Back at the Ahmanson. I’ve heard of this production but know almost nothing about it. Should be fun!
Outside it’s busy. “Gold House” is having their gala and they’ve taken over the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the entire plaza between the theaters. Traffic and parking have been affected in turn.
Big money, apparently. Megan Thee Stallion is apparently their GOH tonight (we didn’t see her).
Rich or poor, it’s good to have boatloads of money! Or so I’ve heard.
Filed under Entertainment, Los Angeles, Photography
2008, I was visiting my son when he was at Scott AFB outside of St. Louis. He was busy during the day, so I went out to Chain of Rocks Park to spot some big birds. I think I had also just gotten the big telephoto lens so the focus might not be perfect.
Wild turkeys.
Great Egret. Not a mediocre egret, but a GREAT egret.
Great Blue Heron. Love seeing these huge birds. Mainly because I’m not a fish.
Filed under Birds, Photography, Travel
Wednesdays are training nights, when I meet my trainer for an hour of “Functional Strength Training.” Weights (flys), sit ups, weights (curls), push ups, even more weights (combinations) – all to build strength, and it’s really made a difference.
It’s one of those “use it or lose it” things. I’m not doing it to be a body builder or anything, but so that I can still move around and have a normal, relatively active life when others my age are restricted to rockers and wheelchairs.
It would be nice to lose some weight as well, but that’s more of a diet thing.
It would be nice if this had been of more help last Saturday when I was getting my ass kicked by a mountain hiking trail, but that’s endurance, not strength. Related, perhaps, but also different.
It does help me sleep well on Wednesday nights!
Filed under Health, Photography
For years the crows have ignored all of the bird seed thrown out into the yard. But the cookies and grapes that have been thrown out recently were a whole different thing. Now that the cookies are gone and I don’t have any grapes to share at the moment, at least one of the crows has put two and two together and gotten “breakfast” as the answer.
This dude’s huge.
Based on size, I thought that it was a raven, but the Merlin app says it’s a crow.
It’s not eating the little seeds, but the sunflower seeds and remaining bits of cookie are fair game.
The squirrels are surpisingly unbothered by this large black critter moving in on their bird seed racket. The juncos, finches, and mourning doves take off like a bat out of hell when the crow shows up, but the squirrels just ignore it.
The critter that DOES pay attention to the crow is the mockingbird. Mortal enemies, the mockingbirds are constantly mobbing it and buzzing it to drive it off. The crow in turn ignores them, but the mockingbirds scare the crap out of the squirrels.
It’s a circle of life thing, I guess.
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
It’s Cinco de Mayo. I understand that “holiday” is just for Americans to get drunk and eat tacos (like we really need an excuse!) and is rarely if ever celebrated in Mexico, and it’s NOT “Mexican Independence Day.”
But it did give me an idea for a place to go look back through a ton of amazing pictures.
Cabo San Lucas from just outside the harbor – our ship is on the right.
Can you see the “hidden” pelican flying by?
Cabo was fun to visit as a tourist for a day. I could see spending maybe a week there and doing nothing but sitting on my ass on a beach or by the pool. After that…
Filed under Birds, Photography, Travel
While yesterday’s hike was an ordeal (and I’m still practically crippled from the DOMS – Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, but it will go away in a day or two), the spring wildflowers all along the trail were spectacular.
My phone battery died before the first of six-plus miles was done, but before that happened, I grabbed images of these to share:
Filed under Flowers, Photography
We had a work event today, a fundraiser with lots of volunteers, public awareness, education, collaboration, networking, and so on. There were 25-mile and 40-mile bike routes (I haven’t been on a bike in decades), a hike, and a walk.
In retrospect, I probably thought that, in addition to helping and participating as an employee, I would participate in the Walk (1.5 miles, flat, around the park) when I in fact took off with the group doing the Hike (6 miles, 1,000+ feet elevation gain, up into the mountains).
I finished and they didn’t have to bring in a helicopter to rescue me or recover my corpse. I kicked that mountain’s ass!
I’ve reached the point in the aftermath where every muscle in my body right down to my eyebrows is cramping, twitching, and incredibly sore. That mountain kicked my ass!
Image: Strava app
It was enough of an ordeal that both my phone and my Apple Watch ran out of power. It was weird finishing the route without any way of contacting anyone if there had been an emergency, or of checking my location on the GPS or trail map, or even taking pictures. It shows to go you how dependant I am on my electronic assistants. I AM BORG, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!
We climbed up into the hills at the far end of the park. You can see the white tents from our event way off in the distance on the left.
There were a ton of wildflowers everywhere and at the beginning we climbing up along the hills overlooking some very nice neighborhoods.
It was cool and drizzly and foggy. In the AllTrails app you can see tons of beautiful pictures of the view from up higher – we didn’t see any of that. Totally socked in, we climbed up into the low-hanging cloud deck and pretty much saw nothing but grey off the trail. Cool, damp, wet, slippery – yeah, fun times!
And look! Over on the other side of the road you can see others of our group who weren’t horribly out of shape climbing up the first really good set of switchbacks. The clouds hide the multiple peaks stretching out to the north with high-tension powerlines swinging from peak to peak to peak.
In the end, I think the peak is looking down over the 101 Freeway where it dives down from Canejo Valley and Thousand Oaks down to the coastal plain of Camarillo. I’m sure it’s a spectacular view. Maybe some day I’ll be able to go back and see.
Or not.
Image: Alltrails.com
After I go home and was describing the ordeal experience to my family, the Second Daughter (who, along with her husband, is a hiker, runner, and camper, and very active) sent this link. YEAH! That’s it. “Moderately challenging.” Not quite the words I was using, but okay. Po-TAY-toe, Po-TAH-toe.
Lessons learned?
One, make sure the electronics I’m so dependant on are charged, or carry a battery backup if I’m going into an unusual situation like this.
Two, while I’m seeing a trainer and going to the gym, training for strength is not training for endurance. Similar yes, related for sure, but not the same.
Three, while my head still thinks that I’m 29 or 39 and I can just rip off a hike like this with little or no notice, reality says I’m 69 and things really, REALLY are starting to change.
Four, I need a better source of pain killers or horse tranquilizers. (Just kidding. I think.)
Filed under ALS Network, Health, Paul, Photography
They were back. I think it’s the cookies. The plastic container with the last of the cookies is covered with tiny bite marks where something’s been trying (unsuccessfully) to get in.
And today I used the iPhone instead of the Canon so that the autofocus was in charge, not me.
Gonna be a long weekend, I think.
Filed under Critters, Photography
As our back yard drops off down the hill to the back yard of the house below us, there are a couple of retaining walls made with railroad ties. By mid-morning these are all exposed to the sun, and they get toasty. They make an ideal place for the lizards to bask, soaking up photons with a quick escape route just over the edge and down into the cracks between the ties.
This dude was living the good life, obsessed with something down the hill. It wasn’t the one that’s missing its tail that I saw a couple days ago – it was there with this dude, about five feet to the right.
Whatever this one was looking at, it had its full attention since he was ignoring me, just four or five feet away. Now, **I** know that I’m not a threat, but generally the lizards don’t and they’re bugging out as soon as I get within about ten feet.
I finally cleared my throat and shuffled my feet a little, and got this nasty side eye look that said, “I know you’re there, don’t you see me ignoring you?!” About that time the shadow of a raven passed over and Lizard Attitude Dude was over the side and gone in a flash.
Maybe he did somehow know that I wasn’t interested in eating him whole, where that raven probably had a different opinion. Life on the edge, with the quick and the snack.
Filed under Critters, Photography
We always have a squirrel around. There are lots of trees on the hill in back of our yard, a big one in our yard itself, many in the neighbors’ yards. We put out a fair amount of food every day for the birds. Trees + food = a squirrel.
Sometimes we see two squirrels. Especially in the spring, chasing each other all over… (insert that deep bass “French-sounding” “uh-Huhn-HUUUHN!” sound here that means “You know that we’re talking about sex now, right?” – is there a word for that sound/phrase/thing?)
Earlier this week there were THREE squirrels out there. It might be the cookies that we’ve been throwing out for them in addition to the bird seed.
They’re all fat and fuzzy, no doubt about it! I grabbed my camera and started shooting…
Only to find out just now that, as fuzzy as the squirrels were, my pictures were even more fuzzy. As in, “badly out of focus.”
This is not an artistic choice, but rather a reminder that, no matter how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of pictures I’ve taken with that camera over the last 20+ years, I still need to make sure I check that the autofocus is engaged if I’ve been shooting pictures of the moon the previous night and had it on manual focus.
The problem is obvious. User error.
Filed under Critters, Photography
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