Author Archives: momdude

momdude's avatar

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
December 5, 2023 · 23:40

Endeavour

Did I mention that on the day after Thanksgiving I went down to the California Science Center near the USC campus and the Coliseum in downtown Los Angeles and saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour?

It’s just a tiny little bit freakin’ awesome.

Scorched tiles on the belly above us.

The business end with the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs).

Twenty-five missions, from May 1992 until May 2011.

It’s on display until December 31st like this, then it will be off display for a couple of years. There’s a huge new building under construction next to this one where it will be displayed in the upright, “ready to launch” configuration.

In addition to Endeavour, the museum also has the last surviving flight-rated external fuel tank, and two Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs).

Once they put it all together in a vertical configuration, it will look just like it did on the launch pad, ready to go to space. When you first come in from the parking lot you can see the two SRBs standing up, peeking over the top of the outside walls of the new building.

As you leave the exhibition, over yonder you can see the orange foam of that final external tank.

It’s going to be spectacular to see!

Leave a comment

Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Space

December 4, 2023 · 23:37

Sunset – December 04th

It’s Puerto Rico, right?

Right there, floating in the sunset. You can almost see where Arecibo was. Or still is, at least the town. The radio telescope? Not so much.

What do you see?

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Sunsets

December 3, 2023 · 22:37

Fine Feathered Friends – December 03rd

I was out and about for the Sunday morning shopping when these guys asked if I had any spare trash.

These two were near my car when I got out. There were four more picking over what had fallen out of a trash receptacle or been left on the ground in the parking lot. They were LARGE birds.

These two were strutting around like they were line dancing and you can see that they were displaying the ruff of feathers under their chin. I’m no expert, but I’m thinking it was a mating display of some sort.

Given their size, the chin ruff, and those honkin’ huge beaks, these have to be ravens. I see a pair up in the trees behind our house, but they rarely come down to the ground, so I don’t always remember just how big they are.

Lovely birds! Beautiful! I think they’re spectacular.

Just don’t piss them off. They can recoginze and remember individual humans, they’re very intelligent (they can use tools, i.e., sticks to get bugs out from holes, problem solve like dropping stones into a vase to raise the water level to where they can drink, etc), they carry a grudge, and there’s some evidence that they can even pass that information on to others in their flock.

Hitchcock knew what he was talking about.

Leave a comment

Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography

December 2, 2023 · 23:43

MORE Lights! – December 2023

The second tranche of 2023 Christmas lights is up at Sietch Willett!

Last week I did the lights along the roof line, which is typically the most time consuming and difficult. That was seven sets of lights, plus two on the ground (the candy canes) along the driveway.

Today, in about half of the time as I spent last weekend, I got ten sets of lights up on the ground, in the rose bushes, and in all of the plants along the front and side of the house.

Curiously, I ran out of lights to put up! This is due to the age of my supply of lights and the fact that there were nearly a dozen strings that I had to pull when they were failing. I test everything before I put it up and I won’t put up anything with a section (usually a 1/3 section or 1/4 section, depending on the style of lights) completely burnt out. By the time they all got weeded out, I had enough to finish today’s ten sets – but I’ve got at least four other sets that really need to get filled in and there are a couple more places where I can put some up if I can still find them in the store tomorrow.

Good thing that the Chiefs game isn’t until 17:00 local time tomorrow. There’s a time and priorities conflict that might just short circuit my frazzled brain.

One other thing that I’m going to be trying hard to get done earlier this holiday season is getting the Christmas cards out earlier. To that end…

  • If you’re on the Christmas card list (i.e., you’ve gotten them in the past) and you’ve moved or changed your address and want to stay on the Christmas card list, please send me an email at pwillett@ix.netcom.com (or call, I’m easy!)
  • If you’re not on the Christmas card list (i.e., you’ve never gotten cards in the past) and you want to be, please let me know and tell me where to send it
  • If you see me posting a list on here in a week or so with high school friends or CAF friends or fannish friends who have dropped off the radar and you have current contact information for them, please either let them know that I’m trying to reach them or contact me with the current information

Social media is (sometimes) great and all of that, but I’m an olde phart and believe that there’s nothing better than a card, a couple of pictures, and the family newsletter from friends.

Especially given how many of them this year are being flagged as “deceased” in my mailing list database.

Life’s too short. I don’t know or care who “they” are, if “they” say that Christmas cards are uncool and passe, then I have a number of physiologically improbable suggestions for “them.”

Merry Christmas!

Leave a comment

Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography, Sietch Willett

December 1, 2023 · 23:20

Critter Updates

Welcome, December! Let’s see if we can make this the festive, joyous month that Hollywoood would have us believe it is. I’m feeling good about the possibilities.

A couple of things have happened with local neighborhood critters. I find them odd and amusing.

First, the skunk.

I haven’t seen it, but several times this month I’ve definitely smelled it. It seems to be lurking in or around our yard, possibly in a pile of construction equipment and materials that our landlord (a general contractor) has left there. Earlier today, when the gardeners were cleaning up over there, they seemed to have disturbed it.

Or it could be in the garage. When I was putting up the first batch of Christmas lights last week I moved some boxes and both heard something moving under the workbench and got a strong whiff of skunk scent. It didn’t spray, but I knew it was there.

Or both.

For now, I’m leaving it alone at all costs and double checking when I go out at night to make sure that I’m not surprising it accidentally. Live and let live. And hope that it moves on to bother someone else.

Somewhat more bizarre for me is the rooster.

I never thought of it being “normal” for there to be “backyard chickens” in suburban Los Angeles, but it actually isn’t that unusual. They’re not permitted in apartments and there are some pretty lenient regulations on the number you can have and how big your yard has to be to have them, but the bar’s set really low. It’s surprising how many upper class and upper middle class neighborhoods have chickens as residents.

Most folks have only one rooster. I’m not sure if that’s a regulation or just that roosters tend to fight if there are more than one. I’m no “chicken dude” by any definition of the term.

Sometime over the summer, one of the houses below us in the canyon got a handful of chickens and the obligatory one rooster. I usually hear it in the morning if I go outside in the back.

But tonight, at 22:45, going outside to walk around and earn my blue “stand” dot on my watch’s exercise app (I’m apparently strongly motivated by stickers, dots, badges, gold stars, atta-boys, and so on) I can hear this idiot rooster going off about every minute. It’s coming up on midnight. It’s pitch dark. We’re eight hours away from morning twilight starts and over nine hours before actual sunrise.

Why is this idiot rooster crowing like his life depends on it?

It’s LA. I can only assume that the rooster is neurotic, like everyone and everything else here. It must be something in the air, or in the water. No doubt they’ll be getting some rooster therapy soon … if they haven’t already.

Oh, and the juncos have returned. We had the two that stayed here year around, but sometime in the last month about a dozen more showed up. Between them, the 18 to 24 mourning doves, and the house finches, morning feeding time gets crowded.

Where’s Merlin Parkins (and his large, macho man sidekick, Jim) when you need them?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Birds, Critters

November 30, 2023 · 23:40

Not NaNoWriMo, 11/30/2023

And so November comes to a close, along with any pretense that I was ever going to actually finish my NaNoWriMo project this year. But I knew that.

Five years ago, a couple of months after we moved out of the house we had owned for nearly 30 years and into the house that we’ve been renting ever since (please, let 2024 be the year we get out and buy our own place again!), there was an amazing sunset. A neighbor across the street (who has since sold his house and moved on) saw me taking pictures from my front yard, looking over the houses on the opposite side of the street. Anthony’s house has a deck in the back, no obstructions to the view, and he invited me over to take some quick photos from there. They were spectacular.

NaNoWriMo 2023 is over, even if it’s not finished. I may not have gotten the words written, but that didn’t stop my brain from thinking about plot points and where the story might go, as silly as it was. So, in the broadest of strokes, maybe…

Sara and Carl get ordered to go investigate what’s going on at the epicenter of that monstrously huge earthquake. A lot of the data doesn’t make any sense and they’re already in the field, so HQ sends them. They can’t get too close, but there’s a drone in the Jeep they’re driving and they launch it and find something really weird and bizarre. Maybe a giant 3/4 hemisphere missing out of the side of that mountain, cut off clean, glowing lights, then something wipes out the drone.

Deb starts to get subjected to “treatments” from the little non-leprechaun critters who want to make her immortal. It’s painful but they do something else and it turns every wave of pain into a wave of pleasure. But she can’t figure out where she is, who they are, or why they’re doing this to her.

Ed gets out of the scrape with the New Mexico cop at the weigh station by pulling out some ID and a great (fake) cover story about being with a top secret division of Homeland Security or the CIA or the NSA. Some hilarity ensues. The cop is a glorified Barney Fife who wants to be in on the plot so he lets Ed and the truck go. Ed starts following the bizarre readings that the truck’s equipment is picking up and abandons his trip to Malibu, instead following the trail off into the desert and mountains.

(Insert much hand waving and bullshit over many chapters.)

Somehow all three plot lines start to come together. Maybe there’s a weird thing in the desert that Ed finds which is similar to what Sara and Carl find in Iceland. Maybe the two are connected in some way. Ed’s “Boss” is a shadowy figure, a rich, wannabe mad scientist type and what he’s looking for with the equipment Ed’s driving around is connected to the technology the non-leprechaun guys are using. Ed’s supposed to be an idiot savant who can run the equipment and drive the truck but does so as a clueless sidekick (think Ned Beatty’s Otis in the original “Superman” movie) but he’s in fact the undercover good guy who’s putting all of the pieces together to save the day.

The day needs saving because the non-leprechaun dudes are trying to make humans immortal, but not because they love us or becuase they want us to be happy and healthy. Nope, they’re the true evil bad guys, looking at a planet of eight billion potential slave laborers (or something – go for something far more bizarre and hilarious if possible) and they need us immortal for it to work. Maybe their starships are run by something connected to exercise bikes and they need legions to be peddling 24/7/365/1,000,000,000 to get back to their home planet?

Wherever Deb is, she’s figuring out that she doesn’t want an eternal spin class as a career and she’s going to escape. She causes some chaos, which causes detectable things that Ed can home in on. The Boss then swoops in to steal the not-leprechaun technology, just as Sara and Carl arrive in the super secret non-leprechaun hiding place in their evil lair halfway along the line between New Mexico and Iceland, a thousand miles underground. There’s a confrontation, conflict, chaos, confusion, which ends in the not-leprechauns being forced to take off and escape in the emergency escape pods from their starship. The Boss goes along with them, thinking that he’ll steal one of their escape pods, but in fact just ends up as another warm body to be experimented on. Sara and Carl end up getting the Nobel Prize for their discoveries. Ed and Deb do a saccarine meet cute as he’s rescuing her (or maybe vice versa) and they fall in love and live happily ever after, just like in a Hallmark Christmas movie.

The Earth is safe! The human race isn’t going to be immortal and have thighs of steel as they power alien starships. It’s over!

Or…

…is it? The non-leprechans have The Boss and his evil genius super sized brain and they need their startship back… Sara and Carl discover a flaw in their award winning theory that leads them to discover that something else isn’t right and soon… Ed notices that Deb’s body is … changing. But into what? How far did the non-leprechauns get in their experiments on her?

OH, NO!!!

It’s time for NaNoWriMo 2024!!!

2 Comments

Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Writing

November 29, 2023 · 23:51

Not NaNoWriMo, 11/29/2023

Yet another day with a bit more chaos than I had anticipated. And yet, good things have been accomplished.

I took a quick break and discovered that we had a passing shower overhead, but with the sun behind us, there was a dim but beautiful rainbow off to the northeast. Can you see it?

What I failed to see wandering around looking for a good view of the rainbow was the honkin’ freakin’ HUGE orb weaver spider that was about six inches from my head. (To be fair, while it was a large spider and scary looking, it was also harmless to me. Just get my monkey brain stem to figure that out.) I will refrain from sharing the pictures.

There’s today’s lesson. Beauty and fear, side by side. both with the ability to catch us by surprise.

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Weather

November 28, 2023 · 23:50

Not NaNoWriMo, 11/28/2023

2017 business trip to San Diego, a job or two back.

Where did today go? How is it 23:50?

Where did November go?

Where did 2023 go?

One of them days.

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Travel

November 27, 2023 · 23:32

Not NaNoWriMo, 11/27/2023

2003, Toronto. The World Science Fiction Convention was in the hotel that’s attached to the SkyDome stadium. We saw a ballgame there, then the circus came into the stadium while the convention came into the hotel.

Toronto was a wonderful mix then of the old and the new – still is every time I go back!

Leave a comment

Filed under Photography, Travel

November 26, 2023 · 22:52

Not NaNoWriMo, 11/26/2023

Just a touch past Full Moon tonight, moving past Jupiter, with a layer of high, thin clouds moving overhead. That means a 22º arc, with Jupiter just outside.

It’s been a nice holiday weekend. Now back to work.

Be kind to others. And to yourself.

Leave a comment

Filed under Astronomy, Photography