There’s beauty there. You just need to keep your eyes and heart open to see it.
Category Archives: Weather
Regrowth
Back in November, our area of California (among others) burned. The fires came within a half mile of our house.
Now the next part of the cycle comes, with the winter rains and a possible El Nino year dumping higher than normal amounts of rain on California, causing mud slides, flooding, rock slides, and other problems in the burn areas as they’re no longer protected by vegetation.
But it’s amazing how quickly the hills can turn from black to green again.
The contrast can be stark and vivid. Parts of the hillsides can still be black as night, burnt, and charred, while patches or even whole mountainsides are an almost iridescent green.
These pictures, taken along the 101 Freeway between Camarillo and Woodland Hills (my son was driving, so I got to take pictures yesterday) show other damage such as this, where rock slides have caused temporary barriers to be put up and lanes closed.
I don’t know what causes this phenomenon where the new growth is in a mottled or spider-web like pattern across the blackened hillside. You can see the burnt bushes and trees everywhere, but the green undergrowth along the ground has started to be re-established.
Just a few hundred yards way, the entire hillside is iridescent green, with the black stumps of the bushes sticking up through it.
This is how the cycle continues. As green as it is now, this brush will grow up and over the summer will spend nine months turning brown and highly flammable.
This might go on for ten years or more, the brush and weeds growing thicker during the winter months, green for a few weeks, and then drying up and turning brown in April and May, finally baking itself into tinder by July.
It’s the same with all of these trees – most of them will grow back and become lush again, just waiting for the next brush fired to come through, when they’ll turning into flaming torches, their leaves and branches burning, breaking, and being blown for miles in the high winds, starting new spot fires ahead of the main fire, spreading it faster than a person can run.
That’s the cycle – burn, regrow, dry out, burn again.
Welcome to California. We don’t know what will try to kill you this year – the earthquakes, the fires, the floods, or the mudslides.
Down here in the lower elevations, it’s unlikely to be a blizzard or hurricane.
But wait for it. That could be coming soon as the climate changes unpredictably.
Filed under Disasters, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
El Nino
I don’t know if this has officially been declared an “El Nino” year by the National Weather Service (or whoever’s in charge of such things) but it sure feels that way to those of us getting drenched.
In an “El Nino” year, there’s a warm patch of Pacific Ocean water that forms around Christmas time (which has something to do with the name – google it) and the end result is an unusually wet winter in California. We get these “atmospheric rivers” that start funneling huge, wet, relatively warm storms onto the California coast, one after the other for days, one onslaught after another.
Whether official or not, this is what we get:
(I wasn’t driving, thanks!)
At this particular moment, the weather radar looked like:
(Image from Wunderground, despite their competitor’s ad, which I find somewhat hilarious and ironic and just a bit creepy.)
It’s quiet now, mostly, but there’s a lot of unstable air behind these fronts, and another couple of fronts to follow about every eighteen hours, so tomorrow and Monday look soggy as well.
While this might be beneficial in terms of alleviating our constant water shortages and drought in California and the Southwest states, it’s not so good in terms of the flash flooding and mudslides.
Welcome to California! If one thing doesn’t kill you, it’s opposite thing will!
Filed under Los Angeles, Video, Weather
The One That Got Away
This is the view from the Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Hospital parking lot about 5:45 this evening as I arrived. There are storms coming and it was an interesting view.
It’s an okay view. But it’s the one that got away, the sunset that was FREAKING SPECTACULAR about a half hour earlier.
I don’t have any pictures of it to share.
It was enough so that even in our office it was like being in a giant neon tube. Oranges, reds, pinks, like some sort of Technicolor acid trip from the 1960’s.
But I was on deadline and had to get things done so I could get a FedEx package off and get out on time to get here, so there aren’t any pictures.
Possibly a poor choice of priorities. My apologies.
Filed under Los Angeles, Panorama, Photography, Weather
Pillow Fort Day
Cold, rainy. Hard rain. At least three more days of it to follow.
T’would have been an excellent day to stay home, build a pillow fort, get a good book and some hot chocolate, and just hide for the whole day.
Maybe with some of those peanut butter filled pretzel things for snacks.
And M&Ms.
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
A Brief Respite From The Rain
Los Angeles is hardly turning into a tropical rain forest, but we are in our “rainy season.” There’s quite a bit of variation in what that term means from year to year as well, but this one seems to be tending toward the more rainy, wet, “El Nino-ish” end of the spectrum.
My sense of that could also be skewed by the fact that it rained almost every day in Seattle and Kansas City a couple of weeks ago.
Regardless, we’re looking at a weather forecast that has it raining almost every day for the next six days or so, and we got rain last night and this morning. So it was a pleasure when I came out of the hangar this afternoon to find that the sun was breaking through.
(Click to enlarge)
As I was hoping, this in turn led to a nice sunset.
It’s important to appreciate the little things every day if you can. Everything out there doesn’t suck, even if a lot of things do. Find the non-sucky items and embrace them.
For instance, the way the different layers of clouds are illuminated and glowing at different intensities and all different shades of pastel colors.
That’s non-sucky.
Filed under Panorama, Photography, Weather
Favorite Pictures – January 09th
Have I mentioned that I take a **LOT** of pictures? (Hint — I have)
As proof that if you do that, eventually you’ll take one that just pops, where you look at it and say, “Damn! I took that picture and it’s just about perfect!”
Here’s one of those that I took.
January, 2016, front yard of the old house in West Hills
No processing. Los Angeles doesn’t often have one of those truly spectacular sunsets, but when it does… Wow! (Of course, it’s often caused by smoke, which means there are a few thousand acres burning nearby and probably some homes in there as well, but you take what you can get, right?)
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
Mission Secondary Objective #10 Achieved!
To wind up for now, let’s go back to where this trip started.
On our previous trip to Seattle, I got a brief glimpse of Mt. Rainier through clouds and haze. This trip was a bit more generous with its views. Not much, but a bit.
Nice looking mountain you’ve got there!
On our last evening there the clouds and rain cleared just enough to see it, while the setting sun (off on the right) started peeking under the cloud deck to make the most marvelous sunset.
Pink to the west, tall and white to the east.
Until it all turned a bit pink at the end.
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Well THERE’s Your Problem – December 7th
It’s a whole new adventure putting up Christmas lights at the new house. Everything’s new and different. Where can I attach things? Where can I plug things in? Where can I put things so they stay dry if it rains?
There are…”challenges.”
We had some pretty significant rain a couple of days ago, and while we didn’t have to deal with any of the major problems that deluge brought to Southern California (especially to the burn areas), I found myself scrambling on Monday and Tuesday to try to waterproof my Christmas light installations.
Something failed.
The lights on one end of the house were plugged into a power strip at the end of a long extension cord and that was the likely source of the failure. It’s pretty exposed to the elements, so I had wrapped it up in plastic and I thought it might be okay. When I got home and saw that the lights were out it was pouring, so I just checked to see if it had tripped a breaker at the main panel and taken out any of the other electrical circuits in the house. We were fine, so it must have just been the circuit breaker on the power strip – which is how it’s supposed to work.
Tonight it was finally dry-ish, so I went out to see what was up, figuring a little bit of water might have squirreled it’s way in.
As Adam Savage is so fond of saying, “Well, there’s your problem!”
Yeah, that’s a bag full of water and electricity. Not so good.
The reality is that the electricity got cut off as soon as it hit the electricity on Tuesday and from there the water just kept coming in from wherever it came in and made it look really impressive now.
Things are drying out now. We’ll see what’s working and what needs to be replace tomorrow.
(Now what REALLY would have been neat is if someone else had seen this and put a goldfish in there before I got to it!)
Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography, Weather
Beacon Of Hope (Real World)
Even a bit of double hope over there on the right…
It’s not without justification that the Bible says that God gave Noah and his family the rainbow at the end of the Flood as a sign of Hope.
(I’ll pause to allow some recovery time for those of you who passed out after seeing me reference the Bible…)
Aside from the biblical references, multiple societies refer to the metaphor of rainbows (hope) following storms (difficult times).
This one was from a few days ago when LA got it’s first decent rain in a long time, which helped put out those fires. (And brought mud slides and flooding to the burn areas, but let’s not get too nit-picky here.) Tomorrow and Thursday we’ll get more rain and perhaps more rainbows.
I fear that the worst “storms” might be ahead of us in any number of dimensions, so I’ll start stocking up on rainbows now. I think we’re going to need them.
When the storms hit, whether they be in our personal lives, the lives of those near and dear to us, in our state, country, or across the whole world, let’s remember that there are going to be rainbows if we can just hold on to see them.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 