Category Archives: Castle Willett

December 4, 2016 · 23:05

Assembly, Not Trimming

One of the “best bang for the buck” items in our household is the artificial Christmas tree we bought at least a dozen years ago. (It might be longer.)

The old phrase “trimming the tree” isn’t quite appropriate for a fake tree – “assembly” is a better verb. I remember last year thinking (after the fact) that the assembly process would be a good subject for a time lapse video. This year I actually remembered to do it as an experiment.

Not perfect – probably need to get some sort of tripod mount for the iPhone to do it better. But not bad.

Welcome to the Willett household Christmas tree assembly, 2016 version!

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Filed under Castle Willett, Christmas Lights, Paul, Ronnie, Video

November 27, 2016 · 23:02

Christmas Lights – November 27th

Weekend One of the 2016 Christmas Lights Frenzy is in the books. Thanks to The Younger Daughter’s help on Friday (the addition of an extra set of hands is far more than exponential in the amount accomplished) and several hours way too high on a ladder today, we’ve made a pretty good start to this year’s madness.

file-nov-27-22-35-19-smallAgain with the possibility (probability?) that this will be our last Christmas in this house after twenty-six years here, I’m trying to max out our display.file-nov-27-22-34-49-smallOne issue we have is some large changes in the foliage which is the support and substrate for so many of the lights. A huge chunk of the birch tree is gone from a wind storm a month or so ago, and the tall evergreens just to the left of the garage door went away when the enormous sewer project went in. (For comparison, here’s a picture from last year.)file-nov-27-22-34-22Just playing with the iPhone, but if you click on this image and blow it way up on the screen, you can juuuuuuust pick out the seven bright stars in Orion that make up the shoulders, feet, and belt.

Which gives me an idea to try for later…

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Filed under Castle Willett, Christmas Lights, Panorama, Photography

November 24, 2016 · 23:58

The Raccoons Want To Share Our Thanksgiving

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends – I hope that you did as well!

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Tonight the raccoons on the roof are being particularly rowdy and I can also hear some sort of pounding, almost as if someone’s banging on a door or periodically. That’s a new one, which has caused me to poke around outside. Nothing seen, but on the last trip out it occurs to me that it might be coming from our trash cans, which would boom a little bit like a drum if something were hitting them.

Or if something, say, a raccoon, were trying to get into it by lifting the lid and not quite able to get it open before dropping the lid back down. And then trying again. And then running off when I stick my head outside. And then trying again. And again.

Normally they don’t ever even bother, and the trash cans we get from the City of Los Angeles are pretty critter proof. I wonder what could be in that trash can tonight that might cause them to go the extra mile to try to get in there?

It’s a mystery.

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November 23, 2016 · 23:24

No New Dog Today

I think today was the first non-holiday weekday where I haven’t worked since we went to New York City in August. That means that the errands and chores had built up for all of the places that aren’t open on Sundays. (I am, of course, either at a Saturday work event or at the CAF hangar every Saturday.)

I had replaced the battery on the van over the weekend to get it mobile again. With that accomplished, first thing this morning I had it loaded up with aluminum cans and plastic bottles for the recycling center.

Once I was done at the recycling center I realized that the back of the van still had two or three boxes of dog food, treats, bones, and various dishes and dog toys. I had gathered them up for donation somewhere but hadn’t ever gotten around to it. But the recycling center is only two blocks from the LA County Animal Shelter, the same one where twenty years ago (HOLY GUACAMOLE, BATMAN, TWENTY FREAKIN’ YEARS??!!) we got the legendary “Lucky Puppy.”

They were more than happy to take the donation. When I walked back out to the van to start bringing the boxes in, a pickup truck had pulled up next to my van. The driver had gone in but in the truck bed was a gorgeous yellow lab.

He was friendly, wanted attention, a good dog. He seemed healthy, not too old, maybe five or six years, and was just a vision of the typical “I just want to be friends with everyone and everything – do you have a ball?!” yellow lab.

And this was the place where people drop off animals that they found wandering around lost or the ones that they can’t keep any more.

THAT DOG WAS NOT GOING INTO THAT BUILDING!

Now, mind you, I had absolutely zero factual reasons to believe that was going to happen. I had zero facts at all other than that this friendly dog was there sitting in the pickup truck outside of the shelter. This was not an intellectual decision of any sort at all. Pure emotion, pure gut feeling.

See, this whole election kerfuffle has us all just a bit off balance emotionally. I blame Trump! (That’s my new mantra for the next four years, by the way.)

I know that The Long-Suffering Wife and I had agreed that there wouldn’t be any more dogs for a while. We have changes in our housing situation coming up and a dog would be a serious complication. We have plans for travel and other activities now that we’re empty nesters and a dog would be a serious complication. I need a break from scooping dog poop from all over the yard and a dog would be a serious complication.

But I would have figured out something and I’m sure TLSW would have gone along with it.

Fortunately for our plans, the driver came out at that point with another dog, causing the yellow lab to go nuts with joy, as only a lab can. It seems that the other dog in the house was an escape artist (been there, done that, with both Lucky and Jessie) and had gotten picked up and turned in again.

A happy ending for all. But there’s no new dog here today.

Which is a good thing. A very good thing.

Yeah, that’s it – a very good thing. (Repeat as necessary.)

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Filed under Castle Willett, Dogs, Family

October 2, 2016 · 23:09

Looking Forward To Halloween

October always ends with Halloween, which might not be my favorite holiday strictly as holidays go. It isn’t special to me for all of the usual reasons (pumpkins, costumes, trick-or-treating, candy, etc), but is still one that I look forward to every year – especially if we have clear skies and bright objects to look at!

If the conditions are favorable, we always bring out the telescopes and binoculars to the sidewalk and let people look through them as we hand out candy. This year the astronomical forecast is pretty good for the early evening of October 31st.

We might be able to spot a very, very thin crescent moon for a short while after sunset. As of 18:30 that evening the moon will be only one day, eight hours past the new moon, but that might be possible.

Even if we can’t seen the moon due to the hills and trees to the west, Saturn and Venus should be up for an hour or so after sunset. Venus will be an easy target and will show a crescent – always good for a bit of quick astronomy to prove to the little ghosts and goblins that there are things they can see with their own eyes to prove that we are on a planet, one of many, going around a star, and so on. It really helps to make the universe, astronomy, and physics real to them.

Saturn is also always popular with the rings and all. The tough part on Halloween is keeping it on the planet with a decent magnification eyepiece in there. 99% of the people looking through the telescope haven’t ever done it before and have no idea how it works, so they tend to grab on and yank it toward themselves, not realizing that it’s pointing very, very accurately and they just ruined that accuracy. That’s one of the reasons we like to find big, bright objects like the moon – they’re really easy to re-find and re-align the telescope on.

Even after Venus and Saturn set we’ll have Mars up in the west for a couple of hours. It’s not quite as spectacular as Venus, Jupiter, or Saturn, but kids are a lot more familiar with it since they can see pictures from Opportunity or Curiosity any time they want online.

Almost directly overhead there are a couple of nice globular clusters in Cygnus and Lyra. The Ring Nebula is also in Lyra, nearly at the zenith, but in the light-polluted skies of LA it’s a bit of a stretch.

What should be a piece of cake, even in binoculars, is the Andromeda Nebula. In a dark sky it’s a naked eye object and it’s up nice and high in the sky at the end of October, so I’m hoping we can get one of the scopes on it all night long. We should also be able to see the Beehive Cluster in Cancer.

Later in the evening, closer to 22:00, we’ll be getting the Pleiades rising in the east. Orion has a lot of good targets but it won’t rise until after 23:00, by which time the little folk should all be in bed.

One last thing to watch for as we get closer to the night will be any ISS passes overhead. Even if we don’t get ISS, the Hubble Space Telescope is fairly bright, as are several other satellites. We’ll see what we can see.

Now we just need some clear skies!

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Filed under Astronomy, Castle Willett, Space

September 21, 2016 · 22:24

Unintended Consequences

While the Blue Apron meals that I ranted and raved about last night might be delicious, it’s not just our empty nester eating patterns that have been disrupted.

You may recall that I take a certain “(wanna be) Tetris Grand Master” pride in my ability to load the dishwasher to within an inch of its life. But now…

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My dishwasher zen is totally out of whack! Look at that, it’s disgusting!

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While the bottom rack is jammed to the brim and requiring the dishwasher to be run ASAP, the top rack is only maybe half full!

Oh, the embarrassment!

The proportion of large items (plates, pans, cutting boards, and so on) to smaller items (bowls, storage containers, glasses) has been shifted in a way unseen since the Great Collapsing Kitchen Shelf Debacle of 2006! And we all remember what a nightmare that was!

I think it’s the almost total lack of any storage containers that are doing it. With two meals from Blue Apron and the portion sizing being just a hair on the smaller (and probably healthier and better) side, there aren’t any leftovers. Period.

Madness, I tell you! Madness!!

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September 20, 2016 · 22:57

Blue Apron

There’s a new service called Blue Apron which will deliver all of the ingredients and cooking instructions for three very fancy meals for two. We’ve been giving it a try.

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This is the “Basque-Style Cod with Sweet Pepper-Tomato Sauce and Freekeh.” It was delicious.

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This was the Pork Chops & Spicy Chow Chow with Sweet Potato Salad. The spiciest one we’ve tried so far.

Of the eleven meals we’ve tried so far, only one has been sort of a dud. The rest have done a fantastic job of making sure that dinner three times a week won’t be any more of the same old same old.

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August 27, 2016 · 22:26

That Moment, August 27th Version

That moment when you’re gently sliding the dish washer racks in and out to see if there’s anything actually jamming the tracks or blocking the spinning sprayers because you’ve got it so full it probably is in danger of growing its own event horizon but you have that one last little dish that you’re sure you can get in if you just Tetrisificate the contents and move that little bit just a millimeter here and that other plate just a micron there…

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…only to recognize (after succeeding, of course) that you spent ten minutes trying to fit in a single small dish that you could have washed by hand in thirty seconds.

It’s not about that kind of efficiency, it’s about this kind of efficiency!

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August 18, 2016 · 23:08

A Certain Lack Of Trust

Out for my late evening stroll (two and a half miles) I was about two blocks from home tonight when I spotted one of my old nemeses. It was digging for grubs in a yard two houses down from me, a good sized critter, black, bushy tail held high, with that bright white stripe prominently displayed.

I was going to simply cross the street to give it a wide berth, but the skunk started toward the street instead and I froze. I’ve read that they have lousy vision, which was fine  by me. It waddled across the street and started digging for grubs in that yard.

Down the street was walking a man with two dogs on leashes. He had moved out into the street and over to my side. I was watching the skunk to make sure it didn’t do anything rash, as well as to see if there might be a mate or baby skunks wandering about. As my neighbor got next to me he asked, “Was that what I think it was?”

“If you think it was a skunk, then, yes, it was,” I said.

He reined in the leashes on his dogs, which were now picking up the scent (the skunk had not sprayed, but still…) and getting excited. He moved on past me and I started toward home again.

As I got to the corner to turn for home, another man rounded the corner with two large dogs. I stopped him and gave him the heads up that a potential major problem lie just down at the next corner.

He was incredulous. “A skunk? Here? In the city?”

He must be new to the area, because we can smell them once or twice a month, even though seeing them is more rare. I assured him that I was dead serious, noting that running into a skunk while walking the dogs would most certainly ruin his day.

“Yeah, right,” was all I got for my efforts. He moved off down the sidewalk.

I crossed the street and headed for home. As I got halfway down the block I heard dogs start to bark and could clearly hear a man’s voice yelling, “OH, SHIT!”By the time I got home the first whiffs of Eau d’Skunk were wafting across the neighborhood.

In the stereotypical big city suburban neighborhood where the assumption is that no one knows their neighbors’ names even after living next to them for twenty years, I tried to be friendly and outgoing. You know – “neighborly.” Our now-stinky friend should have had a bit more trust.

Karma, man! It’s a real bitch.

(P.S. – For the record, we do know most of our neighbors’ names for at least the first two or three houses, with one notable exception. Further down the block, if we don’t know the name of the neighbor, we at least know the name of their dog.)

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Filed under Castle Willett, Critters, Dogs, Health

July 21, 2016 · 22:31

Fifteen Years Ago

About this time of night, our families were shooing The (At That Time) Short-Suffering Wife and me off to our hotel. They would help clean up and take care of the tuxes & gowns & presents and so on. Our work for the day was done.

It’s been a good fifteen years. We’re a good pair, we love each other, and we make each other laugh, even after all this time. Usually we’re laughing at stupid stuff that other folks just don’t understand, but that’s fine.

For example…

Yesterday the (Now) Long-Suffering Wife looked up what the traditional anniversary gifts are for fifteen years of marriage – crystal or watches.

How blasé!

Not an inexpensive gift (literally more than we spent on my new car), but for our fifteenth anniversary we each other a completely new sewer system for the house!

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Having the entire end down by the street filled with roots is apparently a bad thing.

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For the line from the “Y” to the main sewer line under the street, they “shot” this liner in. When inflated to fill the inside of the broken pipe, it’s then heated so the epoxy layers turn hard as a brick. Much cheaper than digging up all of that street, curb, and sidewalk and then rebuilding it all.

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From the “Y” up to the house the one line runs under a LOT of cement. Instead of digging it all up, they run this honkin’ big cable through the broken pipe, with this huge nose cone at the end hooked to about 45′ of somewhat flexible 4″ pipe.

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At the other end, this big hydraulic ram muckles onto the cable and pulls, about a foot at a time. The nose cone breaks apart the old, clay pipe and forces it outward, dragging the new plastic pipe in behind it. Pretty neat!

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Once all is said and done, the far end of the pipe is connected back to the main iron pipes coming out from under the house.

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We seem to be missing that tree that’s been there forever. What will we do with those Christmas lights this year?

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Back at the “Y”, the top pipe comes from the bedroom end of the house, the one from the right comes from the laundry room & kitchen end of the house, and it all goes off to the left into the pipe with the new liner. They also installed several “clean out” fixtures to make cleaning any future problems MUCH easier.

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Easy peasy!

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It all disappears underneath the sidewalk, beyond the street, hopefully to never be a concern for us together!

My sister said that there’s nothing romantic about this. I disagree, especially for the two of us. This will last far longer than any flowers or chocolates.

And we now have a sewer system that can flush away a live armadillo! Behold our toilet power!

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