it and need to be a triple-jointed contortionist to reach it. Tonight, after my obligatory two to three hours and extra two glasses of water, easy peasy!
Now to get all of my little cells working on creating new hemoglobin!
Filed under Health, Photography
Not the election.
Not COVID, although it’s probably related.
Not an incoming asteroid to destroy all life.
Nope, the great crisis before us is…
There are no Diet Cokes in our store for three weeks in a row.
There was some rumor that this might be coming, and there have been shortages of other soda brands. But I’m selfish and self-centered (isn’t that repetitious?) and I don’t care about them.
Now it affects ***ME***!
Because there had been rumors I had stocked up, so I’m not in actual desperation mode for another four weeks or so. And this week they at least had some in the big, two-liter bottles (I prefer it in cans) so it seems to be an issue with the availability of aluminum cans, not the soda itself.
But I’m a little fragile and worn thin at this point with *waves hands vaguely at everything* and if this situation craters it most certainly has the potential to be the straw that breaks my back.
The camel’s on his own.
Filed under Disasters, Photography
Something (or someone, depending on how anthropomorphic you want to be) left a mess out at the edge of the back yard.
There’s a chair that I leave there, right on the other side of the sidewalk from where yesterday’s picture was taken, and on the next day there was a pile of debris there.
Not that a pile like this is necessarily unexpected given the critters that live about, but it is notable in that it’s the first time I’ve seen it in the 2+ years we’ve lived here. So, something new is happening, and that could be a clue to the week’s mystery.
Lots of pine trees here, and lots of pine cone detritus on the sidewalk. Who could our new suspect be?
Filed under Critters, Photography
But with some context to follow over the next couple of days?
Where’s the mystery? I assure you, there is one here.
Or rather, there’s one not here.
Filed under Castle Willett, Photography
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 
