The trip to Vermont was a ton of fun, but it’s been a long, hard month in many ways.
I spent two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday getting an old root canal drilled out and re-done, with two more to come in July. That whole “minor discomfort” lie? I’m calling bullshit!
I’m trying to model my reactions based on the mockinbird. Nothing bothers him. Except for the squirrel. I don’t know what the squirrel did, but the mockingbird his harassing him mercilessly.
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography
While walking through Springfield, I found this:
It’s a telephone pole near the town Commons (where the baseball field & park is) and across the street from the cemetary.
Did this get hit by a car or some piece of heavy equipment or is there a rogue beaver wandering around town?
Our old house was only about 200 yards down the hill – I’m about 99.999% sure there isn’t any water around that might be home to a beaver, so I’m going to go with something man-made or accidental. It was the only pole I saw with this sort of damage and it did leave me wondering.
A small town Vermont mystery!!
Filed under Critters, Photography, Travel
Being under the extended center line for Burbank’s primary runway 8, we get a ton of 737’s and smaller Airbus jets overhead all day long. Every now and then we get something larger. In particular, every day at almost exactly 5PM, we get a large UPS cargo jet coming in to pick up all of the Los Angeles area overnight freight and packages.
(Image: Flightradar24 app)
Sometimes it’s a 757 – today it was an A300. Either way, it announces its presence with authority! And today I happened to be out in the yard with a camera and saw it making its turn to final right overhead.
Floating up there the exact same way that bricks don’t, as the Master said.
Filed under Flying, Photography
As you’re walking/hiking/climbing your way from the parking lot near the top of Mount Ascutney to the actual top of Mount Ascutney, you have the option (assuming you’re a masochistic, delusionsal fool who has conveniently forgotten that you’re 68 years old and you sit at a desk all day) of going off on about a 0.2 mile side trail pretty much straight up to get to Castle Rock. I couldn’t recall ever having gone that route in the past, and they had a BOGO special on delusional that day, so off I went.
It’s not so much extra climbing and altitude gain as it is going the hard and steep way just to see a big rock with a view. I had a good time and apparently lived.
You’re probably still 100 feet or so below the summit and off to the side, but the views are nice as you pop out of the side of the heavily forested mountain and can see for quite a ways.
Sitting on Castle Rock and looking back in, there are a great many trees that look like this. The Vermont winters can be brutal, cold, icy, and windy, and the first rank of trees next to the rock are fully exposed to those elements. They’re doing their best, but they regularly get the shit kicked out of them. Yet all of them still had some fresh, green spring growth somewhere. They weren’t dead and they weren’t giving up.
And when I slipped and almost fell off of the freakin’ rock, they were there for me to grab onto.
These trees are my favorites. We are kindred spirits.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography, Travel, Weather
Back in the 1970’s, Mount Ascutney in Vermont was a leading location for those experimenting with hang gliders. To this day, there are side trails off of the four primary trails up and down the mountain that lead to launch sites.
From the observation tower at the top of the mountain, I spotted the tiniest dot in the big sky, a rainbow wing of a paraglider.
(To Pat, the nice park ranger I met up there, who was asking about the difference betweeen a paraglider and a parasail, I apologize for getting it backwards. This is a paraglider, a parasail is typically towed behind a boat. My bad!)
Click on it. Blow it up, I’m giving everyone the full-sized file.
We’re looking east, across the Connecticut River into New Hampshire. I believe that’s Mount Monadanock in southern New Hampshire.
As good as this view was, I’ll bet that our flyer had a better one.
Filed under Flying, Photography, Travel
Last Friday was the solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the start of astronomical summer. It also happened to be a full moon, the “Strawberry Moon.”
Here it is, rising in the east over Encino in the distance and Griffith Park beyond that. Not the Sun, but orange for the same reason as sunset or sunrise is so orange – the passage of that white light through miles and miles of thick atmosphere.
There are a ton of truly spectacular professional photographs out there with the rising, full, Strawberry Moon and mountains, landmarks, and spectacular scenery captured as well. I’m just amazed that anyone with a recent model cell phone can do something like this with little to no planning or skill.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
We have hawks all the time overhead, ususally red-tail hawks soaring overhead and sometimes getting closer, plus red-shouldered hawks in the pine trees on the hill below us, and the occasional Cooper’s hawk. Plus both great horned owls and barn owls.
The red-shouldered hawks seem to have taken over for the moment. There’s the one that can be seen or heard pretty much daily for the last several months. But since we got back home from our Vermont trip, the screeching of the red-shoulder hawks has been almost constant from before sunrise until after sunset. I do love the hawks, but it would be nice if they would shut up for a while every now and then.
There also seem to be more than just the one. Every day this week I’ve been able to hear at least two of them screeching from different directions, and once I could hear two while watching a third. I suspect there’s at least one nest being constructed somewhere in the neighborhood.
Tonight I saw one of them sitting in a tree just off of the edge of the hill, so I went to take pictures.
It was sitting in the shade (not stupid – it was HOT out there today) and about the time I started zooming in, I was surprised to see a second hawk sitting with it. Do you see it?
After making more racket, the one on the left, in the deep shadows near the tree trunk, flew off to perch on the other side of the canyon. This one stayed here as sunset progressed and its perch spot moved into the sunlight.
I don’t know if there are distinguishing features or patterns that might tell me if one is male and another female.
Given that there are at least three in the area, there may be some competition for a single female and that could explain some of the noise levels.
We also have our annual infestation of gophers or moles chewing the crap out of the hillside and lawn. All of the hawks are cordially invited to keep well fed on that particular food source!
Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography, Video
Bringing the trash bins in this morning, I found the Italian cypress trees covered in these little pockets of spider webs, one above the other.
They went all the way up and down all of the trees, pockets of white, still covered in dew.
They stood out from the dark green trees and the way that they each just hung there, row after row, up and down, reminded me of those iconic, round towers next to the river in Downtown Chicago.
I don’t know what kind of spiders are building these, but this is their high-rise condo building along those same design lines.
Somewhere in thee is the little spider equivilent of Dr. Bob Hartley!
Filed under Critters, Photography
Yep, I took a gazillion photos, and I’m going to inflict them upon you share them for days and days.
There were wildflowers everywhere. Alongside the road, the parking lots, the trails on Ascutney…
Daisies, bluebells, clover, and some I can’t ID right off the bat. Wonderful!!
Filed under Flowers, Photography, Travel
Back in LA, it’s clear as a bell during the day and cloudy, gloomy, and foggy every morning (“May Gray” has turned into “June Gloom” – IYKYK) but last weekend in Vermont there were some wonderful clouds almost every day.
I just wish that it had been a little bit more cloudless at night. Those stars the first night were spectacular!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 