Category Archives: Weather

May 15, 2014 · 15:21

Yes, I Am A F$%king Asshole – You’re Welcome (NSFW)

Call it fate, if you will.

Normally I’m at the CAF hanger in Camarillo until about 3:00 or 3:15. Today I decided to leave early since I had a check to drop off, a deposit to make at the bank, and a stack of mail to go out.

Just before 2:00 I came out of the bank and went to my car. A woman had just parked in the space next to my driver’s side, a big, white, brand-new (no plates) luxury SUV. As I walked to my car I could see that she was talking to someone in the car. As I got to my car I could see two kids in the back seat of the SUV, an infant in a full-sized car seat and a toddler in one of the forward-facing toddler style car seats. The woman was closing the driver’s door and walking toward the bank.

I didn’t have time to think, I just said, politely, “Excuse me, ma’m? You need to take your kids in with you.”

She stopped, looked at me, and said, “What?”

“Your kids. It’s extremely dangerous to leave them in the car when it’s this hot. You need to take them in with you.”

It finally dawned on her what I was saying. “Mind your own business,” and she turned back toward the bank.

Now I raised my voice, just a bit, no longer convinced that  being polite and respectful was as useful a strategy as I had hoped. “Ma’m, I’m making it my business, sorry. You’re endangering the lives of your children.” I pointed at the time and temperature sign on the corner which said it was 105F. “You can’t leave your kids in the car like this.”

Now she was getting pissed, apparently not used to total strangers calling her on her behavior when she was being an idiot. She didn’t even stop, but yelled back over her shoulder, “Fuck you!”

I wanted to make really sure she heard me. I yelled. “STOP! If you go into that bank I will immediately call 9-1-1 and I will start breaking out the windows on your car to rescue your children.”

Now she stopped, storming back to get into my face. “Go fuck yourself! Who the hell do you think you are?”

I ignored the question. “It will be over 130 degrees in that car in less than five minutes.” OK, so I didn’t know the exact figures, but it was close enough for government work. Someone can correct me on the exact numbers later. “Your children will be unconscious, and they’ll be dead in less than ten.”

“I’m just going into the fucking bank! I’ll be out in five minutes!”

I knew that I had been in there closer to ten. “Simple choice, ma’m. Take your kids or I call the police.” I pulled out my phone, half expecting her to punch me.

She didn’t. She went around to the driver side on her car, opened the door, took the kids out, glaring at me the whole time. I just stood there watching. I was pretty sure if I got into my car and drove off, she would leave the kids.

As she slammed the door on her SUV and walked toward the bank with the kids in tow, she was furious. She yelled at me, “You’re a fucking asshole!”

“Yes, I am. I’m the fucking asshole who just saved the lives of your kids. When they graduate college you can remember this and thank me, assuming you don’t manage to kill them someplace else before then when I’m not around to stop you.” Okay, that last bit was a cheap shot, but she had earned it.

She flipped me the bird, but kept walking. It was apparently too hot to stand out there arguing, even though… Oh, never mind.

I waited until she was in the bank, then got in my car and left.

That was seventy-five minutes ago. The adrenaline shakes should stop soon.

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Moral Outrage, Paul, Weather

May 14, 2014 · 22:25

Hell Arrives Early In SoCal This Year

Anyone who’s lived any length of time in Southern California knows that there’s a semi-official “brush fire season” from about late July through late October.  This is true of many other places in the western United States (Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado all come to mind), but here in SoCal we have a LOT of houses and businesses that get in the middle of those brush fires, while many of those other places have a few houses and a lot of timber.

This year the wildfires have arrived early. It’s only early May, yet there are nine different fires burning in San Diego County and a couple more in Los Angeles County. Flip through the fifty or so pictures in that link if you want to see what Hell On Earth looks like SoCal style.

A big part of the problem is drought. California’s in an extended, extreme drought condition. Past droughts have resulted from multiple years where the rainfall amounts have been below average – but there was still rainfall. This drought has been caused by multiple years where the rainfall has been drastically below normal and many places have gotten no rain at all in two or three years or more.

Then the temperatures rise and rise a lot, much earlier in the year than they have in the past. Here in SoCal the two terms you hear repeated every year at this time are “May Grey” and “June Gloom.” Normally we’re getting a marine layer for weeks at a time, which at least keeps the humidity up a bit and will occasionally thicken enough to give you some drizzle or light rain. Not this year. The last two days have been at or above triple digits, and tomorrow’s going to be even hotter. Along with that heat we’re getting single-digit humidity (remember the crack about how “it’s a dry heat?”) and the Santa Ana winds blowing at 30 to 40 mph with gusts to 70+ mph.

Some idiot flicks a cigarette butt out of their car window…

Someone’s clearing weeds and their lawnmower blade hits a rock and sparks…

Someone’s car dies and they pull off to the side of the road, into the knee high, bone dry grass, which comes in contact with the almost red hot brakes, exhaust, and catalytic converter on the underside of their car…

…and eight hour later you have 20,000 people evacuated, 5,000 acres burned, and 100 houses gone up in smoke.

And it’s only the second week of May and it’s only going to get drier and hotter all through June, July, August, and all the way to Christmas and maybe into 2015.

One of these years it’s just going be a year-round thing, with triple digits, howling winds, constant fires, and no water.

This has been the driest and hottest year in recorded history, going back to when records first started being kept in San Francisco prior to the Civil War.

It’s almost like…like…like the climate is changing…

No, wait, that can’t be. Marco Rubio said that we’ve got it all wrong, and as a Florida lawyer he obviously knows far, far more than the 99% of climate scientists and weather researchers who…

Sorry, that’s a rant (or fifty) for another day (or fifty). (FREAKIN’ IDIOTS!)

Please keep an eye on the SoCal fire situation, today and tomorrow and the rest of the year. The people evacuating tomorrow might be you, or someone you know. Like, me.

I don’t think Marco Rubio’s going to be able to change that.

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Filed under Disasters, Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles, Weather

January 28, 2014 · 20:23

What A Really Long Day, What A Beautiful Sunset!

It was a long day out at Camarillo Airport, but at the end of the day there was the most marvelous pink, puffy sunset.

photo 1To the east, a cotton candy sky over the CAF’s C-46, “China Doll”

photo 2To the west, a couple of our aircraft under restoration as the sun sets. I particularly love the dark purple shadow stretching back from the clouds at the upper center.

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Filed under CAF, Flying, Photography, Weather

January 20, 2014 · 23:40

3400 Words Today

…written on something I can’t show you yet. But it’s good, I like it, the writer’s group I’m in likes it. Maybe soon.

Meanwhile, have a nice picture of the fog rolling through the hills of Encino.

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Filed under Photography, Weather, Writing

December 10, 2013 · 22:04

Wind In Los Angeles

I’ve recently written about how Los Angeles residents respond to rain (badly) and cold (not much better), so let’s talk about a much more common weather affliction — wind.

For those unfamiliar with the Los Angeles area, we have a thing here called “Santa Ana Winds“. The short version is that high pressure builds up to our northeast, which causes winds from that direction. But those winds get funneled through a whole slew of mountain passes. They get compressed, speed up, and then vent out into the valleys blowing a gale. It’s not uncommon for there to be sustained thirty to forty knot winds with gusts to seventy or eighty. And better yet, it can go on like that for days.

In the summer, when it’s already pushing 90F or higher, the Santa Anas will heat things up even more (adiabatic heating), dry things out even more, and take any tiny spark out in the mountains or desert and turn it into a 10,000 acre brush fire. The folks who fight wildfires hate the Santa Anas.

In the winter, when it gets unseasonably cold and the temperatures drop down close to freezing at night and only into the low 50’s during the day (like it has been for the last week), the Santa Anas can blow, but they don’t bring any relief from the cold. I don’t know why, it seems they would, but they don’t. Ask Fritz Coleman or Doctor George. What they do is take the wind chill down into the teens at night, which makes the cold all the worse.

Houses in Los Angeles aren’t built like houses in a normal city where you actually have four seasons. Houses here are built to stay cool, because 90% of the year it’s hot, or at least warm. We have almost no insulation at all, and while we typically have great air-conditioning, our furnaces are almost an afterthought.

When it gets cold and the Santa Anas blow, it’s like living in one of those ice castles in Finland or China.

We also get most of the other wind related problems that are simply associated with forty knot sustained winds with gusts to eighty knots. Semis and campers get blown off the road. Trees come down. Power goes out. Roofs lose shingles. Patio furniture ends up in the pool or in the neighbor’s yard.

It also makes it hard to sleep, at least for me. We have several orange trees in the back yard and the oranges are just getting big and ripe and tasty. One of these trees is right on the other side of our bedroom wall. When the Santa Anas start blowing in the middle of the night, I find out about it with dozens of oranges bashing and smashing into the wall for hours.

I’ve also gotten to fly in these winds. It’s…exciting. At Whiteman in Pacoima where I normally fly, the usual runway is Runway 12 (pointing southeast). When the Santa Anas blow you switch around (always take off and land into the wind) so you’re on Runway 30. Not only do you get to deal with the wind and some nasty turbulence, but you’re also getting a sight picture and traffic pattern that you see only every now and then. If you’ve never flown pattern work in a Cessna 172 when the Santa Anas are blowing, you’ve missed a real “E Ticket” ride.

Finally, as with everything else in Los Angeles, our local news can blow everything out of proportion at the drop of a hat. When we get 0.2″ of rain, we’re on “STORM WATCH 2013”! When the Santa Anas blow, you’ll get a news van taking pictures and doing live shots from every downed tree in the county. The bigger, the better. If lanes are blocked or a car gets crushed, you’ll have seven or eight news vans.

The weather patterns are shifting again. By Thursday we’re supposed to be back to “Sunny & 75” for a few days. The Chamber of Commerce will taunt everyone in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago who have a foot of snow and sub-zero temperatures.  The Rose Parade committee will get back to building floats and putting up grandstands for our annual New Year’s Day taunt advertising parade and football game. The surfers will get back to surfing and the snowboarders will get back to snowboarding.

And we’ll all start waiting for the next “natural disaster” — the one that’s just known as “weather” in the rest of the world.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Weather

December 9, 2013 · 22:36

Juicy Chunks O’ Wisdom For Monday, December 9th

‘Cause it’s windy as hell and I’m really starting to hate the wind, that’s why.

  • In the intro to last Thursday’s Flash Fiction Challenge, I said that no one had picked my “first two hundred word” piece. That’s changed. Someone picked it up and today (a couple days after the Friday “deadline” but who cares?) wrote a nice second part. Angela Carina Barry‘s work is posted here (scroll down until you find my original post at 8:59 PM on November 28th).
  • There was one particular really freakin’ brilliant gem that I was going to put in here, the wisest and juiciest of all of the juicy chunks o’ wisdom, which was the reason I picked this format to begin with for today’s post. Now I’ve completely forgotten what it was.
  • My desk sits next to a huge bay window, which is marvelous most of the time. I love the view of the backyard. But with the current cold snap in Los Angeles, this thing just bleeds cold air right on top of me. (Yes, it’s got double pane, insulated glass.) So I hung a blanket up across the window to shield myself from the frigid air, and it works pretty well. Except the cat’s favorite sleeping spot is in the bay window. For three days she’s been baffled by the blanket, but tonight figured out how to sneak around the corner and into the window. Then all of a sudden I see her head sticking out as she tries to figure out how to get back to me. It’s very cute. It’s a cat thing.
  • While cleaning up after painting, I tried out a technique I had read about online. It was described as a “fast and fun” way to clean the paint rollers. Basically, you take the garden hose, put the nozzle on the “Jet” setting, hold the roller out in front of you, then blast it with the hose. The roller will spin like mad, the water pressure from the hose will clean out the paint, and it’s faster than doing the cleaning by hand in the sink. Okay, first of all, it works like a charm. Having said that, I suspect that it’s “fun” if it’s done at the end of a hot, sweaty, summer’s day of painting, not out in a thirty knot wind at about 40F in the middle of the night. I guess there was a certain amount of “fun” involved, but there was also a significant amount of getting soaked. FYI.
  • It’s time for all of the “Best Of 2013” movie lists to start coming out and the jockeying for awards season. If nothing else, combining the lists of “best” movies from different groups will give you a pretty good list of what DVD’s to get (or to order on Netflix). We always try to see all of the movies nominated for the five major categories in the Academy Awards before the awards show itself, so these lists kick off a season of scrambling to see the ones we haven’t gotten to in the theaters.
  • As for 2014 movies, the first I had heard of “Jupiter Ascending” was when someone I follow on Twitter mentioned the new teaser trailer (here). It looks spectacular and has an awful lot of really talented folks involved. It could be spectacular — we can hope. We all need a little “spectacular” sometimes.
  • Vacuuming the ceiling is hard work! My arms are killing me tonight.
  • The raccoons are running around on the roof again tonight. I double checked the other day, they still haven’t gotten back into their hidey-hole.
  • On day twenty-four of the NaNoWriMo adventure, I mentioned that my computer hadn’t crashed yet even though I hadn’t rebooted it in four weeks or so and had been using the crap out of it with lots and lots of open windows and programs and bookmarks… Today it locked up and had to be rebooted. Whoever had “39 days” in the office pool can collect your winnings.
  • Still no clue what that forgotten wisest and juiciest of all of the juicy chunks o’ wisdom was. That’s disappointing and frustrating, but the worst part is hunting and trying to jog my memory and getting nowhere and knowing the whole time that the second I hit the “publish” button, THEN I’ll remember it.
  • Or at 3:30 AM.
  • Sometimes I hate my brain.

Remember that a bird in the hand will probably leave a mess there.

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Filed under Cats, Juicy Chunks, Movies, Weather, Writing

December 6, 2013 · 22:05

“Cold Snap” In Los Angeles

I have recently made fun of the responses Los Angeles residents and drivers have to the slightest bit of rain. Well, now it’s gotten “cold” here, so I’m going to do it again.

Just to be clear, that’s cold as in “below freezing overnight in some of the valleys” as opposed to cold as in “any exposed skin gets frostbitten in thirty seconds or less.” Granted, there are spots up in the high desert getting down into the teens, as well as plenty of sub-freezing temperatures up in the local mountains where they’re making snow for the ski resorts above 5,000′. (You didn’t know Southern California had ski resorts less than two hours’ drive from downtown? Skiing in the morning, surfing in the afternoon — people do it all the time here.) But I’m talking about down here in “the basin” and the valleys, which are all at sea level or maybe 500′ to 800′ above it.

As a result, while huge swaths of the country are experiencing scenes like these (stay safe out there, it looks ugly!), here in La-La Land for two days in a row we have had frost on the grass and windshields in the morning. And I have PROOF!

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photo 3I can’t even imagine the terror and panic we would get in Los Angeles if there was actually snow and ice on the roads, especially during rush hour. We have absolutely zero-point-zero equipment for plowing or clearing roads, so if some freak storm ever comes through and dumps three or four inches on the freeway, we’ve got no choice but to wait for it to melt.

In addition, a huge percentage of the commercial buildings and houses here have flat roofs, with just a teeny-tiny slope built in so that rain drains off. I can guarantee that none of them were designed to hold up under a few thousand pounds of snow.

If it ever happens, they might as well just nuke us from orbit. It’ll be the only way to be sure.

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Filed under Disasters, Weather

November 20, 2013 · 21:38

Raining In Los Angeles

Okay, let me rephrase that just a bit, because if you live anywhere with anything like normal weather, this isn’t rain. We’re finally getting a bit more water than “drizzle”, and it’s not “mist”, but if it’s “rain” it’s “really, really light rain”.

Nevertheless, this is one of the most amazing things that one sees upon moving to LA from anyplace “normal”. For two days in advance now, every single local television station has been on “Storm Watch!”. Or they’ve got their “Storm Tracker!” ads running for the 11:00 PM news. I kid you not, I couldn’t make this shit up.

Los Angeles is not washing away into the ocean. We might, might, get 0.10″ of rain out this. Places in the foothills and mountains might get 0.25″ of rain. In the next three to four days combined. Yet from looking at the media and press here, you would think that we should all be building arks in the back yard.

Better yet are the drivers in the rain. Despite the fact that most of them grew up and learned to drive someplace else (presumably someplace where there might be rain and/or snow), LA drivers become even bigger idiots with any moisture at all on the roads.

They fall into two categories, and I suspect that it’s tied to where they learned to drive. The native Angelinos are so terrified by any sort of precipitation that they immediately start driving at 10 MPH, for fear of spinning out and causing a fifty-seven car pile-up. Those who learned to drive elsewhere (but haven’t actually driven in the rain for twenty or thirty years so they’ve forgotten how) don’t bother to slow down at all, continuing to barrel down the freeways at 80+ MPH.

Put them together on the freeway at the same time, along with the layer of oil that’s been laid down on the road in the last 400 or 500 days since the last rain, and it’s no wonder that a “rain storm” that wouldn’t even get mentioned in Boston or Chicago will cause complete gridlock in the Los Angeles commute.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that we live in the desert while wasting billions of gallons of expensive water on our lawns, EVERYONE will ignore the free water falling from the sky and keep their sprinklers going on their regular daily schedule. Half the people do this because they don’t know how to work their sprinkler controls, the other half because they don’t bother.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Here are my Facebook posts from earlier this evening:

Facebook Capture 1

Facebook Capture 2…and my Twitter warnings:

Twitter CaptureI’m doing my part to sound the warning. Now I’ve got to get back to building the ark. Or the zeppelin. Could go either way.

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Filed under Weather

November 16, 2013 · 21:02

The Real Life Manitou Springs

I’ve mentioned that when writing I find it easiest to describe someplace I’ve been. One of the settings of my current NaNoWriMo work in progress is Manitou Springs, Colorado. While many of the specific places that I mention are imaginary and are meant to invoke a feeling for the place in general, others, such as the police station and the Pikes Peak train station, are very real. We were there in 2008.

IMG_6294 smallThe Pikes Peak Cog Railroad Yard

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Bear WarningJust what you want to see walking from the parking lot.

IMG_6686 smallI thought they were hummingbirds. Nope. We were told that they were the biggest freakin’ moths we had ever seen. (I still think they were hummingbirds.)

IMG_6691 smallThese were definitely hummingbirds!

IMG_6697 smallAnd bees. Lots and lots of bees.

IMG_6642 smallGoing to dinner after we had gone up to the Pikes Peak summit, we came out to this HUGE thunderhead, spectacularly lit as the sun set. With the tops still brilliant white, the bottoms black and shooting out lightning, and the middles various shades of red and orange, it was gorgeous to watch.

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Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather

November 13, 2013 · 19:53

Here, Have A Pretty LA Sunset

First of all, I have to say that I am not posting these in order to taunt my friends and relatives back in New England and the Midwest who are getting their first big snow of the season, or my relatives up in South Dakota who are getting like their third or fourth huge freakin’ snow this year already.

Not that I wouldn’t do that, mind you. It’s just that I’m not doing it tonight.

With that having been said, it was warm today, into the lower 90’s here in the San Fernando Valley. Yesterday it was grey and gloomy and icky even though we never got any rain, but today was “clear and a million” as they say in the flying biz. Not a cloud in the sky. For most of the day, but…

When I went out with the dog just before the Long Suffering Wife came home, there were a few high, wispy clouds floating by, right as dusk started to set in. As we got further and further past sunset they started to turn pink and salmon. OK, so it wasn’t one of those “Oh, My God! My Brain Is Going To Explode This Is So Beautiful!” sunsets from Bali or Hawaii, but for Los Angeles it much less suckage than normal.

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