We signed loan documents today. I sent wire transfers for more than $80,000. It doesn’t get much more real than that.
We should fund on Monday, and close escrow on Tuesday morning. After five years of living on Zillow for hour after hour and looking at house after house, it’s a bit unreal to actually be at this point.
We still have to get everything packed and ready to bug out on Wednesday and Thursday next week. It will be an exhausting weekend.
Another “last” tonight, as SpaceX had an almost perfect launch out of Vandenberg after sunset.
A couple of minutes before the launch, the light fading, a bit of color in the clouds. (That white, comet-like thing above the wire isn’t the rocket, it’s a lens flare from the neighbor’s security lighting.)
The launch was fantastic, complete with four or five teenagers pulling up mid launch with one girl screaming about “that thing in the sky,” some dude telling her it was the Moon (it was not the Moon), and some olde phart (me) yelling across the street to tell them what it really was.
Loud, evil, jet black minions. My evil army, to do my bidding!
Crows! A half dozen of them, they spent all day making quite the racket out in the back yard, hanging out and taunting the two dozen mockingbirds that were cooperating in mobbing them. (Yes, the crows will find the mockingbird nests and eat their eggs, so there’s some justification for the animosity.)
I was out for a break and eating a snack (cheese) and they flew down to sit on the fence to watch.
I didn’t have enough cheese to share, so I went in and got grapes. They LOVE grapes. I threw a couple dozen out in the yard and then went back inside. They all pounced as soon as I shut the door.
I will continue to feed them and train them to come when they see me in the yard. Once I have them linking my appearance to food and coming to the yard, I’ll start to train them.
I hope by the time we get to that point I can figure out something specific that I want to train them to do. Otherwise it’s just pointless.
There was a SpaceX Falcon9 launch (with Starlink satellites) at 20:36, with sunset having occurred at 20:09. It was clear and I expected a spectacular sight – I was not disappointed.
Click on them – enjoy the full-sized files!
The rocket rose just to the right of the mountain, seen through those trees and headed toward orbit. The white exhaust plume is from the first stage, which cut off (MECO = Main Engine Cut Off) just behind that far left tree. You can see the rocket coasting and the second stage firing just above and to the left of that point.
The second stage, along with the Starlink payload, is headed to space and well above most of the atmosphere at this point, so the exhaust expands out in a cone behind it. The bright dot just behind and below it is the first stage, falling back toward the drone barge waiting for it off of Baja.
Behind it, the plume was being pushed around by high altitude winds and still brightly lit by the Sun, even though it was well after sunset here on the ground. A launch like this always leads to a ton of calls to 9-1-1.
Finally, as even the eastern-most parts of the plume fell into darkness, the western-most parts were still lit up but were starting to turn orange with the sunset.
I think I got a pretty decent view of the launch on video. It’s long, about 15 minutes, since I let it run, hoping to hear the sonic boom about 12-13 minutes after launch. (Spoiler: I didn’t hear the sonic boom, but the front yard sprinklers did turn on and I had to run for it to stay dry. You can stop watching the video after about the 8:45 mark, unless you want to see me scramble.)
Falcon9 shows up over the hill at about 3:43. MECO and stage separation happens at 4:29. At 5:35, in the plume behind the second stage, you can see three dots. That’s the 1st stage, and the two fairing halves, all falling back to be recovered and re-used on a future flight.
Another thing to look for is the reentry burn of the first stage. It can be seen starting up just to the left of the street light pole from 8:11 to 8:34, the first time I’ve ever seen it from here, over a hundred miles away. In this burn, the first stage slows down as it starts to hit the top of the atmosphere, reducing the heat and structural stress on reentry as transitions from falling to flying down onto the drone ship. Spectacular!
I’ve seen videos taken from the High Desert, Hesperia, Victorville, and Apple Valley, where folks there can still see these launches, even another hundred miles to the east. It will be interesting to watch for from that new viewpoint when we find the Forever Home.
I generally don’t post long videos here (they take up a LOT of space on my corner of the WordPress site and I’m paying for that) but I think this is worth it. The “grand finale” from last night’s fireworks display at Anaheim Stadium.
The Angels won again today, so they’ve taken two out of three games in each of their first three three-game series. By the standard of their dozen or so most recent seasons, that’s about the best they’ve done in a long, long time. There are still 153 games left to go, but 6-3 is a lot better than 3-6 to start, and that losing record is more of the norm.
Enjoy the fireworks and big booms! Try to not stress out too much over the news tomorrow and for the rest of this week. Especially since there’s not much any of us can do about it. The train is out of control, there’s a mad man driving it, those who have the power to stop him are mostly helping him, and the rest of us are just along for the ride.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the dark-eyed Juncos are the clown princes of the back yard. Hopping, flitting, buzzing around the yard, onto the ground to grab seeds before the squirrels get them then back up into the bushes whenever something bigger flies over.
At this time of year there’s just one or two left – the rest have all migrated off to Canada for the summer. But “Solo Junco” and “Dos Junco” seem to stay around all year.
I always thought that they were silent, or at least not well known for being “songbirds,” but nope! At least this one is noisy!
It’s no mockingbird, but it’s loud. (I hope this clip has decent sound – the upload to YouTube has truly sucky sound, but that’s a known issue.)
Maybe Solo Junco doesn’t marathon his little way to Saskatchawan and back every year because we keep dumping a cup or two of bird seeds out in the dirt every day.
Fighting off the finches, mourning doves, and squirrels for free food must be a piece of cake compared to a 3,000 mile commute!
And our water heater went nuts, cracked open, and sprayed thousands of gallons of water all over the garage, soaking and ruing a ton of shit that I had to take out onto the back porch to try to dry out (while it was raining).
Our landlord got that fixed, we have water, hot and cold again tonight.
But the house is farting every time we turn on the water as the air in the pipes gets pushed out.
A SpaceX Falcon9 rocket finally got off the ground tonight out of Vandenberg after several delays and scrubs. We were hoping for one of those fantastic, just-after-sunset “jellyfish” displays where it’s dark where you are but the rocket plume high above the ground is still brightly it.
What I would really like would be an old-style video camera where I can put my eye on a viewfinder and see what I’m filming. The other option these days, which sounds really neat but I have no idea how to do it, is to get a camera with an ouput and hook it up to a VR headset. Something to play with, maybe, some day.
The new computer arrived today. The good news is that it was originally estimated to arrive March 12th. Eleven days early is GREAT, considering how fast the old computer was failing. The bad news is that I have to set up the new computer and install all of the programs and get them set up the way I like them – in the meantime it’s like I’m trying to work with oven mitts on, drunk, and with one arm tied behind my back.
Frustrating, to say the least.
Yesterday night I was playing with with time lapse function on the iPhone, watching the coastal clouds stream by during sunset. It turned out pretty nice. See?
We’re down at the Music Center for our next Ahmanson production (Sondheim’s “Old Friends” with Bernadette Peters – looking forward to this one!) and at the Great Park down the hill there’s a big music festival going on.
Most folks don’t even know that LA has a Great Park, including most folks who have lived in LA for decades. It’s not as big as New York’s Central Park, but it’s not small.
The Music Center (Ahmanson, Taper, Chandler) and Disney Concert Hall are here on these north end, City Hall is off to the south, the Hall of Justice and Cathedral are on the east (left), and there’s a ton of parking underneath it all, so it’s convenient.
The previous 24 hours of mist and drizzle and light rain was just fine – we’ve been falling into a drought this year, way behind on the normal Year-To-Date rainfall totals in SoCal.
This afternoon’s hour-long downpour inspired hours of blaring warnings on every TV channel, with a mudslide and flash flood warning that extended until well after the rain had actually abated.
No problems here, but we’re at the top of a hill. If we start getting flooded, there’s a guy named Noah who gets to tell the rest of the story. Our biggest concern would be intersections and streets flooded out down below the hills, and we can avoid most of that by simply staying home.
On the other hand, up in the mountains, it was snow. I’ve been watching the bald eagle webcam and they were buried, sitting on their three eggs:
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 