Sunset. Clear skies. A white dagger moving slowly toward the horizon.
Not a comet. A jet headed out to sea over Ventura County. High and fast.
Destination Hawaii was my first guess. Going to Asia, Tokyo or Shanghai or Seoul, they would be heading north or northwest, up the coast toward Alaska on a great circle route. Headed out to sea in this direction there’s a LOT of nothing except Hawaii unless you’re going to Singapore or Australia.
The dot is another jet, this one headed south down the coast from Asia into LAX. There’s a whole stream of them, 24/7/365.
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.
No sunrise pictures from Stonehenge for me this year. First of all, there’s that whole “sunrise” and how damn early it is that I’m opposed to. On the other hand, if I were able to make it all the way to Stonhenge for the solstice, I suspect I’d find a way to scrape my sorry ass out of bed early enough to be there.
However, we did have a very pretty conjunction after sunset, starting with the three-day old crescent Moon and the very bright Venus.
A short exposure shows the crescent nicely and Venus is a pinpoint. If I had the telescope out, Venus would show the same crescent as the Moon. (It’s geometry.)
Crank up the exposure and Venus is overexposed but the Moon much more so. There are craters and plains and some details silhouetted at the terminator (the line between sunlight and darkness) but you see the dark portion of the moon dimly illuminated by “earthshine,” light reflected from the Sun off of the bright Earth.
Pull back a little and try to capture some details in the illuminated part of the moon, but I always forget just how stinking bright it is. Even though I had reset for a 1/250 second exposure, it’s still a bit overexposed. I should have gone down at least to 1/1000 second.
Pull back the zoom a little more and try again? Same mistake.
Pull all the way back on the zoom, overexpose for earthshine, and what else shows up? That thing just to the right of the palm trees that looks like a bright red planet? That’s a bright red planet, i.e., Mars.
As always, if you didn’t see this tonight, go look for it tomorrow night or Friday or Saturday. The Moon will be further up and to the left each night (for example, closer to Mars tomorrow) but you’ll still be able to see all of this if you have a clear western sky about an hour to two hours after sunset. Our forecast is for the June gloom to return with the coastal marine layer and fog moving back in, but we’ll see. Maybe the gods will cut us a break.
What does that Magic Eight Ball say? “Outlook not so good!”
I do wish that the sound quality on YouTube videos was better. On my phone you can hear all kinds of bird songs, the drone of other hummers buzzing me, dogs barking, planes goin overhead…
On this video, it’s all dulled down and dampened, like listening through it with soggy sponges stuck into your ears.
At the little restaurant where we get Sunday breakfast, there are a couple dozen eucalyptus trees in the parking lot.
Yesterday I found the entire parking lot littered with thin strips and patches of eucalyptus bark as the whole grove had decided to shed together almost overnight.
Eucalyptus are non-native to SoCal, but they grow well here and they’re everywhere. As invasive species go, they’re not terrible.
The fact that they anually shed their bark is a bit of a nuisance since the stuff gets everywhere and is a mess to clean up.
The bigger problem is that, either on the ground like this or still clinging to the trunk of the tree, this thin, paper-like bark is highly flammable. When a brush fire starts, these things go up like Roman candles.
What I was REALLY looking for as I got back to the car was the red tailed hawk that was making quite the racket somewhere in the treetops thirty feet above me. I never saw him, but the food chain is obvious. There’s a grocery store here, several restaurants, large trash bins spilling over with food, and all of that attracts seagulls. Fat, slow, well fed seagulls keep red tailed hawks well fed.
The laws of unintended consequences, urban shopping mall version!
It’s been a lovely couple of days to sit out on the back porch in the shade and listen to all of the birds. Sitting near one of the hummingbird feeders, I hear the buzz of them coming in, but once they perch, my view is limited.
What I also find hilarious is how Little Bastard (butt shown) reacts when I take down this feeder to clean and refill it. While I’m at the kitchen sink cleaning it, maybe ten feet away, he’ll zip in and fly all around where it was. He won’t fly at all into that empty space, but he’s circle that space like the feeder was still there, just invisible.
Does he think I had a Romulan cloaking device installed?
He’ll do this two, three, four times or so. Then he’ll come back with three or four other hummingbirds. Now, mind you, these are the exact same hummingbirds that he’ll chase away in a heartbeat if they try to eat at HIS feeder. But now that it’s vanished out of this plane of existence, he’ll go round them up and bring them back to show them the mystery he’s found. “Look, guys! Just like I told you! It just freakin’ VANISHED!”
I’m sure when I was younger there were stretches of 2-3 weeks like this. I spent years as a single dad with three teenagers and a job that required way more than 40 hours a week and I got through that. When I was in my early 50’s I still had that job, it was going through a stretch that was busier than all getout and I was going to Pepperdine for two years to get my Masters and I got through that. So, yeah, this isn’t a first.
But I might have lost a step between my 40’s, my 50’s, and now my late 60’s. In other words, I’m getting too old for this shit.
It is always a surprise when I see news of another high school classmate retiring. Or one my brothers, all of whome are one to seven years younger than I am.
Retire? Not any time soon. I’ll be happy to just get some time off this weekend instead of working all three days.
But there’s a lot of satisfaction in what our team is doing and the teamwork concepts that I learned at Pepperdine are being put to good use. So we’ll press on.
Perhaps with an extra nap or two for a couple of days. Maybe I’ll even have time to go find something other than this one rose bush to take pictures of.
We’ve established that I’ve been REALLY busy for days and weeks, and the best case scenario is that it won’t get much worse. All with the knowledge that in a worst case scenario it could get barking mad in the blink of an eye.
Then this happens out of the blue…
It’s entirely possible that language was used or which my saintly mother would not have approved. ENTIRELY possible.
The last ten days or so have been like running a triathalon and doing so while trying to keep up with the Kenyans in the marathon, Lance Armstrong in the bike race, and Michael Phelps in the water. There were three critical, like, “Scotty I need warp speed in three minutes or we’re all dead!” deadlines, plus a whole huge other longer term project, plus, you know, the usual day in, day out operations stuff.
Needless to say, I’m a little short on sleep. And there were moments when I had doubts. But the three critical deadlines all get met, the other big project is being picked back up but at a more “normal” rate, and the operations thing keeps chugging along.
One dictionary definition of a “plateau” is, “a relatively stable level, period, or state.” I’m there. This evening I’ve been just watching a baseball game, fighting off that nagging feeling that I MUST be missing something critical if I’m not going 100 miles an hour.
It’s fine. The 10-day long adrenaline high will fade.
There will be a ton of more work, and new deadlines, and new crises. But I (and the amazing team of folks I work with, I’m no freaking solo superhero) have shown once again that we can get the job done. We’ll deal with those deadlines and crises.
Tonight however, I will sleep. A little bit, at least.
Now if I could just get a better, final solution to the multiple plumbing problems in this #*#$%$&!# rental house…
The semi-random picture isn’t really a plateau, more like a hill. Close enough for government work!
(Image: Flightradar24)
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 