Category Archives: Los Angeles

October 9, 2015 · 23:32

Where Did The Day Go?

I hate the feeling at 23:18 at night when you know that you were busy all day, and you can remember doing that, that, and that, and going there, and taking care of that errand, and picking up those, and spending hours and hours working on this ’cause you promised it for tomorrow — but you feel like, “Did I get anything done today?!”

When in doubt, take a few minutes to flip through some pictures and find one to share. Like this one.

Not taken today, of course. Today we’re setting high temperature records again all throughout the region and there’s not a cloud in the sky. Except for the occasional “pyrocumulus” clouds rising over the brush fires.

I hate the feeling at 23:31 at night when you’ve at least gotten something to post on the website today, but you’ve still got a dozen things to get off your desk before you can go to bed and you have to get up “early for a Saturday” tomorrow to get out to the hangar with that thing you worked on all day…

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Filed under Flying, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather

October 3, 2015 · 22:46

Is It Moral? A Pop Quiz For October 3rd

I observed something today germane to pretty much nothing in the big scheme of things, but it did get me to wondering, so I figured I would throw it out there and see if anyone else had a comment.

The Post Office. A woman pulls into one of the handicapped parking spaces right in front of the door. She immediately hangs her handicapped parking placard on the rear-view mirror. No problem.

But she never gets out of the car. Her twenty-something passenger (assumed to be a daughter, maybe) gets out of the passenger side and runs into the post office to stand in line for whatever business there is.

The driver appears to be in her sixties, if not older. From what I can see she appears frail. The passenger looks like she runs marathons.

There are a number of assumptions here, I’ll admit right up front. Above all, I’m assuming that the handicapped placard is for the driver and that the passenger is perfectly healthy.

Given that, is it moral for this lady to park in the handicapped space when she’s not going to be the one getting out of the car?

I’m sure it’s legal. She has a placard. I’m assuming that she has it for a reason and she’s not one of the people (there are a LOT of them in Los Angeles) who has a fake placard or got a real one by buying it.

But the prime rationale for the existence of handicapped parking spaces is to make it easier for those with physical limitations to get into the building without having to walk a longer distance across the parking lot. Forget all of the legal and bureaucratic nonsense. They exist because society wants to help “even the playing field” for those with physical handicaps.

Considering why these parking spaces exist, plus the fact that in this case the person who actually was getting out of the car and going into the building was not the handicapped person, was parking here moral?

Your comments and observations are eagerly awaited. (Show your work.)

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Filed under Death Of Common Sense, Los Angeles

September 23, 2015 · 22:45

Panorama: Woodland Hills, CA

I’ve lived in the west San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles for thirty years now – that sort of amazes me.

It’s not a bad area, as cities go. We’ve had good schools for the kids, decent parks, a low crime rate, and so on. We’ve been lucky to live here (and buy a house here) at a time when the property values increased significantly, although they dropped about 45% in the 2007 “Great Recession.” (They’re now getting back close to where they were.) All in all, a pretty nice place.

But in the end, it is a city. While I’ve lived in one for most of my life, and I enjoy visiting other cities, when I come home from visiting friends or family in a smaller city (Durham, Fort Wayne, Burlington) or town (Springfield, Barre, Blacksburg) I always wonder why I’m not leaving here to go home there instead of the other way around.

Regardless, here’s a pretty good view of the area, taken from our room near the top floor of the local Marriott. We were there for a convention, the weather was clear, and while I get much better “bird’s eye” views when I’m flying overhead, I’m usually a little bit too busy flying the plane to take a lot of pictures. (That’s a good thing!)

2004_08_07_Woodland_Hills(As always, click on the image to view the full-sized file.)

This panorama comes from ten images of 2592 x 1944 pixels (5 megapixels each) combined into an image of 15,655 x 1883 pixels (29.4 megapixels).

This view is pretty much due west, looking at the hills that form the west end of the San Fernando Valley and separate it from Simi Valley to the northwest and Canejo Valley to the southwest.

At the far left you can see a portion of the Santa Monica Mountains. On the other side of those you’ll find Malibu and the beaches at the northern end of Los Angeles County.

Hidden by the small hill in the foreground left is the pass where the Ventura Freeway (US 101) leaves the SFV and goes down into Calabasas and Agoura.

Along the top of the ridge running left to right in the center of the picture is the county line separating Los Angeles County from Ventura County. Almost everything on the LA side is houses, while in this area, almost everything on the Ventura side is open, wild parkland. It’s great for the critters and a nice place to go hiking, biking, and so on. It’s no so great every fifteen or twenty years when it all bursts into flames and we get a wall of brush fires from Simi through Calabasas and marching all the way to sea in Malibu.

Off the the right, sort of right above the Wells Fargo Bank building, is the Santa Suzanna Pass that goes from the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley. The 118 Freeway runs through there.

That’s what can make it somewhat tricky getting from where I live out to the CAF hangar in Camarillo, which is about thirty miles out on the Ventura Freeway. Between the Ventura Freeway on the south and the Simi Valley Freeway on the north, there aren’t really any other routes west through those hills. (OK, I know one, but it’s basically a one-and-a-half lane death trap that would no doubt be a blast on a motorcycle or with a new convertible and a ton of insurance, but I wouldn’t use it to commute.)

If one of those two freeways gets clobbered by a big accident, there are very limited options. If you know of a problem on one you can take the other, but a 100,000 of your new closest friends will be joining you. If you don’t know about the problem until you get caught in the backup, you can get stuck for an hour, two hours, three hours…

The other driving option if both freeways are clobbered is to use Topanga Canyon to cut south over the mountains to the ocean, then take Pacific Coast Highway north to Point Mugu and Camarillo. This is also on twisty, two and three lane “highways,” which were state of the art in the 1940’s, but not so much now. Still, if there isn’t any traffic and you just want to kill the extra time to have a fun drive, it’s great. When it’s the last driving option available and all of those aforementioned close, personal friends are joining you, then not so much.

Of course, if I had my own plane and was current, the better option in such a mess would be to drive the opposite direction entirely to Van Nuys or Whiteman, then fly to Camarillo. Much faster, much more fun. I highly recommend it!

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Filed under Los Angeles, Panorama, Photography

August 19, 2015 · 22:42

Good Meetings

I had a series of follow-up meetings today in downtown Los Angeles. I talked about many interesting things with many interesting people. I feel good following those meetings. Let’s hope it was a good day for the (figurative) hunting of 400-pound elephants.

And, hey, more pictures of downtown Los Angeles!

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Keep those karma points coming, I need all the help I can get.

I swear, I’ll stop beating around the bush and tell you what this was all about. Real soon now. I hope it’s on a day of celebration. Real soon now.

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Filed under Job Hunt, Los Angeles, Paul, Photography

August 12, 2015 · 22:28

Good Meeting

I had what I thought was a very good meeting this afternoon in downtown Los Angeles. We talked about some interesting things. I’m hoping that those I met with thought that it went well also. Perhaps there might be another meeting in a couple of weeks.

That would be a very good thing. It’s time for the 400-pound elephant in the room to find residence elsewhere.

Also, it has occurred to me that I have many more pictures of downtown Prague and London and Boston and Shanghai and Kyoto and Washington and Seoul and Southampton and Brussels and Seattle and Cabo San Lucas (and on and on and on…) than I have of downtown Los Angeles. I’ve only visited those places for a few days, I’ve lived here for over forty years. Among other benefits, a side effect of a positive outcome to today’s meeting would no doubt offer many, many opportunities to rectify that situation.

If anyone has any karma points to loan to me, they would be welcome at this point.

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Here’s one quick photo I grabbed this afternoon before my meeting. Gotta love those old art deco buildings!

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Filed under Job Hunt, Los Angeles, Photography

July 4, 2015 · 16:52

Fourth Of July Adventure!

I hope you and yours are having a fun (and safe) Fourth of July if you’re in the United States – if not, Happy Saturday!

I’m at the Dodgers game with The Younger Daughter, looking forward to baseball, hot dogs, and fireworks. At the moment the big question is, “Who starts a Fourth of July fireworks game at 4:15??!” We shall see.

But in the search for adventure beyond the norm, we decided to see if we could get to Dodger Stadium using public transportation. Yes, LA does have public transit!

   

In theory we could have caught a bus a block from home and then switched to the Orange Line bus to get to the North Hollywood station, which is the closest subway station to our house. This would have taken an hour or more.

In practice, we drove to the North Hollywood station in twenty minutes. (In rush hour, it would have been well over an hour.)

 

The North Hollywood station is at the end of the Red Line subway. A train was just pulling in. We rode with many Dodger fans.

Mind you, this was not like riding the train to a Yankees or Cardinals or Nationals game, where 95% of the passengers are going to the game. For us it was maybe 10%. But that’s 10% in the land of the automobile and freeway obsessed. It’s progress.

We got off where the Red Line ends at Union Station. From there the Dodgers and LA Metro have a free bus shuttle up to Dodger Stadium.

 

So it’s actually a piece ofcake to get here using public transit. The bus makes a stop outside of center field and also at the top of the stadium behind home plate. 

Downtown Los Angeles looks like a postcard today.
 

The stadium is ready and has been upgraded a little bit each year, but as always with Dodgers fans, it’s a late arriving crowd. (A 4:15 game? Really?)
 

The big flag is out, it’s time to play ball! Let’s hope it’s as easy getting home tonight as it was getting here! (If not, maybe we’ll try Uber or Lyftfor the first time.)

Enjoy your holiday!

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Filed under Fireworks, Los Angeles, Photography, Sports

May 7, 2015 · 22:20

Tiny Drops

It almost NEVER rains in SoCal after March or early April. Yet tonight while letting the dog-beast enjoy her evening constitutional, there were little tiny drops.

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Reflected in the back window of the Volvo…

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…and off of the roof. (The car’s red, the sky wasn’t.)

Make no mistake, the drought’s bad, getting worse fast, and has excellent potential to be a real world-class disaster. But over and above that, our weather is just getting…statistically unlikely, on a regular basis. Or just odd.

Later this evening we got actual, honest to god rain. Not much, probably only 0.10″ or so, but radar shows some widely scattered showers that are pretty heavy. And it’s a cold system, so our high is only going to be about 58°F tomorrow with the snow level in the mountains down below 5,000 feet.

In May??! In Southern California??!!

Little tiny drops might be great big signs and portents of changes that are already in motion.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather

May 3, 2015 · 08:00

Random Photo For May 3rd

Last night I sat down to quickly pick, write, and post something. Thinking was contraindicated, and brevity was a real goal. Ninety minutes and 895 words later, it was obvious that those plans had gone a bit off the rails. Here’s what I wanted to do before I went off into la-la land.

Given my filing system for photos and given the way Chuck Wendig has us use random numbers to pick a subject for our Flash Fiction Challenges, for those days when I haven’t got a clue what to post about and need a “seed idea” to start with, why not combine random numbers with my filing system? Pick a number between 1999 and 2015. Pick a number between 1 and 12. Pick a number between 1 and 31 (or 30 or 28). Odds are better than 50/50 that there were photos taken that day. If necessary, re-pick that third number to get a date where pictures were taken. If necessary, pick a letter between “a” and whatever the last one used is to narrow down which directory to pick from.

Find a single photo from that directory for today’s topic.

See, isn’t that simple? There’s a neat little app that will do this now, so it works like this — 2012 + 3 + 16

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThis is the day before I ran my first marathon. The LA Marathon Fair was filling a good chunk of the Dodger Stadium parking lot and we were there to pick up our bibs and swag.

Honda was at that time the big official automobile sponsor of the LA Marathon, and they had a minivan that had been detailed with the names of about 20,000 runners. Can you find my name?

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Running

April 6, 2015 · 23:30

Burn Area

A week ago I talked about hearing sirens and how sometimes here that means there’s a brush fire in the area.

After the fire’s gone, large areas can be left scorched and burnt. This in turn leads to all kinds of problems from mudslides and flooding if there should be heavy rain, even months later. (Now however, we would probably trade the mudslide danger for the heavy rain and take our chances.)

While we think of the burn area as being all black, burnt, and smelling of soot and smoke — and that really is the way it is for the most part — given a couple of months Mother Nature will come back and some of it starts to look quite stunning.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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Filed under Disasters, Los Angeles, Photography

March 29, 2015 · 22:48

Sirens

When it’s quiet at night it’s always spooky to hear the sirens on emergency vehicles echoing through the hills.

We have a hospital a mile away, so usually you hear the ambulances going of in that direction and then stopping. Someone’s having a bad night.

Sometimes you’ll hear police cars on one of the major streets that crisscross the area. If it’s something big, there will be police helicopters. If it’s big and goes on for a while, the police helicopters will be joined by the television station helicopters.

If you see or hear the TV helicopters out there, flip on the news.

When you hear the fire trucks, normally they’re coming from the fire station that’s a mile or so off in the other direction. Generally they’re heading off down one of the major streets as well, maybe to meet up with the police, ambulance, and assorted helicopters for a major freeway accident.

Rarely, you’ll hear the sirens of one sort or another getting closer, then pulling into our neighborhood. Never a good sign, but fortunately rare in these parts. Generally it indicates some sort of medical situation.

The worst is when the Santa Ana winds blow, and it gets hot and dry. The wind can be gusting to 50 or 60 knots, it’s dry as a bone, and into triple digits during the day and only getting down into the 70’s at night. Then you hear the sirens — and pray that it’s an ambulance or police car. If it’s a fire truck, you pray that they head into the city for some sort of traffic accident. If it’s a fire truck and they’re not going into the city, you pray you don’t hear a second, or a third — or a tenth.

If you hear the second or third fire truck heading up into the canyons and hills, check the news. Check the skies for smoke. Double check to make sure you know what your evacuation plan is.

What to you grab if you only have two minutes to get out? Ten minutes? Sixty minutes?

There’s smoke? It looks closer than you like? Maybe it’s time to put at least the first couple of those boxes of vital documents and your bugout bags into the cars and get the cars turned around in the driveway so they’re easy to load and easy to drive straight out.

Tonight it sounded like two ambulances, a police car or two, and at least one fire truck, all heading to either one of the main streets or back to the hospital. No smoke. No news. The winds are calm tonight.

Tomorrow we might not be so fortunate.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Disasters, Los Angeles, Photography