Did I mention that on the day after Thanksgiving I went down to the California Science Center near the USC campus and the Coliseum in downtown Los Angeles and saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour?
It’s just a tiny little bit freakin’ awesome.
Scorched tiles on the belly above us.
The business end with the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs).
Twenty-five missions, from May 1992 until May 2011.
It’s on display until December 31st like this, then it will be off display for a couple of years. There’s a huge new building under construction next to this one where it will be displayed in the upright, “ready to launch” configuration.
In addition to Endeavour, the museum also has the last surviving flight-rated external fuel tank, and two Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs).
Once they put it all together in a vertical configuration, it will look just like it did on the launch pad, ready to go to space. When you first come in from the parking lot you can see the two SRBs standing up, peeking over the top of the outside walls of the new building.
As you leave the exhibition, over yonder you can see the orange foam of that final external tank.
The 2022-2023 season at the Ahmanson is over and the new 2023-2024 season doesn’t start until December.
But in the meantime they have squeezed in a return engagement of one of last year’s hits (and a huge Tony Award winner from 2019 when it was on Broadway.)
We enjoyed it the first time, and we’ll take any excuse to get “oot und aboot” on a Saturday night, so here we are!
We’re fine. In our particular neighborhood we haven’t had anything particularly threatening going on, fortunately. Other folks in other areas have been less fortunate, but overall, so far, it seems as if the impacts have been within reason. I haven’t heard of any fatalities or serious injuries due to the storm beyond a couple of traffic accidents probably caused in part by the rain – but that happens any time it rains in SoCal.
I got going early this morning and went out to get our weekly groceries and our Sunday breakfast. It was just starting to rain here, even though it had been raining for several hours further south in Long Beach, Orange County, San Diego, and Mexico.
By late afternoon it had started raining much harder and the wind had come up, but again, nothing disasterous. We got a bit over two inches of rain so far (it’s still raining and expected to continue for the next 10-12 hours) and we saw winds in the 20-25 mph range, but none of the 50-80 mph gusts that were possible. No power outages. A few flooded intersections around town, but we weren’t going out! The National Weather Service said “Stay!” and I did my best golden retriever imitation and stayed!
Of course, in the middle of all of this there was that magnitude 5.1 earthquake about fourty miles from us that rattled me from side to side for about ten seconds and shook up some stuff on the shelves behind me. Who had that on their SoCal Disaster Sunday bingo card?
Meanwhile, there’s street flooding and swift water rescues going on out in Ventura, some very near Camarillo Airport where I’ve spent so much time over the last few years with the CAF SoCal Wing. Today was supposed to be the second day of the Wings Over Camarillo airshow out there (do a search, there are a dozen more posts full of pictures over the years from that show), but that got cancelled last night. Out in the desert and in particular around Death Valley National Park there was some massive flash flooding, but the park had been evacuated over the weekend so no word of any casualties. It might just have the park closed for repairs for a while.
All in all, it could have been a lot worse. And while it still is unstable out there and could still be worse tonight, I think the odds are that SoCal dodged a bullet on this one. I just doubt that it’s going to be another 84 years before it happens again.
Up in the mountains and high desert (not so much down here in the LA Basin and the valleys that are close to the ocean) humidity (monsoonal moisture) plus heat (over 100ºF today) gives rise to thunderstorms. So today to our north, toward Mt Pinos and the Coastal Range (on the left), the Grapevine (center) and the Antelope Valley (on the right), we saw this:
(It’s a good sized image – click on it to see it full sized!)
The big threat for the next few days however is from the south, off of Baja. Tropical Storm Hilary is building off of Cabo San Lucas and is expected to be a full-blown hurricane tomorrow. It’s expected to travel more or less due north off of Baja until it slams into Southern California and Arizona over the weekend.
It’s all still three or four days out so who knows what the weather gods will actually deliver – just based on our luck, we’ll get missed entirely and Las Vegas and Phoenix will get flooded. Still, the current model from NWS Los Angeles says we’ll get somewhere between 2-5 inches of rain, so I’m hopeful.
It’s 22:30 local and it still sounds like a war zone out there. Once again we didn’t go out and fight any crowds or traffic to see a fireworks display – we can see them when we go to a Friday night Angels game.
From the hill we live on we have a decent view of a local display that’s about four miles away. While we were sitting out in the back we were serenaded by at least three (probably more) red-tailed hawks who were NOT HAPPY about all of the boomy sounds all around. They kept perching for a few minutes in the pine trees in front of us, then circling and screaming over the neighborhood, then perching again. I haven’t seen that before.
Finally, just after 22:00, the 95% full moon came up through the clouds of cordite and smoke, looking like a pumpkin or a full lunar eclipse.
Two days in and July is…fiesty. And that’s not even counting the guanopsychotic politics and whatever is happening on Twitter.
For example:
I keep seeing lights up on Castle Peak after dark. Sometimes WELL after dark, so it’s not just someone who misjudged how long the light would last after sunset. Groups of 3 or 4 lights usually, apparently headed back down.
Given that this summer we’ve seen rescue helicopters up there multiple times a week for hikers who have fallen or broken something or gotten trapped during the day, hiking at night doesn’t seem prudent.
(Image from Earthquake.usgs.gov)
Originally reported as a M4.1 shaker, later downgraded to a M3.8 event, it was felt all over the LA Basin and San Fernando Valley at 01:29 last night. Given the location and size I would have bet a lot that it would have jolted me awake, but I slept right through it. It’s not like I was dead to the world asleep, last night was actually a pretty lousy night’s sleep. But the earthquake wasn’t one of the contributing factors.
Of course, given the upcoming holiday, every night there are more and more illegal fireworks being shot off.
We know how much (badly needed!) rain we got this winter, so the hills and mountains were green and covered in new vegetation this spring. While May and June were generally cool and cloudy, now that summer’s here it’s gotten into the 90’s every day. A + B + C = all of that new growth is turning into kindling. One moron with illegal bottle rockets can set off a catastrophe.
It’s been a really, REALLY wet winter, which was fantastic! Everything’s green and growing! Until it gets hot, and dry, and “everything” turns brown and highly flammable.
We aren’t quite there yet with all of the May Gray and June Gloom that I’ve been complaining about as the marine layer stays over us all day long for weeks on end. But we haven’t had a good, soaking rain in a couple of months, so we’re getting there.
As a side note, there’s a new app that I like a lot called “Watch Duty.” It goes off and sends you notifications if any brush fires pop up within the range you have set. I have mine set to all of LA County and it’s gone off a half dozen times this spring and early summer. Imagine my surprise when it beeped and vibrated this afternoon and said there was a new fire in West Hills, at an intersection that’s maybe a mile away as the crow flies…
(Image: Watch Duty)
And about two seconds later I heard ALL of the fire trucks firing up their sirens and two air dropping helicopters going over at about 500 feet.
Huh! Something’s going on, me thinks! Let’s go look!
About two acres of light brush, reported to have started at Knapp Ranch Park. The bad news is that Knapp Ranch isn’t at the top of the hill, but just a block or so up from Valley Circle Boulevard, so there are three or four streets crossing the hill north to south above it. Streets with houses on both sides. Which the fire was rapidly approaching.
LAPD and LA County Fire hit this one hard. We had at least three, maybe more, water dropping helicopters overhead in less than ten minutes. It looked like they were going to refill up in Chatsworth Reservoir, which is directly behind us compared to the fire, so we had our own little airshow going on.
We also of course had a whole fleet of fire trucks and crews converging on the area. Which blocked Valley Circle Boulevard and had a whole stream of folks cutting across to Platt and Sherman Way via Highlander, making a mess of our local side streets.
Meh, could have been a lot worse. The winds were light and while today was warmer and clear, the recent history of cloudy, cool days helped. It didn’t spread fast. It took them less than an hour to declare it contained and I never heard any reports of any houses being damaged. Although I do bet there were some homeowners immediately uphill of the fire needing a change of underwear.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 