Yet another kingdom heard from!
The birds don’t give two thoughts to COVID-19.
The bees don’t give two thoughts to COVID-19.
The bunnies don’t give two thoughts to COVID-19
The lizards don’t give two thoughts to COVID-19.
I’m pretty sure the roses don’t give two thoughts to COVID-19.
We’re on our own here, folks. The planet will be just fine without us.
Perhaps we should clean up our act and prove that we’re smart enough to stick around. (I have suggestions.)
Stay home. Wash your hands.
Filed under CoronaVirus, Flowers, Photography
It’s been noted before, but whatever that purple flowering bush thing is around the mailbox, the bees are loving it.
All things being equal, we love seeing the bees buzzing around.
It wasn’t like there was a hive or a swarm surrounding a queen, although we’re starting to see complaints on the local FaceBook group about people finding them in their trees or underneath their eaves.
We’ve got some bigger critters that are nesting again – maybe I’ll pull those photos tomorrow.
For now, there are plenty of these guys who are perfectly happy to ignore me when I get the mail so long as I don’t do anything other than taking pictures.
Let’s hope we get that sort of tranquility soon.
I hope you’re all feeling well still and stay that way. Wash your hands. Stay home.
Filed under Critters, Photography
It’s been a while. Let’s look at a lizard.
I haven’t seen a lot of lizards at the house in several months. It’s been cool and cloudy more often than not. However, this big boy was spotted right outside the hangar doors at the CAF site on Saturday when I was there to pick up the mail.
I know that these guys are out in the area (hell, they’re EVERYWHERE out here) but they usually are pretty shy and skittish if there are any folks anywhere nearby so I’ve never actually seen them anywhere near the hangar. It’s only now with the place about 99.9% shut down that I stumbled on him.
On the other hand, he wasn’t shy about standing his ground. I only saw his head moving a bit to track me as I walked around. I kept waiting for him to bolt – he never did!
Since I was just doing an in-and-out visit and he had found a perfectly sunny spot to warm up, I bid him a fair adieu.
Filed under CAF, Critters, Photography
I am, of course, following the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission tonight. It’s fifty years ago that the explosion occurred while they were about half way to the moon, turning what had started to become a “routine” flight to the moon (c’mon, really??!!) into the world’s most “successful failure.”
All of the Apollo missions can be re-lived at apolloinrealtime.org – it’s an astonishing project. For this mission, go to apolloinrealtime.org/13 and click on the “sync to today’s clock” clock icon in the middle left – you’ll follow along in real time with pictures, video, all of the ground to space audio, all of the audio from dozens of ground controllers as they tried to troubleshoot the problems. Or you can use one of the slider bars on top to go to any particular point in the mission and follow along.
It was a major catastrophe that hit pretty much out of nowhere. In seconds they went from bored to dozens of life and death decisions per minute. One mistake and the crew would be lost and our space program would have gone in a much different direction.
I’m amazed by the teamwork shown in listening to the “background” loops as the different systems engineers worked together to make sure that they could shut down the damaged Command Module and do an emergency power up of the Lunar Module to use it as a “lifeboat” to get the crew home. It’s amazing, a thing of joy.
And that got me thinking about the crisis we find ourselves in.
It might not have sprung out of nowhere to hit us in seconds – we had months to see the problem start, grow, spread, and finally reach us. But more importantly, our situation doesn’t involve three lives – it could easily end up with 300,000 lives just in this country, and in a worst case scenario where the virus spreads unchecked through places like India and Africa, it could easily cost 3,000,000 lives worldwide in the next year.
And listening to that 1970 NASA team spring into action and troubleshoot that situation and solve one problem after another, step by step, truly highlights the deplorable response to our current crisis. As if the normal, daily, background incompetence and buffoonery wasn’t bad enough, today we got the Mango Mussolini totally melting down at his daily press conference and apparently declaring himself to be a god? Supreme grand high poobah? Chief cook and bottle washer?
Oh, right, “megalomaniac dictator” is the term I was looking for. He’s not even trying to hide it any more.
Good thing that the GOP “leadership” is going to step up and use their clearly defined powers under the Constitution to act as a brake on his lunacy…
So, when we talk about how great we are as Americans, how we “put a man on the moon,” how we’re the folks that can solve any problem, beat any enemy – tonight we get to see how that might have once been true, at least a little bit, but it was fifty years ago.
Today? We can’t even get rid of this two-bit, tin pot dictator who’s killing hundreds of thousands of us, enriching himself and his cronies, lying through his teeth with every breath, and betraying our country to our allies.
If we want to actually solve any of the problems dragging us down to be a third-rate, backwater country maybe we could start with removing that particular cancer so we can start again being like Gene Kranz and his crew.
Filed under CoronaVirus, Moral Outrage, Politics, Space
Over the last week or two there have been a series of AMAZING passes of the ISS over SoCal in the evenings, and we’ve had rain and clouds every freaking day. I may have whinged about this.
Yesterday…
…clear and a million again. Not a cloud to be seen.
Quick, we’ve had ISS passes almost every night for the last two weeks! When’s the pass tonight?
*crickets*
The next visible pass over SoCal is a truly marginal one, low in the sky, only lasts thirty seconds, in the morning, nine days from now.
Foxtrot. Mike. Lima.
Did everyone enjoy Easter?
Filed under Photography, Space, Weather
It sounds absurd to many to hear that the six straight days of rain in SoCal left as much as a foot of snow. It would be absurd if there were 12″ of snow in downtown LA or at LAX or at our house at ANY time of year. (I’ve been here over 45 years and I remember once getting what could generously be called a “dusting.”) Yet from the hangar today in Camarillo, there it was!
The key, of course, is to realize that there’s a lot of elevation to play with around here. LAX is at 125′ elevation, Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley (my part of town) is at 802′. I think our house is at 1,041 feet. We don’t get snow.
But up in the mountains on the northern end of Ventura County (shown) they get up to 5,000′ or more. And in Los Angeles County, those gorgeous peaks you see in the background during the Rose Parade every January 1st, several peaks climb to over 9,000′ and Mount Baldy is over 10,000′. So, yes, they get snow. There are ski resorts up there. (Yes, in LA in the winter you can often go surfing in the morning and snowboarding in the afternoon. If you surf. And snowboard. I don’t do either, BTW.)
That all having been said, it is a bit odd to get snow this late in the year. But then again, it’s also odd to get rain for six days in a row (over 4″ around our house).
So we don’t have it nearly as bad as the folks in Maine who got a foot of heavy snow late this week and were losing power all over the place, or all of those who are going to get up to a foot of it across huge swaths of the Midwest tonight and tomorrow.
Ours just made for some picture postcard views.
Filed under CAF, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
It’s Castle Peak to be specific.
You’ve seen it on fire from our front yard, and in any number of evening sunset and ISS pass photos as well. This picture shows it wreathed in low hanging clouds. The perspective’s different because it’s taken on the street down on the flatland at the bottom of our hill.
You’re getting it tonight, even though there are way too many wires, street lights, and telephone poles in it, because:
I know. I’m a tease.
Go wash your hands.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Fenway Park, Boston
August, 2004. I took most of the family (The Son was overseas in the Air Force) to Boston. Being us, we had to go to a baseball game there in what was to them a new baseball stadium. In what was to me a cathedral, and old friend, a long-lost happy place.
It had been sort of a shitty vacation up to that point. We had been up in Vermont visiting my mother, which was nice, and had gone to visit Montreal, which was nice right up until our car got broken into, our luggage and my briefcase stolen, and we got the pleasure of spending most of the next three days trying to cancel credit cards and bank accounts before the identity theft got too bad.
We were going to the 2004 Worldcon in Boston and knew the Angels were in town against the Red Sox, so we spent more on 3rd row seats behind the Angels dugout than we spent on airfare. (Thank goodness the tickets had been left in Vermont and weren’t in my stolen briefcase!)
The Sox were up early and after seven innings the Angels were losing, 10-1. The Daughters had brought their rally monkeys (which were ALL the rage that year) and were waving them wildly despite the score. And we scored two in the eighth inning. And then scored four in the ninth inning…
I remember having at least one guy still on base and maybe two, so the tying run was at the plate before they finally got us out and won the game. A lot of the Boston faithful had left early, but those that remained were giving us some serious stink eye.
It was glorious.
I know the world has an abnormally high ratio of shit in it right now – but it also still has a lot of good things, and good things that will come back to us. It’s important to remember that. So let’s remember that and hold onto it when we need it.
Our family and many others are missing the simple pleasures now, like going to a ballgame, or even just watching one on television. It sucks. It’s a constant, nagging reminder that things are not right.
But so far we’re all healthy – I hope you are too. This will pass, and the baseball games will return.
We need to be doing this now in order to help as many of us as possible be around when they do.
Wash your hands. Wear a face mask. Maintain physical distancing.
Filed under LA Angels, Photography, Sports, Travel
There’s a lot going on these days.
You might have noticed.
A lot of stress, not a lot of sleep, a lot of angst, not a lot of relaxation.
“Take care of yourself,” folks say, and that’s good advice. When you get on a plane they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first if there’s an emergency, because that way you can help others without being one of those who needs help.
So tonight was going to be great. There was an ASTONISHING space station pass over Southern California. Almost horizon to horizon, straight through the zenith, brighter than Venus. (Remember Venus?)
(Image from Heavens-Above.com – get it – use it!)
On top of that, there’s a “SUPERMOON” tonight! Yeah, y’all know how I feel about the sensational headlines and click bait. It’s a full moon when the moon is at perigee, the point in a body’s object when it’s closest to Earth, so it looks about 1% bigger than “normal.” You would never know that just by looking at it. But, it’s a full moon, it will be bright, it will be spectacular.
Been looking forward to this for days and days. Needed to remember the joys of the little things.
And Mother Nature said,
It’s been POURING. Flash flood alerts sort of pouring. Biblical-class rain on and off. You would be soaked to the skin just thinking about going outside.
So there was a really spectacular ISS pass. But we couldn’t see it.
There was a beautiful, bright full moon rising. (Unclear if it was “bad.”) But we couldn’t see it.
Mother Nature’s a bitch.
And not the good kind.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 