Some moisture moving in.
They were talking about a 40% chance of rain for the next three days, but now of course, it’s down to just a 24% chance on Thursday and 11% chance on Friday.
The odds of winning tonight’s $1.55B Lottery are starting to look better and batter in comparison. But at least the passing clouds are cooling it down out of the high 90’s into the low 80’s.
Any port in a storm!
Filed under Photography, Weather
Yeah, I know that it’s August NOW. But yesterday it was still July, and in addition to that great full moon, around sunset we had a surge of monsoonal moisture pass through.
Of course, WE got zero-point-zero rain.
I guess we should have been grateful for the humidity. At least for a couple of hours the sun wasn’t frying the vegetation and sucking every last drop of moisture out of every leaf.
And the sunset was definitely beautiful, even if it was restricted to shades of yellow. No oranges, reds, or purples for us today.
That’s okay. It was a good end to a so-so month. I’m trying to learn to take what we’re given and make the best of it.
Check back with me later and see how that goes…
Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather
As the pilot said the other day when they shut down MSP due to weather when we were on final approach and we had to go circling for a while when we were already well over two hours late – “We just can’t catch a break!”
Not sure if it’s that Nexus thing from “Star Trek: Generations,” the portal that the Ghostbusters opend up for Zuul, or something new. I haven’t been keeping up on my paranormal interdimensional portal identification classes.
It was actually very pretty, but I’ve always suspected that the end of the world will be visually stunning.
At least, I hope it will be. It would be so boring and blase to have 8 billion folks being sent off into the afterlife by something tedious, boring, and mundane.
You know, like, say, the oceans boiling off due to our own stupidity and killing all of the plankton and sea life so that there’s no more oxygetn being generated, with a side effect of weather patterns becoming obscenely unstable, the temperature rising to the point where nothing bigger than ants and cockroaches can survive, and then starving to death while gasping for oxygen. (Wait…what?!)
Instead let’s split the sky, have legions of alien spacecraft pour through (or demons, or dragons, or dinosaurs) and then just have to deal with the Apocalypse. Given how bravely and intelligently we’ve dealt with COVID, alien spacecraft piloted by dinosaurs should be a piece of cake.
Or, and hear me out here, it might just be a weird contrail left behind by some unknown aircraft, probably something really big and really fast.
How droll.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Went on some sightseeing quests around the city today.
Found flocks and flocks of the dreaded Cobra Chickens!
Came outside after a wonderful anniversary dinner and found thunderheads punching their way toward the stratosphere. Five hours later (i.e., now) there are lightning bolts all over!
Trying to get over being jet lagged – that’s a young person’s game. Delays, trying to clear Customs after midnight and then funding a cab to the hotel didn’t help.
A couple of showers, a bit of sun, some convection, and overall a very pleasant day to try & get my circadian rhythms back on an even keel.
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Halfway to Christmas!
No sign of any incoming snow here in SoCal.
But the clouds were very nice for about two hours. It looked like there might be a touch of virga around, but we never saw any rain and it was clear and a million by afternoon.
Nothing in the forecast for precipitation, and the temps will be rising. It won’t be “Texas hot,” but the days in the 70’s might be behind us for a while.
Enjoy the upcoming week! Stay flexible and strong, be prepared to pivot when required. Rigid is brittle – bend, don’t break.
Filed under Photography, Weather
And so it begins, at least locally.
It’s been a really, REALLY wet winter, which was fantastic! Everything’s green and growing! Until it gets hot, and dry, and “everything” turns brown and highly flammable.
We aren’t quite there yet with all of the May Gray and June Gloom that I’ve been complaining about as the marine layer stays over us all day long for weeks on end. But we haven’t had a good, soaking rain in a couple of months, so we’re getting there.
As a side note, there’s a new app that I like a lot called “Watch Duty.” It goes off and sends you notifications if any brush fires pop up within the range you have set. I have mine set to all of LA County and it’s gone off a half dozen times this spring and early summer. Imagine my surprise when it beeped and vibrated this afternoon and said there was a new fire in West Hills, at an intersection that’s maybe a mile away as the crow flies…
(Image: Watch Duty)
And about two seconds later I heard ALL of the fire trucks firing up their sirens and two air dropping helicopters going over at about 500 feet.
Huh! Something’s going on, me thinks! Let’s go look!
About two acres of light brush, reported to have started at Knapp Ranch Park. The bad news is that Knapp Ranch isn’t at the top of the hill, but just a block or so up from Valley Circle Boulevard, so there are three or four streets crossing the hill north to south above it. Streets with houses on both sides. Which the fire was rapidly approaching.
LAPD and LA County Fire hit this one hard. We had at least three, maybe more, water dropping helicopters overhead in less than ten minutes. It looked like they were going to refill up in Chatsworth Reservoir, which is directly behind us compared to the fire, so we had our own little airshow going on.
We also of course had a whole fleet of fire trucks and crews converging on the area. Which blocked Valley Circle Boulevard and had a whole stream of folks cutting across to Platt and Sherman Way via Highlander, making a mess of our local side streets.
Meh, could have been a lot worse. The winds were light and while today was warmer and clear, the recent history of cloudy, cool days helped. It didn’t spread fast. It took them less than an hour to declare it contained and I never heard any reports of any houses being damaged. Although I do bet there were some homeowners immediately uphill of the fire needing a change of underwear.
It might be a really long, hot summer.
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Video, Weather
First of all, I was astonished to see in this morning’s news that last night’s thunderstorms that moved from the Antelope Valley into Pasadena caused a major disruption to the Cruel World Festival going on at the Rose Bowl. Cruel World features artists from the punk and alternative days of the 70’s and 80’s, the sort of music you can hear on SiriusXM Channel 33. The sort of music you hear me listening to ALL DAY LONG.
The Pasadena Fire Department ordered the show cut off in the middle of Iggy Pop’s segment, and headliner Siouxsie Sioux’s segment got cancelled altogether. It was her first (and only!) North American appearance in something like 15 years.
Today was the second day of the Festival and they got some more rain, but no reports of lighting and apparently the show went on.
Weird weather!
Meanwhile, out in the back yard, I was trying to get a bit of down time to do some reading. A group of mockingbirds (at least three, maybe as many as four or five) had other ideas. They were flitting in and out of the big tree and it was unclear if they were fighting, mating, building nests, or all of the above, but they were definitely LOUD!
TURN IT UP!!
I was seeing the warnings from the local National Weather Service office on their Twitter account. Nothing near us (yet) but there were some big cells of convective activity (i.e., thunderstorms) popping up over the Antelope Valley and moving down toward Pasadena.
It was just a couple of minutes after sunset here, but those big thunderheads might be still above the horizon and lit up…
A quick walk down the “back side” of the hill showed that to be true!
I guess if you like seeing some active weather like I do, the Antelope Valley and upper desert were the places to be today! As Maxwell Smart used to say, “Missed it by that much!” (Where “that” is defined as 150-200 miles in this case.)
Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather
Sometimes it’s the simple things that you look right past that can be beautiful and amazing if you just take a second to look.
Take the second.
Make the second.
It’s worth it.
You’re not going to sleep tonight thinking, “DAMN! I wish I had kept hurrying and hadn’t stopped to look at those clouds!”
Filed under Photography, Weather
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