Category Archives: Forever Home

July 14, 2024 · 22:11

Happy Bastille Day

Not because I’m French, or speak French, or have ever even been to France. (Someday…) Nope, just looking for any reason to celebrate, and having peasants rise up, overthrow the monarchy, and start beheading nobility sounded like a perfectly good cause today.

I thought that the Tour de France was finishing today, but apparently it’s next week, on the 21st. But Wimbledon finished today, along with the Copa and Euro soccer tournaments. And MLB wrapped up the “first half” of its season, with the All-Star break and other festivities starting tomorrow. So that gave me lots of things to do other than pay attention to the news.

These guys made excellent role models for that plan, not caring one whit about the news and all of the stupid things that humans are doing. I suspect they would be happier if we would stop cooking the planet as we’re in the middle of another long summer heat wave, but even after we manage to destroy ourselves, they’ll do just fine I suspect.

They’ll miss the two-quart buffets that I keep putting up, but those will disappear when we move to our Forever Home. I have no idea if future inhabitants of this house will bother to feed the hummers, but I can only worry about so many things, and that’s outside of my pay grade. I’ll probably leave the feeders and if the next tenants/owners want to take up the task of refilling them periodically, great. I’ll be feeding a new group of avian minions about 100 miles to the northeast. I hope. Someday. Soon. Maybe.

 

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Forever Home, Photography

June 9, 2024 · 23:23

Frantic Hummers

A new reader, Victoria, stumbled on an old post which had the audio from the hummingbirds “clicking” as they flew around. She was wondering what they looked like.

Funny you should ask.

It turns out that this weekend, while I was trying to get some peace and quiet sitting in the shade in the back yard and reading, a rough and rowdy band of three hummingbirds decided that I was an idiot who didn’t know that their feeder (which I was sitting near) was empty. They buzzed me repeatedly, and would hover right in front of my face within an arm’s length, then zoom up to hover next to the empty feeder, then zoom back down into my face, and repeat two or three more times before zooming off into the trees. The message seemed pretty obvious.

“Look, stupid human who’s supposed to keep the feeders filled! This one’s empty! See! Hey, look at us! Hey, look at the empty feeder!”

After they did this two or three times and I was too surprised and stunned to get my phone out, two of them came back for one more pass.

I haven’t played with the audio to clean it up and the YouTube compression algorithm butchers the sound a lot, but you can still hear them zooming.

For having a brain that’s smaller than a walnut, they sure can fly, and apparently make the connection between me (or at least, people in general) and their feeder being refilled. They’ve watched me do it enough times. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible or likely, but I’ve been wrong before.

Or I’m wrong now, anthropomorphizing the crap out of the situation, and just feeling guilty about letting the feeder get empty. (There are other feeders, the trees are in bloom and covered in pollen, and the place is lousy with flowers in bloom. None of them are starving to death.)

It also reminds me that the Forever Home, wherever it might be, needs to have lots of birds in general, hummingbirds specifically. I live for this particular style of abuse.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Forever Home, Video

June 4, 2024 · 22:41

Six Lessons Learned On The Grass

Last Friday, while having my telescope set up at my daughter’s school, we saw what I believe to be a Falcon 9 upper stage venting excess fuel on its first orbit around after a Starlink launch from Florida. Tonight there was a very similar launch at a very similar time on a very similar mission, so about 80 minutes after the launch I sat out on my front yard with a camera for a while just in case it happened again. It didn’t. But there were still six lessons I learned.

  1. With the multiple flood lights set up by the new neighbor across the street, it’s tough to see anything more dim than a 737’s landing lights going into Burbank. DAMN! In the search for the Forever Home in the High Desert, I’ll have to keep that in mind.
  2. When it’s quiet, you can hear the train whistles from the Santa Susanna Pass, about two miles away as the crow flies. Funny, I would have guessed it was closer to ten miles, but Google Earth says otherwise.
  3. The rabbits out on the front lawn freak out when I go and sit down on the grass – that’s their grass and there was a lot of leporine side eye going on. I didn’t know I needed an invitation.
  4. In addition to the trains, there were repeated calls from what I’ve always referred to as a “night hawk” or “screech owl.” Turns out the latter guess was closer – what I’m hearing is the screech of a barn owl. Given the Great Horned Owls we hear almost every night, I guess I’m not surprised to hear another kind of owl around as well. But I’ve never, ever seen one, I just hear them once or twice a night, and several times tonight.
  5. The rabbits would be a lot healthier if they spent less time giving me the stinkeye and more time watching out for those barn owls.
  6. The sprinklers turn on at 8:00. With little or no warning. Good thing I’m wash & wear, even at my advanced age.

The Forever Home definitely needs to have dark skies, trains, owls and hawks, and probably rabbits. Although I suspect in that environment (and sort of here as well) the coyotes will be more of an issue for the rabbits than the owls and hawks.

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Filed under Astronomy, Birds, Forever Home, Space

May 22, 2024 · 23:36

The Roses Groweth & The Roses Flyeth Away

There are houses we looked at this weekend who had large lots (up to 2.22 acres) and were 99% dirt (zoned for raising horses usually) and those with more reasonably sized lots (about 1/2 acre). Some of the smaller lots were also “desert landscaping” (i.e. dirt & rock & cactus) but most had lots of landscaping (or astroturf – water’s rationed and expensive in the desert) and almost all had lots of roses.

This is a good thing! But no matter how much you grow roses, it doesn’t take much wind to start scattering petals, and there’s a LOT of wind up there in the desert. So there will be a lot of this going on. And probably no gardener to take care of them, so there’s another challenge and learning curve for me!

Do they have “Raising Roses 101” classes at the community college?

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Filed under Flowers, Forever Home, Photography

May 19, 2024 · 23:35

We Don’t Deserve Dogs

Two days, nine houses toured, another half dozen seen in drivebys, countless miles exploring the new territory, and the highlight for the weekend was the pups.

These  beggars were locked away in a kennel at the side of the house and started carrying on as soon as we pulled up and parked. But it wasn’t barking to protect their property, it was whining wanting attention and licks and scratches and (please!please!please!) treats. (Sadly, I did not have any treats, but I was open to being licked and scratching chins, ears, foreheads, whatever I could reach through the fence.)

At the end of the day there were two humongous Rottweilers named Hansel and Gretel who were loose and a serious danger to drown me in licks and slobber. SUCH GOOD PUPPERS!!!  What a way to go!

Since one of our key motivations for finding a new place and buying our own home is so that we can have dogs again, these two places go high on the list.

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Filed under Dogs, Forever Home, Photography, Travel

May 17, 2024 · 23:49

Victor Valley Visit #1

Well, here we are!

What has always been nothing more than a boring, suburban stretch of the I-15 on the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is now our #1 target in the search for our “Forever Home.”

Months and years of searching through a gazillion Zillow listings has left us (we think? we hope? we pray?) ready to move to the next step. I’ve memorized the map and know where so many key places are, but it’s of course one thing to see them on a map and another to drive around town and bump into them.

We’ve got appointments to see A) a couple GORGEOUS houses that we will never, ever be able to afford and B) a bunch that we can afford for about half of what we’re currently paying in rent but they’re grey on gray and boring and suburban and we’ll see what we see.

See all of those hearts on the map? With luck, by Thanksgiving, one of them will pan out and I’ll be draping a bagillion Christmas lights over it for the first time. Or I’ll be bouncing off the walls in a rubber room and taking advantage of massive doses of the miracles of modern sedation.

Could go either way…

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Filed under Forever Home, Travel

May 5, 2024 · 21:50

Roses Are Red (Mostly, Ish)

The roses next to the driveway have started to explode into color and life. This is a glorious thing.

Compared to some of the neighbors, ours is a small and simple crop.

But so, so many of the houses I’m looking at on Zillow (in a completely different part of SoCal) have none at all in the pictures.

If/when we get one of those houses and move, finding a stretch of the front yard to put in roses will be a priority.

Plenty of time to unpack later.

Seeing this every spring and all summer when you go out or when you come home is more important.

It’s one of those key little things that will change a new house into our forever home.

Roses, and hummingbird feeders. Even if we don’t see hummingbirds on Day One. They’ll find us.

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Filed under Flowers, Forever Home, Photography

January 8, 2024 · 23:28

Water & Desert

We’ve been to Lake Havasu a few times back in the past. Not always the best of circumstances, but I always liked the juxtaposition of the water and the desert.

 

I also liked the storms that would come up out there, often violent thunderstorms that were over and gone in just a few minutes, travelling off to create flash floods elsewhere.

Los Angeles is set in the desert and I’ve been here almost fifty years – but it’s faux desert, calmed by a ton of water, concrete, and freeways. The lizards, ravens, and coyotes are the last wild things.

We’ll see what this year brings. It won’t be Havasu, but in many ways, for reasons practical, spiritual, and economic, the desert might be calling.

 

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography

September 29, 2023 · 23:43

Zillow Listings

Over the past three years or so I’ve looked at a LOT of listings on Zillow. Thousands of them. Possibly ten thousand or more. More of the reasons and story and results some other time, but right now I notice there are a couple of red flags that just really are starting to get on my nerves.

Dear Mr. or Ms. Realtor, let me make sure I have this correct. You want me to put my trust in you and pay someone something between $400,000 and $700,000, with you getting what? 5%? 6%? You want me to let you be my guide through a gazillion details on what will probably be the biggest financial transaction of my life. A complex, detailed transaction that I’ll maybe do once or twice in my life but which you do every day, because you’re the expert, the professional.

And yet…

And yet, when writing and posting the Zillow ad copy, you can’t be bothered to proofread it for spelling errors that should embarrass a third grader? Spelling and grammar aren’t your strong points? Okay, you’re trying to earn a $40,000 payday on this gig, maybe spend $50 on ten minutes of a proofreader’s time. Or at least ask what that red, squiggly line right there means in Microsoft Word.

Perhaps it’s not an outright deal killer, but it does not instill confidence.

These drone shots are gorgeous and that spectacular sunset is a wonder to behold!

Until, of course, you realize that that exact same sunset, or at least its AI cousin, is in every! single! listing! And if you know anything about computers and software these days, you realize that the latest version of Photoshop has a pushbutton feature that will add that sunset skyline to any photo. I’m sure that there are some spectacular sunsets in the upper desert. But this isn’t one of them.

In fact, if you look through the rest of the pictures for this particular house, you’ll find this:

Now look closely at the first picture with the fake sunset, down at the bottom where the bright sun is casting shadows of that iron fence on the ground beneath and between the tumbleweeds. Those look exactly like the shadows in the lower picture, cast by the bright sun overhead some time around mid day. Yet the sun is supposed to be setting on the far horizon…

It’s not AI, it’s not a rendering with some decent software that will adjust the shadows and other effects of perspective. It’s a Photoshop plug-in that darkened everything to make it look like dusk, added the sun and purple-pink sunset clouds, and make all of the windows yellow, a so-so first attempt to make them look like there were lights on in the house. But that’s it.

I get it. It’s advertising. And I know that these days a lot of the interior pictures are “digitally staged” with fake furniture and wall decorations and paintings. Which makes me immediately ask, “What else has been digitally ‘enhanced’?” Are there stains and wear on the carpets or floors that have been removed? Are there stains or holes or damage that have been “removed?” Are the appliances or ceiling fans “digital enhancements?”

The other thing that I know is done is that the interior pictures are taken with an ultra wide angle lens, making the rooms look MUCH bigger than they truly are. That’s been striking when we’ve actually looked at places in person. Having poured over a few dozen pictures of a place I really liked, seeing it in person was disorienting at first. It was the house I had been looking at for months – but it wasn’t.

I don’t think there are a lot of regulations on what’s allowed and what’s not in terms of “truth in advertising” on these ads. At the far extreme, sure, you can’t actually show a different house or rooms that just don’t exist. But I don’t think anyone shows 100% factual, accurate, “normal” photos with no manipulation used.

Which is why when the time comes to be ready to push the button, we’re going to go physically walk through a lot of houses. (Probably not ten thousand plus!)

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Filed under Forever Home, Paul