Category Archives: Forever Home

March 16, 2026 · 23:22

Once More Into The Community

Since moving to Hesperia we’ve been actively looking for opportunities to get involved in the community and participate in local events. The Christmas tree lighting, the weekend farmers’ market, the museum, the astronomy club star parties, and so on.

Today the “Monday Municipal Mile” events start for the spring. The same Civic Center park (next to City Hall, the library, the police station…) where the Christmas event was, a lap around the park is a quarter mile, four laps gets you your easy, flat, paved mile with benches and rest stops all over the place if needed. We got our T-shirts, and they also had water, Gatorade, snacks, and first aid (not that I saw anyone needing it).

We heard from the mayor, a couple of City Council members, a bit of blah blah blah about how healthy this all is, and then we were off!

I did two of my four laps with our local City Council representative and had a great conversation about what brought us to Hesperia, what we like (a LOT of things, like this event!), what we don’t (a short list, mainly some key streets that need some maintenance, which they’re aware of and working on), and what we’ve got to look forward to (multiple HUGE warehouse & distribution centers, lots of shopping growth, the high-speed LA-to-Las Vegas rail project). It was great!

We’ll be out there every Monday. Easy exercise, nice folks, a little bit of community involvement. Small town America! Cue the country music!

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Ronnie

March 11, 2026 · 23:48

Squirrel Envy

Sun’s up, it’s a bit chilly (mid 50’s) but they’re up on top of the wall, asleep, sunning themselves. Presumably with a belly full of free bird seed, which seems to come from a magic, eternally refilling source, so no one’s missing any meals. Chubby, well fed, warm, comfy!

Later, after it warmed up, the three of them were splooting out on the cool cement in the shade on the porch. I’m sure it felt good on their bellies.

While I was spending all day in Zoom meetings, answering emails, generating and distributing reports, meeting deadlines, and coding and entering data so I can get my month-end close done and reports sent out.

Who’s the winner between these two scenarios? Who’s got it better? How do I get to be the squirrel for a while?

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Filed under Critters, Forever Home, Photography

March 9, 2026 · 23:27

War Board Review

Back in June, when we were really ramping up the house hunting for our Forever Home and going through Zillow listings by the hundreds, I ended up with what I called my “War Board.” I’ve always had a fondness for these magnetic, white, dry erase boards that you can write on or use colorful little magnets to attach printouts and pictures and documents to.

The War Board was one of these, about 26″ by 40″, with documents for the ‘top twelve’ current Victor Valley listings that we were researching. Some of them we had looked at in person, some we had just driven by, all of them had been researched for hours and hours by me, looking online at their neighborhoods, where stores were located, where the post office and municipal buildings and fire stations were, where the flooding hazards were, and on and on and on. Then I would save the Zillow listing, add lists of notes, pros and cons, print them out, rank them #01 to #12, and put them up on the board so we could look at them all. See the big picture! Take in the gestalt! Leave ourselves open for insight and inspiration!

Now, seven and a half months after we moved in here, I finally found the white boards and was taking time tonight to mount them above my desk in my office.

It was odd, really odd. Looking at this I was transported back in my head to the mindspace of last May and June (go look up some of those daily posts from late June 2025) and it was overlaid with my current mindstate, which has changed considerably since I see many of these areas and streets every time I go out. It was like seeing some sort of mental double exposure where the two images are close enough to being the same so that they do line up, but not perfectly, and in weird, warped, and distorted ways.

The first thing I noticed was that the house we fell in love with, bought, and is now our beloved Forever Home isn’t on here at all. I remember that happening – we had several places we REALLY wanted to see in person after having just seen all of the online information, but they weren’t having open houses. A couple we were seriously thinking about making an offer on if we didn’t hit any red flags when we saw them in person, but figured we might have to make offers on two or three before we got an offer accepted. The weekend at the end of June when we came up to the area to look at houses, two that we REALLY wanted had just gotten offers by other folks accepted before we could look at them, which was discouraging. (One is just a couple blocks away and we drive by it regularly.) The weekend we came up there were just a small handful of open houses, including the house we bought, but it had several things that I was looking at as yellow flags, and I wasn’t hopeful at all.

The other thing is that I remember looking at so many of these houses up in Apple Valley, about ten miles away, and remembering how much I was focused on that area and not where we ended up. That’s especially notable since I know how much we both enjoy the area where we are, now that we’re here. I’m sure the Apple Valley areas would have been very nice as well, but we’re honestly extremely glad that we ended up down in the Hesperia/Oak Hills area. (We’re within the Hesperia city limits by about 200 yards, and Oak Hills is the unincorporated area surrounding us, but the Post Office and the Assessor and Tax Collector all say we’re in Oak Hills, so okey dokey!)

The War Board contents have been disassembled and filed while the board itself has been mounted, to be used on the next tasks. It’s like that board the detectives have with all of the pictures of the suspects and witnesses, and bits of red yarn or string connecting one to another, looking for patterns or connections, but now the murder’s been solved, so we move on.

I also went back and re-read all of the posts and looked at all of the pictures from last June (house hunting) and July (escrow and moving) – how did I not just give up, curl into a ball, and die? I swear I’ve got PTSD tonight just from re-reading all of that.

I guess you just do what you have to do!

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March 8, 2026 · 23:48

Proof Of Life – March 8th

Insert standard semi-annual rant about how freakin’ stupid Daylight Savings Time is and how much I despise it.

Critters.

We of course have these squirrels (three, it seems) and tons of birds (finches, sparrows, scrub jays, hummingbirds, crows, owls, hawks). I’ve seen fence lizards three or four times in seven-plus months so I know they’re here, but we don’t have nearly as many as we had back in West Hills, which I find very surprising.

Rumored to be around (the neighbors have told us they’ve seen them, or I’ve heard them, or some local agency has pictures of them) but not yet seen are rabbits, coyotes (I hear them sounding off every few days), and bald eagles. The bald eagles would be spectacular to see! The Big Bear nest is only twenty-two miles away, up a couple thousand feet of elevation, so it’s not unreasonable to think there are more around.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are the odd deer, elk, bobcat, or even a bear or two out there, but probably much more likely to see them up in the mountains or at least NEXT TO the mountains. We’re three or four miles away, out on the valley floor, so the odds are against us.

I am surprised we don’t see more feral or neighborhood cats. We’ve seen the security cameras on the back porch turn on in the middle of the night a few times due to cats wandering around, but I would have bet on it happening more often than it does.

And bats! We should see more bats, particularly around sunset. I’ve seen them maybe twice – should be more.

I’ll keep my eyes open.

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Filed under Critters, Forever Home, Photography

March 6, 2026 · 23:45

Barstow DMV

One of the things that’s really starting to harsh my mellow about the upcoming milestone birthday is all of the freaking paperwork. I’m hitting the age where taking my Social Security payments is mandatory, and all of that has taken hours of filling out forms. And after decades of just renewing my driver’s license online or by mail (I have a nearly spotless driving record and no accidents), not I have to show up in the flesh to prove I’m alive, take an eye exam, and get a new picture taken.

Going into any California DMV office and simply getting in line is an excellent way to spend all day there, so I tried to make an appointment, as they encourange you to do. Except that all of the offices near hear had their earliest open appointments in mid-April or even early May, which won’t work with my birthday in mid-March. Rather than just accept my fate of a full day wasted in boredom Hell, it occurred to me that I could look for other DMV offices further out of the Los Angeles area. Hesperia’s sort of on the edge of the “LA Metro area” – what’s the next step out?

Barstow. (“Jewel of the Desert” my ass!!)

It’s an interesting shift in perspective. I don’t think that I’ve EVER thought of Barstow as anything other than a spot on the I-15 about halfway between LA and Las Vegas or LA and Lake Havasu, a spot you zoomed through at 70+ mph unless of course you had to pull off a block or two for gas, food, or a bio break. But now, as Hesperia and Victor Valley (Hesperia + Apple Valley + Victorville) residents, Barstow is a neighbor, just a quick half hour away. Where before the mental picture was of an endless ribbon of concrete through the barren desert to get from the Cajon Pass to Barstow to Baker to Las Vegas, all looking the same, rocks, tumbleweeds, mountains, and rattlesnakes, now it’s just ten miles through neighborhoods we drive through all the time, then another fifteen or so miles through desert just like the landscape outside our yard, then you’re in the outskirts of Barstow and back to “civiliztion” with outlet malls, McDonalds, Starbucks, gas stations, and stucco jungle neighborhoods of houses carved out of the sand.

It was definitely weird seeing the difference in viewpoint.

The DMV was…the DMV. The stereotypes, memes, and jokes (sloths, anyone?) didn’t spring out of a vacuum. I will say that the four DMV staff that I interacted with were all pleasant, efficient, and friendly, and we got things done quickly once I got to their windows. The system (which isn’t their fault!) to get me TO their windows is totally fucked, and in between the small handful of two minute interactions were twenty and forty minute exercises in wanting to claw my eyeballs out just to dispell the boredom and ennui.

But it’s done.

Another task checked off, and another government agency giving me permission to be older than I was. Seven decades of living to satisfy the bureaucracies just for the sake of satisfying the bureaucracies.

Joy.

 

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Filed under Forever Home, Paul

March 3, 2026 · 23:37

Cherry-Plum Blossoms

It’s gotten warm for a few days and we see trees starting to bud and flower all over town. Nothing yet from the pear and apple trees in our back yard (I’m keeping an eye on them!) but in just 48 hours or so the neighbor’s trees along the street have gone from bare to an explosion of pink flowers.

They’re gorgeous! Two separate plant-ID apps on my phone identify these as “Cherry-Plum” flowers. Okay!

It’s also great to see a ton of bees all over all of the flowers.

As long as they’re not building a nest in the walls at our house, the bees and I can be good neighbors!

No scent detected while I was taking these pictures, but then again, with all of the bees I wasn’t trying to get my face in there too close.

I remember a grade school joke about a kid failing a spelling test because he spelled that common red flower as “brose.” The teacher says, “There’s no ‘b’ in ‘rose.'” The kid says, “There was in the one I was sniffing!”

Up along Maple Street, where we go to the grocery store on Main, there’s a line of what I believe to be apple trees, that are covered in very similar white blossoms. They exploded into flowers over the last week as well.

Decent rain over the winter, warming up with lots of Sun now, spring is announcing its presence with authority in the High Desert!

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Filed under Flowers, Forever Home, Photography

March 2, 2026 · 23:40

Sunrise Over The Pergola

In about three hours there will be starting the totality phase of the only lunar eclipse of the year, and the last one in North America for about three years. It may or may not be clear enough to see it here, we’ve been getting on and off clouds all day. It doesn’t matter to me – I won’t be up at that time of the morning to see it. That’s a game for the young.

However, I was up just before 05:00 this AM (another fate caused by age) and saw the most amazing and bright red and orange sunrise. That will have to do for today.

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

February 26, 2026 · 23:21

Planes Past & Possibly Future

I was thinking this evening about life up here at the Forever Home, and while we’re truly loving it, there are things that we gave up in moving out of the west San Fernando Valley area where we lived for almost 35 years. One of those would be my involvement with the Southern California Wing of the Commemorative Air Force.

Granted, after eight years on staff there as the Finance Officer and finally giving up that position three years ago due to the time it involved and my new (at the time) position with ALS Network, I hadn’t been out to the hangar that often. But I still stay in contact with many friends there on social media, I’m still a member, I still get all of the emails and publications, I still get to the odd airshow here and there. But now that 30-minute drive from West Hills to Camarillo is a 3-hour drive from Hesperia. Not doing that a couple of weekends a month! (There’s also that whole lack of time thing with my work schedule, but if I don’t have time for a short drive each way, I really, REALLY don’t have time for six times longer drive each way.)

It does occur to me that it would be a relatively simple 30-40 minute flight (we’re only four miles from Hesperia Airport, maybe ten miles from Apple Valley Airport) if I had my own plane or even if I was renting one, and that would be an excellent “excuse” (i.e., motivation) to keep flying and stay current. That all is, of course, dependent on getting current again. It’s been a while since I’ve flown. So maybe we’ll table that thought for the moment and look for a more simple solution.

Then it occurred to me that I might be an idiot (this is not news) and that I had completely forgotten that the CAF has OTHER Wings, and I was pretty sure that at least one was out here somewhere. A quick search shows that the Inland Empire Wing flies out of Riverside Airport, which is less than an hour away. They’re not as big and don’t have as many planes as the SoCal Wing, but that’s not a deal breaker in any way. It’s most certainly worth checking out.

Meanwhile, here are some plane pictures from 2013 when the CAF’s B-29 “Fifi” and other planes came to visit in Camarillo. This is what I’m missing!

“Fifi,” at the time the one and only airworthy B-29, still one of only two.

Our F-8 Bearcat.

Our Zero.

The P-51 we had at the time, since gone and with a different owner. She might be out at the Palm Springs Air Museum…

Our Spitfire.

One of our two SNJ’s.

One of several C45 transports owned by the CAF, this was “Bucket Of Bolts.” I haven’t had a chance to ride in her … yet.

“Fifi” and “Bucket Of Bolts” came in from the previous stop of their tour, our aircraft went up to greet them, and they all did a couple of passes over the airport in formation.

Not one of ours, this is a Mark I turkey buzzard. Fairly large bird, will ruin your day big time if you meet it in the air and take it in the windshield or prop on short final.

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Filed under Airshows, Birds, CAF, Forever Home, Photography

February 19, 2026 · 23:49

Paul Gets Quicker, Catches Two Quarters Of The Rainbow

No snow. Not unexpected in the end.

However, when the rain was starting to taper off I noticed that it had gotten a little bit sunny. I scrambled to check.

Never saw the full rainbow, must have been some cloud blocking the middle part above us and back behind us. But I got the two ends.

Individually they were nice and bright.

It was however, COLD. Never even got into the 40’s, and the wind was howling.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Weather

February 18, 2026 · 22:47

Snow Level Down To 4,100 Feet Ish

After this latest storm, I can assume that Mt San Antonio is well covered in snow – all of the roads heading up there are closed, so that’s your first sign. I haven’t been able to see the mountain in the last three or four days due to all of the clouds.

What I could see today were the mountains to the east. Mt Butler was well covered, way off in the distance, but we’ve seen that before.

What was new, this being the coldest storm so far since we’ve moved in, was the snow on The Pinnacles just at the east end of Victor Valley.

The Pinnacles go up to 5,646 feet and we, out in the valley floor, are at about 3,585 feet, so with the snow line being about a third of the way down, I’m guessing it’s at about 4,100 to 4,200 feet.

Even some of the peaks and ridges off to the side of The Pinnacles had some snow on their tops.

We’re at 34°F now, and all mention of flurries or snow has disappeared from tomorrow’s forecast, so while there may be more snow up on the peaks, I have doubts that we’ll get any down here on the valley floor. I’ll be watching, but I think this snow storm crapped out for us.

I’ll still be waiting…

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Weather