Category Archives: Photography

August 14, 2025 · 23:09

Proof Of Life – August 14th

How did it get to be mid-August? My head is spinning.

Is there an end to the madness somewhere down the road? Is there a quiet, stable, relaxing space somewhere where everything is in the house and unpacked and put away, where I’m not “behind the airplane” at work and watching deadlines whiz toward me like freight trains, where I have time to kick back and chill in this nice yard and maybe read a book or have a BBQ without feeling like I really, REALLY should be doing something critical?

There must be. I have faith, or hope. Why keep moving in the marathon if I didn’t think there was a finish line?

But, damn! There are days…

Good and bad. For example, I know that there’s a drip irrigation system for all of the nice plants and fruit trees and flowers, but I have yet to see it on or any signs that it’s working. So I did some poking around, found a control panel of some sort, played around with the controls, and viola!

The good news is that it turned on! This is in the interior courtyard.

The bad news, obviously, is that I found the first drip irrigation stub that needs its nozzle replaced.

I have no idea how to do that, but I’m sure that someone at Lowe’s will be glad to explain it to me – and sell me a bunch of replacement parts.

PROGRESS! Onward, to the quiet, stable, relaxing space somewhere! RAMMING SPEED!!

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Video

August 13, 2025 · 23:56

Can We See SpaceX Launches From The High Desert?

This was not quite a deal breaker when figuring out where to find our Forever Home, but it was definitely an important question to me. And I had gone looking for videos and pictures prior to moving here, so I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

Yep! Coincidentally, we happen to have a clear view between the two houses across the street all the way to the western horizon, so less than a minute after launch there was a red dot climbing up which quickly started growing a tail of fire.

Over the next minute or two it was easy to see the tail get longer and start to change color, then it all suddenly blinked out at Main Engine Cut Off (MECO).

I figured that was it, but after the second stage lit up I could see it with my eyes for another couple of minutes, headed southbound and up.

Tonight’s launch was originally supposed to be a twilight launch, with the exhaust plume all lit up by the setting Sun from way over the horizon, and possibly a huge “jellyfish effect” as the exhaust expanded and blew around in the high altitude winds. Then the launch got bumped almost two hours, and we didn’t see any of that in the dark night sky.

Maybe next time.

It most certainly looks smaller from here – we’re almost three times as far away from Vandenberg as we were in West Hills. But this is not a strictly local phenomenon, so let’s bring on the next night launch!

By then I’ll have found the tripods and rescued them from the PODS unit and I’ll be looking for better photos and maybe some video. Stand by.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Space

August 12, 2025 · 23:42

If You’re Up Before Sunrise

Last night and tonight will be the closest approach in this conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, and they’ll be slowly separating over the next month or more, but if you’re up before dawn and have a clear sky, look to the east!

At 05:25, my iPhone taking pictures through the kitchen window is having just as much trouble focusing as I was! I know how it felt!

With a little bit of effort, both I and the phone were able to focus, both in the optical and in the philosophical sense. The brighter, lower right one is Venus, the slightly dimmer, upper left one is Jupiter. With a pair of binoculars (or the time to actually put on pants and shoes, go outside, and set up a good camera and a tripod, assuming I could find one of the tripods in one of the PODS units out in the driveway) you could easily see several of the Galilean moons near Jupiter.

This was my favorite view. We have plantation shutters…

If you’re up, go look! Take binoculars! Put on pants!

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

August 10, 2025 · 23:00

Sunset View From The Mailbox

Another change for the Forever Home from all of my previous houses is that we don’t have an individual mailbox at the street next to the driveway – there’s a set of mailboxes for the entire tract down on the corner. Since we’ve been in here almost three weeks now (WOW!) I figured I should probably see if we had any mail.

We did! A couple of very nice “Happy New House!” cards from some friends, lots of escrow closing and insurance documents, and a slew of “Dear New Homeowner” spam. (Which went straight into recycling – life’s too short!)

Since it got up to 102ºF here today (it’s a dry heat, really, not that uncomfortable) I went about a half hour after sunset when it was comfortable. With some smoke still in the area from a couple of brush fires, it was lovely.

Not saying that a few clouds couldn’t push this sort of lighting from “astonishing” up a notch or two to “extraordinary,” but I’m thinking I can get used to it as a baseline without ever taking it for granted.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

August 9, 2025 · 23:07

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One…

I think that in all of the chaos of the last six weeks, this particular bizarre incident of terror got completely overlooked. Boy, if that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is!

Back on July 10th I we were in escrow, but still living in the old house in West Hills. The Long-Suffering Wife had left for the morning, I was down the hall in my work-from-home office, and the house was filled with boxes and stuff waiting to go into boxes.

I heard a crash of some sort from down the hall, in the kitchen or living room. Being alone in the house and the sound not being something like someone smashing in a door or window to force entry, I figured something had been piled up in an unstable manner and had crashed over to the floor. I would deal with it later.

Then came another bang. And another crash. I came to the conclusion that I was NOT alone in the house.

When I went to investigate, I found that the kitchen had been invaded by mourning doves.

At the moment I had no clue how they had gotten in. All doors and windows were closed. (Later, having reviewed the view from a NestCam, I came to the conclusion that they probably came down the chimney by accident. Drunk? Fermented berries? Or just stupid and clumsy? Both?)

This one was fairly calm. I put a towel over it, picked it up, took it outside, and let it go.

This one I found in the kitchen sink and I figured it would be a breeze to drop a towel over it, trap it in the sink, and repeat the take outside & release strategy.

WRONG!

I never did figure out what its major malfunction was, but I spent fifteen minutes chasing it around the kitchen before I finally got the drop on it. There was much panicked flying up into the eyes (mine) and flapping of wings in my face. I know that we’re in drastically different weight classes and that no one on the planet has ever been killed by a mourning dove, but there’s a first time for everything and I didn’t want it to be me with the funny headstone.

When I finally succeeded in getting it outside I realized that I was now twenty minutes late for a Zoom call with my boss, his boss, our banker, and multiple members of our Board. OOPS!

It’s not quite a “my dog ate my homework” moment, but I’m sure it wasn’t a story that was on anyone’s Bingo card that morning.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography

August 8, 2025 · 21:48

Full Moon Over The Backside Of Lake Arrowhead

One of these days I’m sure we’ll get up to Lake Arrowhead and get a view of the lake itself. For today, what we have from our back yard are the northwest sides of the mountains surrounding it.

You can’t see the mountains in this picture, but they’re there.

I’ll also need to get my telescopes back up and running since we have such a nice sky, but since we still haven’t found our dishes or silverware or pots & pans or sheets or most of The Long Suffering Wife’s clothes yet, getting the ‘scopes aligned might not rise to the top of the priority list this weekend.

(Credit: “Liberated” from the internet someplace, some time in the last forty years)

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography

August 7, 2025 · 23:31

Reality Is Odd

Boy howdy.

Loving the new house, not so thrilled about all of the work that remains to unpack and get settled. Got a bit knocked off kilter with some news, when the move and the freakin’ world had me already spinning, so it’s all a bit odd.

Perhaps I need a better office chair, since I seem to be in this one about 16+ hours a day and this one is thirty years old and sort of sucks. But I digress…

Lying on the floor by the front door, we have the good luck charms and trinkets on the front door handles, and the really nice chandelier in the foyer.

Sleep would be nice – one leftover from all of the moving the last week is those freakin’ nocturnal leg cramps waking me up every hour. If anyone has a cure or a suggesstion on treatment or prevention, please drop it into the comments. I’ve been bitching about it to my Primary Care Physician for about fifteen years and so far all I’ve gotten is, “You’re getting old.” While true, it’s less than useful.

And somewhere I picked up a cold. Lousy sleep every night for a month, pretty constant pain and discomfort, and hitting the Dayquil every six hours is not a good combination for wrestling with the nature of reality.

That’s how you end up lying on the marble floor by the front door, taking pictures of the ceiling and the chandelier.

I need better drugs. Or better reality. Or both.

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Filed under Forever Home, Paul, Photography

August 5, 2025 · 22:13

Purple Mountain Majesties

Just after sunset, “the Golden Hour,” is photogenic up here in the desert.

Part of it’s the light, part of it’s the mountains, part of it’s the various layers of smoke from the Gold Fire over by Big Bear. Part of it is the Belt of Venus and part of it’s the 88% illuminated Moon floating up there.

In the end, we’ve come full circle. There were several things that got us pointed at the High Desert as a location for the Forever Home, but one of them was the Virtual Railfan camera here in Hesperia.

(Image: Virtual Railfan)

See those mountains in the near distance on the right?

Here’s how they look from our back yard. Which isn’t a surprise since we’re less than a mile away. I’m looking forward to seeing snow on them in a few months. We may be in the desert, but we’re also at 4,000 feet elevation.

 

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

August 3, 2025 · 22:40

First Hesperia Hummingbirds

I’ve had LOTS of hummingbird pictures over the last seven years at the West Hills hilltop house. When we picked this new house in Hesperia we had no idea if we would continue to have hummingbirds to host in our yards.

I started seeing a hummingbird around the yard the first day that we were moving in, but it wasn’t until today that I found the feeders and food in all of the chaos. I didn’t know how long it would take for the birds to find the food source – turns out it was literally about three minutes.

We’ve got this wonderful patio and pergola in the back yard and it’s perfect for hanging our feeders. We probably won’t throw bird seed out for the finches and other songbirds since we have astroturf instead of grass and I’m concerned about the mess that birdseed might make, but I figure two hummingbird feeders and two birdseed feeders should be a good start on rebuilding a personal bird population here at our Forever Home.

Cleared for landing! The sunset silhouette view from about 20′ away was perfect!

This is actually when this bird returned (assuming it’s the same one that came almost immediately when I put the feeder up). Once I get a couple of feeders up I’ll keep an eye out to get a better idea of how many birds we have in the area.

Click on this one to blow it up to full sized – I don’t think I’ve ever caught one with its beak open like this. WIERD! LUCKY!!

Last weekend when I was cleaning out the old house and packing the truck, the hummers there definately knew that something was up. Where I would often see as many as five or six at a time zooming around the yard, there was one point when it was probably three times that or more. (They’re tough to count when they won’t hold still!) There’s still plenty of flowers there, but someone else will have to feed them if/when new tenants take over.

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography

August 2, 2025 · 22:22

Just Because They’re Colorful & Ornrey

A substantial chunk of our moving budget has been spent at one of the local UHaul locations (who have been wonderful, to be clear) and in the office there they have these two large, colorful, and loud birds. Macaws?

Today when I was dropping off the latest truck that I finished unloading last night, the two of them were out of their cages and wandering loose.

I wouldn’t describe either as “calm,” but at least the green one kept its distance for the most part and minded its own business.

The red dude literally knocked over a full sized broom that had been left leaning against the wall, then picked it up in its beak and started trying to chase me around with it. As much as I didn’t have “being beaten in the shins by a macaw with a broom” on today’s bingo card, I stood my ground and got glared at for my trouble.

They were gorgous. I went home and spent a very decent chunk of the day sitting on my ass and trying to recover a bit instead of unloading and unpacking and trying to bring order out of chaos. I remain confident that the chaos will still be there tomorrow. I do not expect the house elves to sort it all out for me while I sleep tonight.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Forever Home, Photography