December 3, 2025 · 23:26

39ºF + 99% Full Moon + Clouds

Quite the recipe for a bracing and brisk and beautiful night!

But wait, there’s more!

Blow up the image to full size and you’ll see Orion just to the right and below the center. And the “V” (pointed to the right) of Taurus just under the Moon, in that notch in the clouds.

And of course, even if you didn’t blow the image up to full size, that really bright object just off of the left edge is Jupiter.

Wouldn’t it be neat to just lay out on a lawn chair and watch for a couple of hours? Preferably in a thick, down-filled sleeping bag. 39ºF now, headed toward 32ºF before dawn.

Nippy!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather

December 2, 2025 · 23:16

No Context For You – December 02nd

Choose your Hell…

Concentrate on those important tasks for hour after hour after hour? End up exhausted, barely able to keep your eyes open and capable of staggering to bed, little or no energy or time to do anything else, anything enjoyable.

Work hard but put down your labor when the allotted time comes? Feel okay, have the time and energy to read a book or watch the hockey game – but the whole time your brain is racing about your deadlines and how you’re risking failure, and trying to sleep is futile and troubled.

In between somewhere? There’s a reason it’s called “work/life BALANCE.” Some days it feels like that balancing act is being done with you as a last-minute substitute for Philippe Petit, on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Which, if you’re tired enough, becomes an allegorical phrase from the Tamarian language. “Paul, a poor substitute for Philippe, on a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.”

IYKYK!

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Filed under Memes, Paul, Photography

December 1, 2025 · 23:41

Bots?

“A spike in your stats” indeed! Apparently something or someone was visiting this site this afternoon causing a 13,250% increase in traffic. No messages or comments were left and other than the alerts from WordPress and Jetpack I don’t see any signs. I haven’t gotten any huge jump in subscribers, just the usual “couple a month.”

One of the social media posts that kicks out every time I post something new (like this, my usual “daily” post) goes to LinkedIn, and I have had a few new folks joining the company who have asked to connect to me there, no doubt prompted by the Linkedin algorithms when they update the information on where they’re employed. I give them fair warning that I don’t post “business related anything” there, just the more-or-less daily connections to my personal blog, and if they find it bizarre or boring I won’t be offended if they disconnect. It’s possible that one or more of them finally actually looked at what’s posted here, but still… 275+ views is quite a bit.

My suspicion is that it’s a bot or digital agent of some time that started “scraping” content and for reasons unknown picked a large but not complete batch of posts. Who knows?

I, for one, WELCOME our digital overlords! If they want to sign up as subscribers, or better yet, PAID subscribers, so much the better!

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Filed under Paul, Writing

November 30, 2025 · 19:59

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Two

Most of this work technically was done yesterday (today was filled with wonderful family activities for a belated Thanksgiving celebration) but yesterday I got distracted by pretty lights in the sky and it’s close enough for government work.

The garage end is good, with the basic foundation along the roofline of the big, colored C9 incandescent lights and the white icicle lights. Both of the old houses were covered end to end with two sets of lights. Not this house. At this end, headed back over the big white gate to the back yard driveway, the colored C9s make it to the corner, but the white icicle lights run out short. Need to get more sets.

My son got the candy canes installed along the driveway, and got about half of the small Italian cedars next to the driveway lit up. I’ll continue with those next time. Behind the Italian cedars is a 6′ cinder block wall, which would be GREAT to display a ton of lights on if I can just figure out an easy, cheap way to anchor the lights to the top of the wall. I have an idea…

The most glaring “gap” in the existing coverage in front is where the colored C9s and the white icicle lights run out WAAAAAY short coming around to the front. Probably going to need two additional sets of both here as well.

I wasn’t sure about putting the old artificial tree out in the front, but I think it looks nice in this corner. Although now that it’s primarily a night-time display, it probably needs a HUGE, BRIGHT star or something at the top.

At the old Scarborough house these blue & white cascading icicle LEDs used to go along about a third of the front of the house and looked nice. Here they wouldn’t even come close to covering a significant portion of the roofline so they would get swallowed up amid all of the other lights. But they’re the perfect width to fit in this section over the front door with the two pillars on either side. I just overlapped them and offset them so that it looks blue-white-blue-white-blue-white. I like the effect and think it will still stand out when I finish putting up the colored C9s and the white icicle lights. And I didn’t fall off the ladder and break anything putting them up there. WINNER!

This morning when I got up I was pleased to see that three of the four timers turned off correctly at 00:30 last night. This afternoon when we got home from our family affair I was equally pleased to see that those three then turned back on correctly at 16:15. Now I just have to figure out why that fourth timer is borked. No doubt it’s a user error.

The other suggestion I’ve had is to put at least a few lights up on the back yard roofline and on the pergola. I’ve never done the back yard at either of the two previous houses, but here we have vacant lots behind us and the rear roofline and top of the pergola can be seen from the main road coming into the subdivision and a little bit from the main road. It wouldn’t be that hard…

As one of my kids texted over the weekend: “How many lights Dad wants”

No inaccuracies found!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Memes, Photography

November 29, 2025 · 23:28

Circumzenithal Arc

We were out putting up more Christmas lights this afternoon and saw what was to me a totally new and fascinating phenomenon, a circumzenithal arc. Technically not a rainbow but a halo, it comes from the sunlight being scattered by high-altitude ice crystals instead of raindrops. It stood out because of its location (directly overhead instead of on the horizon), the fact that the colors are extremely vivid, and the arc and spacing of the colors are reversed or “upside down.” Bizarre at first, but stunning.

(The “Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Two” pictures are coming, but will have to wait.)

Given the positioning of the arc relative to the Sun and that band of ice crystals between them, I suspected the connection even if I didn’t understand or remember the math behind the optics. The article referenced above confirms that.

With a wide-angle view you can see the two sundogs on either side of the Sun, with some hints of the very faint Parry arc. One of the things that amazed me was how long the phenomenon lasted – I’m used to rainbows on the horizon only lasting maybe five to ten minutes max, often much less due to the clouds and rain moving around. With this based on high-level ice clouds that are moving much more slowly, we watched this for well over a half hour.

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Filed under Photography, Video, Weather

November 28, 2025 · 22:23

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day One

Day One of the efforts to decorate the Forever Home in Hesperia. I am not dissatisfied with the progress and results, but I have learned new truths.

Part of the “adventure” is figuring out where our existing light sets will go best on the new house. For starters, along the roof line we typically have dual lines of big, colorful C9 bulbs, along with white icicle lights. We started at the garage (southwest) corner of the house and from there worked both ways.

The good news is that we found a relatively quick and simple way to hang the lights and anchor them, and there are working power outlets up under the eaves on both ends of the house, as well as near the front door.

The bad news is that this house is HUGE and has a massive front roof line. There are gaps, and we’re going to neeed to make a trip to Lowe’s ASAP to get more lights.

Once we get the roof line done, then we can start to fill in with colored lights in the bushes along the driveway and the trees in the front yard.

At one point in the house hunting over the past couple of years I think I mentioned that a non-critical but also non-trivial consideration in looking a potential new houses was, “Are there lots of places where I can hang Christmas lights?” Some potential houses might have been on streets with more traffic, and at least one had even bigger roof lines and opportunities for hanging more lights, but this place is going to be pretty magnificent I think.

Updates to follow…

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Photography

November 27, 2025 · 21:31

Thanksgiving Sunset

Exactly what it says. It was one of the better ones, more pink and purple than orange in the back, with the quarter moon up high.

In the front is where the reds and oranges were found.

I hope that all of my American friends had a wonderful and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday with no arguments over dinner about politics, religion, or how Aunt Charlene is now Uncle Charlie.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

November 26, 2025 · 22:41

Paying For The Sin Of My Stubborness

ME???!!! Stubborn???

Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as being focused on the most straightforward solution and keeping things simple.

For example, fixing the tooth that I broke back in May or June. At that time we had no idea that we would be moving soon and playing 52-pickup with our routines and lives. Broken tooth = visit to my usual dentist = start treatment with a couple of necessary but undesirable surgeries.

Then came the move.

Do we have a new dentist up here? No. Do we have a recommendation? No. Do we know of anyone in our dental plan so we don’t have to pay 100% out of pocket? No.

So my solution for the last three necessary dental visits was to just go back to my usual dentist who had started the procedures. The only real downside was the 100-mile round trip to get to her.

It seemed to be the easier of the two paths. The more simple one.

The third and final post-move appointment was for last Wednesday. But the dentist woke up feeling ill. The good news was that her office called nice and early to cancel & reschedule, since they knew I was driving in from up in the mountains in the next county over. (Or maybe it’s two counties over…) The bad news is that her office called nice and early to cancel & reschedule, while I was still asleep. They gave me a new time and date and I grunted like a semi-conscious chimpanzee.

Today was that rescheduled date. The day before Thanksgiving. One of the busiest travel days of the year on the LA freeway system. And I’m voluntarily doing a 100+ mile round trip.

Surprisingly, and I’m grateful, the trip “down the hill” was a piece of cake, one of the fastest and most traffic congestion free of the dozen-plus that I’ve done in this whole “moving to the High Desert” process of the past six months. About 1:50 total, and there were good tunes on SiriusXM.

Coming back home at about 14:00 when EVERYONE IN THE FREAKING CITY WAS HITTING THE ROAD TO GET A JUMP ON TRAFFIC AND GET TO GRAMMIE’S AND THE TURKEY? That might have been more of a trial and a tribulation. Closer to 5:00 with multiple stretches where I didn’t go eight or ten miles in an hour, and the only saving grace in going the “back route” up over the mountains instead of the “straight route” on the freeways was that my map and GPS apps kept reassuring me that the long way around was actually an hour or more faster than the freeway route.

Okay, but that’s a lot of time sitting still with a sore tooth, hungry, thirsty, needing a nap, and having time to think about life, the Universe, and everything. And as Crash Davis so correctly taught us, “Don’t think! It can only hurt the team!”

So, I’m finally home, I finally got to the bathroom, and the adventure of this tooth is finally over!

Except…

Looking at the final X-rays, as the dentist finished up, she showed me where there are signs of new cavities growing on nearby teeth. When I *DO* find a new dentist up here (and don’t put that off), just have them contact her for copies of the old records and X-rays.

Great!

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Filed under Forever Home, Health

November 25, 2025 · 23:27

Erma Bombeck Said It First!

Do you see it? Do you see the difference?

We have a “desert landscape” scheme, with tons of rocks and gravel of various sizes and colors. It’s lovely, we adore it. But with the recent rains, something’s changed.

It’s supposed to look sort of like this, and 90% of it does still. But this morning I went out and all of a sudden noticed…

There’s a big patch with green grass growing up through the rocks. Why here and nowhere else in the yard? What’s there that’s different?

Oh, yeah.

As Erma’s book title said, “The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank!”

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography

November 24, 2025 · 23:47

With The Proper Lighting…

Yesterday I complained a bit about the leaves on the maple tree being more brown than red. Today I was out closer to sunset and looking at the tree and the leaves backlit by the setting Sun.

That’s a LOT better! The direct sunlight brings out a lot more of the color.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography