Again, as always out here where they decided to build megalopolises in a desert, we need the rain.
The three days of it we just got came as a complete surprise.
The clouds are headed out (I think) and the moon is about 99.8% full, so I tried playing with how it looked through the now barren tree.
The owls off down the hill added to the spookiness quotient.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Out at the CAF SoCal hangar today. It was rainy and gray, but the cloud base lifted a little bit around noon, and we got visitors.
The Condor Squadron flys out of Van Nuys Airport and is a common site in SoCal airshows, event flyovers, and other aviation events.
They perform formation flying in their AT-6 “Texans” on their missions. The “Advanced Trainer” was used in the US, but the same design in England during WWII was known as the “Harvard.”
With those old round engines, the “Texan” has a very distinctive “blaaaaaaaaaaat” sound as the prop tips break the sound barrier.
That sound carries well and the Condors’ practice routines often carry them over our house, so you’ll often see me running around the house yelling, “TEXANS!” and grabbing a camera to run out and catch them flying by.
With the rain and fog it had been quiet, but the arrival of the four Condor aircraft at full throttle over the runway took care of that. It was great to see them!
Filed under CAF, Flying, Photography
Oh, to be out here someplace in a Goliath-class scout ship, a new system to explore, wondering which of the gas giants or Earth-like worlds we would explore first.
I may be excessively channeling my inner Calvin and Hobbes. Although my Hobbes is a stuffed dolphin, not a tiger, but all the better for exploring those water worlds!
This is not necessarily a bad thing, by any means, by the way.
Filed under Paul, Photography
When it’s been a long day in the middle of a long week in the middle of a long month after several long months… Throw a dart at the photo directory!
Big surprise! I was someplace taking pictures of airplanes!
2006. McCarren Airport, Las Vegas.
Give me an airport, a camera, and a couple hours to kill before our flight, I’ll be predictable.
To be honest, 2006 must have been a weird year. I actually had to look through about a half dozen directories before I found something that didn’t give me PTSD.
Work related, a couple of jobs ago, but time and selective amnesia had erased some of those memories. Nothing too nasty – an awards ceremony, folks I hadn’t thought of in probably fifteen years, an office move.
Damn! Good things there were planes too!
Filed under Flying, Photography, Travel
In this case, a thin layer of it at about 30,000′, called cirrostratus nebulosus clouds.
Quite the pleasant surprise when you’re just going out to stretch your legs!
Other critters besides me were impressed. There was a pack of coyotes, sounded like a half dozen or more, howling away and carrying on something fierce. It sounded like they were down on the next street downhill from us to the west.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather
It’s “suboptimal” at best to be sitting at my desk at 23:15, especially after having been here pretty much constantly, going like a demon, since about 08:15 this morning.
But if you have to make your own silver lining (and it doesn’t look like the cavalry is coming over the hill to do it for me any time soon) you can do worse than setting up the monitors on your secondary computer with this view.
On the left, the Shiodome Rail Tracks in Tokyo. (If you’re bored, try to use Google Earth to figure out exactly where the camera by matching up buildings and landmarks.) My son turned me on to this feed a while back since he was passing through there periodically. It’s very calming and the trains rumbling below are wonderful white noise.
On the right, Venice as seen from the Hotel Filu. This channel plays light classical music all the time (lots of Vivaldi, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, that sort of thing) and you can watch the boats go by. Tonight (my time) as I was working it was dawn in Venice, where the skies are clear and brisk and the sunset was wonderful!
Yes, very much places I would like to be rather than at this desk. One of these days…
Filed under Castle Willett, Photography, Travel
As usual, we’re the last house on the block with our Christmas lights still up. There are a couple around the area, but not many. So the time has come.
I don’t know if I’ll actually get the lights down tomorrow, although they come down a lot faster than they go up. But the power needs to be cut tomorrow.
So, here’s last light for this year.
Let’s see what happens in 2022. Ten and a half months from now, will we even be in this house?
If so, I’ve got some ideas on where to add even more lights. Perhaps fewer commitments in 2022 will allow more time to do a more extravagant job.
If not, well, let’s just say that in the great Zillow hunt of 2022, one set of considerations includes how the roofline would look all lit up, how much roofline there is, how many other trees, bushes, and yard structures there are to cover in lights, whether the house is on a street where everyone within ten miles will see the glow on the horizon… You know, the usual things!
Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography
Sometimes, you just need to MAKE time to look at the clouds.
If you didn’t get to do that today, here, please, use some of mine!
Sometimes you’ll even spot a quarter moon hanging up there in the late afternoon.
Or a hawk or two, or crows, or crows harassing hawks, or a flock of goofy juncos taking their chance to bolt for cover while the crows are harassing the hawks.
Mostly today I saw layers. Some low, dark clouds, some puffy white stuff at about 5,000′, and some thin, icy streaks at about 15,000′.
It would have been a nice day for flying.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Folks who think we never get snow in SoCal haven’t ever been here. We have ski resorts within an hour’s drive.
It’s extremely rare to get snow down in the valleys or on the floor of the LA Basin. These areas are all about 99% under 1,000′ elevation. But the mountains all around go anywhere from 1,600′ in Griffith Park, right near Hollywood and downtown LA, to 3,300′ in the Santa Monica Mountains, to well over 10,000′ in the San Bernardino Mountains. I can remember once getting about 1/4 inch of snow in a house that was at 910′ and next to the foothills in about 1987 or 1988. Our current house is at 1,062′ and we’ve never even come close.
However, after last week’s storms, when a fair amount of snow got dropped down to about 3,000′ there are plenty of places to see snow-capped mountains off in the distance. I just didn’t know that our yard was one of those places.
But it’s winter, and a lot of the trees have finished dropping their leaves. While talking to the crows today I noticed that if you go way over to the corner of the yard, and squat right here, and peek through the trees over there…
It’s not one of those picture postcard views that they show between every other float and marching band at the Rose Parade, but it’s our very own view!
Just as long as I don’t throw my back out trying to stand again after squatting and peeking!
Filed under Castle Willett, Los Angeles, Photography
First Tuesday – better than First Monday? No? That sucks – hang in there, we’re all rooting and hoping for tomorrow to be better.
Stay warm. Be comfy. Find something colorful to cheer you up.
If you’re busier than God and feeling crushed, post something brief, upbeat, easy, and colorful to your blog. Fake it ’til you make it!
Listen to some Pink Floyd. “The Great Gig in the Sky,” perhaps. Yeah – that’s it!
Filed under Paul, Photography
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