Category Archives: Forever Home

December 29, 2025 · 23:05

Sunday Morning Mountain

For years we have gone out to breakfast on Sunday mornings, followed by our major weekly trip to the grocery store. COVID put a hitch in our getalong for a while (we ordered breakfast to go and I went shopping by myself to get in and get out) but now we’re getting back to that routine in Hesperia. It’s nice.

A couple of the places we go are about five miles away, near the post office, so it’s a good chance to also swing by and clean out the PO Box. The place we went this last Sunday is right near the Main Street overpass of the BNSF mainline railroad tracks, which might be one of the taller structures in the area. And it was the first day after the clouds had finally cleared out following the Christmas storm.

While we were waiting for breakfast to get cooked and served, I took a short hike.

That’s the back (north) side of Mount San Antonio, known better as “Old Baldy.”

With several inches of fresh snow, it was beautiful! Too bad that with several major mountain roads closed and washed out by the flooding, no one could get up to the ski resorts there.

While I was up there for five minutes, I also got to see two freight trains, seen here just before they meet going in opposite directions. The one on the left is headed down into Cajon Pass and down the hill into the Los Angeles area rail yards, while the one on the right has just come up the hill and is headed to points east. The main line goes through Barstow, Flagstaff, Kansas City, Fort Madison, and Chicago.

Later, from a lower point of view, i.e., atop the fence surrounding the flood control basin near where I took last night’s pictures of the Christmas lights hanging over the back yard wall, you can see the mountain rising about twenty miles to the southwest of the Forever Home.

I’m thinking we won’t get tired of that view any time soon.

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December 28, 2025 · 23:29

Which House Is Ours?

As mentioned a couple of times, our street, as lovely as it is (and is really *IS*), is one street of seven in our subdivision, with none of the other streets ever being developed, leaving nothing but empty, graded, ready for construction lots for the last couple of decades. Weird, but it is what it is.

As I mentioned earlier this weekend, because of that, there’s nothing but dirt and weeds on the other side of our back wall, so I started hanging extra Christmas lights on the other side of the back wall. Theoretically I guess that would be in someone else’s yard if they ever built a house on that lot, but they haven’t, so I put lights up that can be seen when you come off of the main street into the back way into the subdivision.

Tonight I walked the two blocks down to the corner where the back entrance is and looked back toward the line of back yard walls on our street. Guess which house is ours!

I think it looks great. As I’ve said, next year I want to extend it out about twenty feet to both sides along the brick wall, and add a couple more loops below these. It will be amazing!

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December 27, 2025 · 23:00

Quarter Moon O’er The Pergola Lights

Cleaning up some of the (minor) wind damage from this latest storm, had the quarter moon almost straight overhead. From the pergola…

My other discovery about the “new” Forever Home (which I should have discovered five months ago if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an idiot) is that when:

  • I’m in my office and
  • the only other person in the house is The Long-Suffering Wife and
  • she’s a couple of rooms away and
  • we’re in a larger-sized house in a subdivision where all of the houses are on reasonably big lots and thus set away from each other and
  • a song that I really, REALLY like comes on the Sirius Channel 33 (“1st Wave”) Saturday Night Safety Dance

it’s okay for me to turn it up REALLY FUCKING LOUD!!!

That whole flooding thing on Wednesday sorta sucked, but being able to do that makes up for it!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Music

December 26, 2025 · 23:39

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Five

The back yard – a new frontier!

I’ve always put 99% of the lights up in the front yard where they could be seen by the neighbors and passers by. Yes, I want to show them off! That last 1% went round the sides of the roofline to give a bit of a 3-D sense and something to look at while you’re coming at the house from the side. To give the whole light display some depth.

And so it’s been this year, although with the huge driveway on one side and the garage doors on the side, it’s more like 75% in front and 25% on the one side. No worries, it looks good.

But the Forever Home doesn’t have anything in back of it, no neighbors, no houses, just several vacant, graded pads where houses have never been built. You can sort of see it from the intersection with the main road a block away, and you can see it clearly as you turn off of the main road and come toward our street. The pergola with all of the bird feeders sticks up above the cinder block wall.

And that’s a canvas that I had to start putting lights on this year.

As seen from the house, there are a couple of strings of lights hanging down from the support posts of the pergola. EASY to put up and support, no hooks or hangars or anything else needed. And with the low-power LED lights, you can have thousands of lights in a single string going back and forth.

What you can’t see from this view are the first (top) string running right along the top beam of the pergola and facing outward, and the fourth and fifth arcs of lights, which hang down on the outside of the wall so that they’re visible only from the outside.

(I am SOOOOOOO glad that I didn’t drop my phone over the wall taking this picture, leaning way out.)

I now have the rest of the lights that can fit onto this one string and next year I want to add another loop or two hanging below these two, then I want to extend the loops out from the top of the cinder block wall on either side of the pergola. I think it will look amazing and bright and colorful for anyone coming into the subdivision off of the back entrance from the main road.

As always…

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December 25, 2025 · 23:10

Christmas 2025

For those of you who celebrate, I hope this was a peaceful and pleasant holiday. For those who do not celebrate, I hope you had a quiet Thursday without too many inconveniences caused by everything being closed due to everyone else taking the day off.

We had two of the three kids (plus the one son-in-law) here, and we had a Zoom with the out-of-town daughter. The Long-Suffering Wife made our traditional Christmas feast featuring Joe’s BBQ from Kansas City, and there were a gazillion calories to be consumed. It was wonderful.

It was cool (mid 40’s) and windy as Hell, with the next band of rain (not as bad as yesterday) hitting after midnight tonight. Because everything’s already saturated with areas of flooding (nothing too bad near us) we’re back on a Flash Flood Watch. It will be be fine. At least our yard, interior courtyard, and garage no longer have any standing water. Let the healing (i.e., the drying out) begin!

This whole weekend storm has taught us that the City of Hesperia and the County of San Bernardino are aggressive and efficient about communicating about potential hazards. I didn’t necessarily expect that, but I most certainly appreciate it.

Technically tomorrow’s a day off at work, but I’ll likely spend most of the day trying to get caught up on paperwork and data entry. That’s going to be my Christmas gift to myself, spending that time to buy myself a little peace of mind and freedom from some of the usual time pressure. Put on some music or a football game or five, get some snacks, check a dozen or so things off the to-do list from Hell… Golden!

Adulting…

It sucks, but it’s probably better than most of the options.

(Oh, Khan’s gone from the wreath on the front door. Someone twenty miles downwind is going to find that picture in their front yard and I can only imagine what they’ll think about it. KHAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!)

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography, Weather

December 24, 2025 · 23:44

The Great Christmas Eve Flash Flood Of 2025

Standing in six inches of freezing cold water in a downpour with a bucket, desperately shoveling water into a large, rolling trash container so that it didn’t flood into the shiny, new, amazing Forever Home was NOT how I expected to spend Christmas Eve. But here we were!

They said we were going to just get a bit of this storm, nowhere near the worst of it. Either they lied, got it badly wrong, or Jeez Louise it must have been really, REALLY bad down by the coast.

It was a long, long night between the winds and the rain. Hey, did anyone else know that the cover on the flue to the fireplace in the master bedroom sounds just like a snare drum in a Neil Peart solo in a deluge?

(Image: Weather Underground app)

The yellow spots weren’t so bad after some of the orange and red blobs. And the City of Hesperia and County of San Bernardino do an extremely thorough and efficient job of notifying us of flash flood warnings, flash flood watches, tornado warnings, and tropical storm warnings by text, voice mail, email, and phone calls. Even in the middle of the night…

The problem in the back yard was annoying, but not much of a threat. It was when we noticed the rising water levels in the interior courtyard that things got exciting. There’s a drain, but it was apparently blocked by leaves. There are doors on all four sides, three of which lead into the house, particularly into my office, the hallway by the dining room, and the living room. Fortunately (by accident or otherwise), the fourth door is the lowest by about two inches and it leads into the garage where there was minimal damage to be suffered. Not a crisis, just a mess.

So out I go into the deluge and the ankle deep, ice cold water, to clear the leaves, set up a sump pump, and grab a bucket to help get the water level down faster than it was going up with all of the runoff from the gutters.

The joys of home ownership! Althought, to be honest, even if we were renting, I still would have been stuck doing this.

After about four hours we finally got the upper hand and the flow into the garage stopped. When the rain finally slacked off to just a Level 8 instead of an 11, I was able to get some warm and dry clothes again.

Being Christmas Eve, while I was bailing and pumping, The Long-Suffering Wife was cooking our first holiday dinner of the weekend. It was wonderful.

A quick check of the Christmas lights shows a couple of strands down on the ground due to the winds, but they all seem to still be on. No short circuits, no water damage. I love it when a plan works!

And we all lived happily ever after. Except, of course, for the mess that I still have to dry out and clean up in the garage. But given the fact that there’s rain expected every day for the next week, maybe we’ll just hold off on that.

 

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Weather

December 20, 2025 · 22:33

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Four

When last we saw our plucky hero, the new Forever Home had a substantially larger roofline than the old houses, so while the “baseline” colored C9 lights and white icicle lights had been put up, there were large gaps in the front that didn’t have lights at all. By the time this was discovered, buying additional lights in the store was out of the question and it took a couple weeks for them to be found and shipped in an online purchase. Now they’re here, and it was time to get those “baseline” light sets up.

Because I’m working from both ends and meeting over the front doors, there are more lights there than anywhere else as the sets overlap. That’s fine. It draws attention to the front doors, which is also where the wreaths are and where the roofline naturally is larger and more distinct.

I also started throwing strings of small colored LEDs into the now leafless maple tree. It’s a good start, but I would like to double the number and get some into the upper branches. We’ll see if I can spare any time tomorrow.

Overall, I like it, a lot. It’s a much bigger canvas than we’ve ever had at the last two houses, so I’ll need to step up my game next year to fill it better, but this year has given me valuable information to use to plan that.

Another area that can use some more lights to wrap up is over by the driveway, where only three of the seven trees have lights right now. Again, we’ll see if I have any time tomorrow to finish it up.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

December 15, 2025 · 23:56

The New Tree – Layer One

New home, nice home, Forever home. However bad 2025 might SUCK, and believe me, we don’t have to look far to see evidence of that, this will be the year that we got our Forever Home.

Our old Christmas tree was probably 20+ years old. It was a bit ratty, and most/all of the built in lights were shot. It’s now part of the outdoor decorations in the front yard and makes a wonderful substrate for a couple of strings of lights. But for the new home with the tall ceilings and the gorgous Great Room and kitchn, we needed something bigger and newer.

There are eight or nine different modes for the built-in lights here, both colored and white, twinkling & steady, switching back and forth, very complex. For now we’ve settled on the steady white lights for this first “layer.” We’ll add strings of colored lights over the top, then ornaments of all kinds (we have a “garbage” tree design), then decorate the rest of the room and the interior.

In addition, the rest of the outdoor lights have arrived and I think I’ve hit (barely!) all of the super critical deadlines at work, so I’ll be able to take some time to get the rest of the outdoor lights up.

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December 13, 2025 · 22:29

Community Christmas

The Long-Suffering Wife noticed an announcement on the FaceBook page for the local town we’ve moved to about an event at the Civic Center park with Santa, music, food, and the town Christmas tree lighting. We’re trying to be proactive about getting out and getting active in the town that we’ve chosen as our Forever Home, so off we went.

IT WAS LOVELY!!

Booths with lots of crafts and toys. Tons of people with their dogs, including an incredibly sweet and patient Great Dane. Free cookies & hot chocolate. Other food trucks, everything from pizza, crepes, Mexican food, coffee, and ice cream. Dozens and dozens of inflatable figures and a gazillion lights on the trees all through the park.

We had a wonderful sunset, then the place really lit up. The park itself (first time we’ve been over to the Library and Civic Center area) is great, plenty of benches and room to roam, fountains, and so on. We heard that during the summer there are Friday night concerts there – something to watch out for in 2026 and beyond! Plenty of parking. All in all an extremely pleasant place. We picked a good place to live!

The fountains were off but still had water in them, so there were reflections to be seen. The stage had music from a local band as well as the bands and choral groups from at least two of the local high schools. There was a dance group made up of grade school and middle school students. Santa and Mrs. Claus came in via the local LifeFlight helicopter and were scheduled for a couple hours of taking pictures with kids.

My goofy “Dr Seuss” style sproingy Christmas hat was a big hit, I got many compliments.

We didn’t stay for the tree lighting since we were getting hungry, but you can bet we’ll keep an eye open for other community events such as parades, concerts, or other holiday celebrations.

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December 12, 2025 · 23:28

Morphing Into Gondor

With the maple tree in our front yard becoming increasingly denuded and looking more and more like the White Tree of Gondor, it only makes sense that as I allow my hair to grow back out and I’m starting to look my age, I’m looking more and more like Denethor (son of Ecthelion), the 26th and Final Steward of Gondor, as portrayed in the movies by John Noble.

I hope this doesn’t mean that I have to fight an orc army or Ring Wraiths on flying Nazgul. So far it’s just Two-Tone and the owl and they seem friendly-ish.

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