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 get three & four years of severe drought. Water rationing. Extreme limits on watering the lawn (unless you’re a golf course owned by a billionaire). Lawn, open areas, trees, all get brown and dry and ready to burn. We get brush fires.
Then we have two years of above-average rain. Good, now we can water the dirt in our yards. Everything out in the wildlife areas gets green and lush.
Another year of drought. All of that new green growth gets brown and dry and extremely flammable. We burn again, tens of thousands of acres in four major and a dozen-plus minor fires all over the city and county and Ventura County, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County, San Diego County… An area the size of New England is on extreme fire watch for weeks, THOUSANDS of homes and businesses are gone.
Mind you, because they’re not in the news every night, most people think those fires are out and done. They’re not. They’re just more or less contained and not threatening any more structures and homes. But as of right now the 23,448 acre Palisades fire is still only 85% contained. The 14,021 acre Eaton fire is at 95% containment.
Oh, good, here comes a few days of rain. That will help put out the fires.
Well, yes, it will, but…
This will be a “good” rain in that it should be mild, less than an inch of rain total over three days combined, with relatively little chance of any big downpours or thunderstorms with lightning, which could start new fires.
But we now have something on the order of 50,000 acres locally that’s newly burned, most of it in canyons and steep hillsides, and any hard rain will start to cause mudslides and flooding. Barren hillsides will erode like crazy with nothing left in the way of brush and trees to hold the topsoil together. It’s time for the next disaster in the chain!
On the other hand, listening to the rain in the night and smelling the petrichor is wonderful.
Several years ago I bought a tree topper for our Christmas tree that had a star and a motorized bit that spun around with an airplane and banner on a wire. Two years ago when I packed it all I did a lousy job, and last year when I assembled the tree I found it to be broken. Being an expert idiot and not just a gifted amateur, I just packed it away again while broken, didn’t order a replacement, and just forgot about the problem until this year, when I found that the house elves had not miraculously repaired it for me. It was too late to order a replacement to get delivered before Christmas, but at least this year I ordered it to come in whenever it could get here so that I would have it for the future.
Today it arrived and got installed, so our Christmas tree is flying again, even if I might not be.
Maybe that will be one of the New Year’s Resolutions that actually gets kept for 2025. Maybe.
Some days, no matter how many awards it won, “American Beauty” isn’t the film to watch.
And then when you turn it off and try to listen to music, the playlist gods just want to mess with your head.
Maybe I’ll just watch Iceland erupt – again. What’s the worst that can happen? (Looks at news and prays for the planet to crack in half and disintegrate into a slowly spreading cloud of debris.)
Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, first visible to me above the western horizon at sunset yesterday, was visible again tonight with another night of clear-ish skies. There was a bit of haze (outright fog this morning) which didn’t clear until after noon, with enough hanging around so that I didn’t see the comet tonight until about 15 minutes after I did last night. But it was also higher above the horizon than last night, so it was a fair trade off.
Low-resolution screen capture from the video below. The comet starts to appear out of the twilight & haze on the right-hand side, then I shifted the camera once I could see where the comet actually was.
The little white things zipping by are jet aircraft heading down the coast off of Ventura toward LAX.
A hazy, late afternoon descent from Central Kansas into MCI in Kansas City. The river at the very beginning is the Missouri, right near Wyandotte County Lake, which means it’s very near where I grew up in my grade school years.
Time to step back, take a breath, and let some of the adrenaline burn off. Let’s go to a happy place.
Mount Ascutney in Vermont, of course. Maybe a third of the way up the trail from the parking lot to the summit, still on a reasonably flat stretch, there’s a spot where the tree canopy opens up and it’s sunny and the ground is covered in ferns.
I always make a point to stop there for a while. It’s quiet and beautiful and very, very green.
There are insects and bugs flitting about and I could hear birds (cardinals), but other than that it was dead quiet. I was lucky – while I was there, no one else was hiking along the trail to interrupt my reverie.
Behind me to the left the hillside climbs very steeply and there are some “small boulders the size of large boulders,” and through the trees you can see the mountains off in the distance (looking toward New Hampshire and the Connecticut River to the east, I think, maybe?).
Even if we can’t go to the “Ascutney Sea of Ferns” in person tonight, perhaps we can go there in our heads for a while and leave CNN, NYT, WSJ, and Twitter behind. They’ll be there when we come back, but in the meantime, our blood pressure and anxiety levels can drop back down to safe levels.
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!
A new reader, Victoria, stumbled on an old post which had the audio from the hummingbirds “clicking” as they flew around. She was wondering what they looked like.
Funny you should ask.
It turns out that this weekend, while I was trying to get some peace and quiet sitting in the shade in the back yard and reading, a rough and rowdy band of three hummingbirds decided that I was an idiot who didn’t know that their feeder (which I was sitting near) was empty. They buzzed me repeatedly, and would hover right in front of my face within an arm’s length, then zoom up to hover next to the empty feeder, then zoom back down into my face, and repeat two or three more times before zooming off into the trees. The message seemed pretty obvious.
“Look, stupid human who’s supposed to keep the feeders filled! This one’s empty! See! Hey, look at us! Hey, look at the empty feeder!”
After they did this two or three times and I was too surprised and stunned to get my phone out, two of them came back for one more pass.
I haven’t played with the audio to clean it up and the YouTube compression algorithm butchers the sound a lot, but you can still hear them zooming.
For having a brain that’s smaller than a walnut, they sure can fly, and apparently make the connection between me (or at least, people in general) and their feeder being refilled. They’ve watched me do it enough times. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible or likely, but I’ve been wrong before.
Or I’m wrong now, anthropomorphizing the crap out of the situation, and just feeling guilty about letting the feeder get empty. (There are other feeders, the trees are in bloom and covered in pollen, and the place is lousy with flowers in bloom. None of them are starving to death.)
It also reminds me that the Forever Home, wherever it might be, needs to have lots of birds in general, hummingbirds specifically. I live for this particular style of abuse.
Two hundred years ago today (apparently) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was played in public for the first time.
You’re probably most familiar with the final movement, the Ode to Joy, which is one of the most stunning, brilliant, and beautiful pieces ever created anywhere, any time, by anyone.
If the alien overlords land and point at Trump and Gaza and ask why we as a species should be allowed to live, I’ll point to this.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 