…then why am I even busier NOW?
Insert many, many head-exploding emojis here…
You know those “oh, shit, look at the time!” posts?
This is a classic.
High-Altitude Smoke
California’s been burning, a LOT. Most of the fires have been up in the Sierras and in Northern and Central California, and I’m sure many if not most of you have heard about Lake Tahoe coming within a hair’s breadth of burning to the ground. A lot of that smoke has ended up Colorado, Utah, and points east, as far as Chicago and Pittsburgh.
But very little has hit the Los Angeles area.
Today that changed, rather suddenly.
Most of the smoke is up at high altitude, so we’re not doing any choking. You can’t smell anything on the ground.
But it sure is orange.
It’s supposed to blow out of here again over the weekend. Say hello to Sheboygan!
Filed under Disasters, Los Angeles, Photography
Unwanted Guests
Being where we are and the ecosystem we’re in, we get gophers. Annoying little bastards, they’ll ruin your lawn in weeks if allowed to. Our gardeners deal with them as needed. But this morning…
As soon as I came to a spot in the house where I could see out of the sliding glass doors to the backyard, it was obvious this was no simple visitation from gophers.
It was GOPHERZILLA!!!
The other problem with them, especially since the back yard is on the edge of a sizeable hill, is that if left unchecked the gophers can dig enough holes and tunnels to undermine the stability of the hill. Given enough gophers and a good soaking rain this winter (please, we could REALLY use that rain!) then a chunk of our (rented) house ends up in the downslope neighbor’s back yard and the house gets red-tagged and we’ve got 24 hours to find a new place and move out.
Not my idea of a good time.
So the powers that be have been notified and in a couple of days someone will be out to encouraging the gophers to move to someone else’s yard. In a couple of days.
In the meantime, tomorrow morning might be “interesting.”
Filed under Castle Willett, Critters, Photography
Random Old Photos – September 21st
The end of summer is here. The autumn equinox is tomorrow, September 22nd, at 15:21 EDT, 12:21 PDT. From there the days get shorter and the nights longer, until we get to December 21, 2021.
Out of curiosity, I looked up where I was on the autumn equinox ten years ago. I figured it would be some random picture around town or more birds, lizards, or dogs. Nope, I was out of the country!
In London, to be precise. I had gone to Southampton for three days of testing on a theoretical procedure for reducing drag on racing yachts. On the way home, the timing was off for getting straight from Southampton to Los Angeles via Heathrow, so I ended up with about twenty hours in London.
Poor, poor me how it worked out that way.
I didn’t get much sleep on that brief layover. There was plenty of time for that in steerage on the flight home.
This picture is from my first stop after a quick nap (I think I left Trafalgar Square about 3 AM according to the date stamp on the pictures.) It was raining, but I wasn’t going to let that slow me down. This was from Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, followed by a quick pass past Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, the Princess Diana Fountain, then a sprint back to the hotel for my bags and a train ride to Heathrow.
Someday I would like to get to London to visit and roam and stay for at least 24 hours, maybe even 72. It could happen.
Filed under Photography, Travel
Define ‘Deadline’
As I may have blathered on and on about for the past several weeks, it’s been one of “those” times when I’ve been up to my eyebrows in 24/7/365 (or is it “25/8/366” for these?) deadlines on several fronts. Primarily at work and then at the CAF SoCal hangar and from there all of the other little daily deadlines.
Tonight I finished the fifth and (for now) final of the “super gigantic mega oh God we’re all gonna die!” deadlines. I made them all, but it got me thinking about how some folks need to be more explicit about the exact details of the deadline. You know, for people like me!
One of them at work was quite clear – we have a 17:00 meeting on this day with a number of VIPs and it would be “very bad” if we didn’t have that stack of documents ready.
No sweat! After weeks of work, I printed out the final versions for me and emailed them to others on team a full eight minutes before the meeting started. There may have been some hysterical laughter released at the absurdity of it all.
At the other end of the spectrum, the CAF project had to be done “by end of day 9/20/21.”
There’s a fair amount of wiggle room there in my universe. Business day? Or am I still good at 23:59:55? Pacific time zone or Central? That’s important, gives me a whole three more hours!
That got done tonight at 22:20 PDT, so by my definition, I made it by a full 1:40! If that doesn’t fit in their timetable and they meant 17:00 CDT, well, whose fault is that, huh?
Hopefully I’ll finally sleep well tonight. Mañana, y’all!
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
No Context For You – September 19th
I love color.
In a world that’s increasingly grey, black, white, puce, putty, and bland, I like bold, bright colors and find them in the oddest places.
Someday we’ll get our own house again and I’m going to decorate it so, color-wise, it’s going to be the equivalent of the Weasley house in the Harry Potter books.
Sunglasses will be provided for guests at the door.
Filed under Castle Willett, Photography
From One Spice To Another
Last night I talked about a spicy dinner – tonight my thoughts range to another spice, that of the planet Arrakis.
“Dune” has been a favorite novel since I first read it in high school, probably 1973. In a couple of weeks the new movie version (covering the first half-ish of the novel) comes out and I haven’t waited this anxiously for a movie in a long time. This will be the movie that will get me back into a theater.
Having gotten past one set of deadlines and pressure at work (yeah, me, and the great team that I’m on there) I’m now up to my eyebrows in another killer deadline from Hell at the CAF hangar. No stress…
But as I’ve been working like a demon on this all day today, my attention keeps going to a poster I’ve had on my office whiteboard for a long, long time. For those familiar with “Dune,” obviously, this is the Litany Against Fear.
Fear of failure, fear of shame, fear of embarrassment, fear of being yelled at. All of the above. Powerful motivators.
Today I’m facing some fears.
And soon I’ll be watching the movie.
Filed under Entertainment, Paul
SPICY!!
I eat lots of broccoli, not because I like broccoli, but because I eat a lot of crap that’s “good” for me in my old age, and very little stuff (like ice cream and chocolate and bear claws and cheeseburgers and pizza and… you get the point) that I want to eat. Often to make it taste a little bit less like green, semi-crunchy cardboard, I’ll put a few drops of Sweet Baby Ray’s HOT sauce on it.
A couple nights ago dinner consisted of the aforementioned steamed fresh broccoli, plus a bunch of shrimp. I do love shrimp, and yes, it’s on that list with ice cream and pizza.
But we had no cocktail sauce. An error in my shopping calculations. So I improvised. I already had the Sweet Baby Ray’s out…
Double up the hot sauce on the broccoli, and then really lay it on while coating the shrimp in it.
Thinking about all of that hot sauce on something that my doctor would not approve of to begin with got me thinking. (Which is often not a good thing.)
I won’t tell my doctor if you don’t! (And it wasn’t bad – I would have preferred the cocktail sauce, but it beats using ketchup!)
Filed under Health, Paul, Photography
The Power Of Meaningless Stickers
In kindergarten and early grades, there’s a lot of motivation to be found in a cheap, meaningless sticker. Do well and get a green one – need some improvement and get a red one. Get a whole sheet of green ones for Parent’s Day and you’ll never be more upset in your life than when you get your first blue, yellow, or, god forbid, red one.
As much as we might think we outgrow that, there’s a reason that almost every charity out there gives out SWAG. Give blood and you get a T-shirt. (I’ve got dozens.) Donate $10 and get a wristband or baseball cap. The WWF will send you a calendar for free with pictures of cute endangered animals, and if that inspires you to send them $25 or $50, well…
For WordPress, which I use to host this site, a few years back they started sending motivational posts to my comments if I posted something every day. I was already a little bit motivated (aka, “anal,” aka “OCD”) to post EVERY FREAKIN’ DAY! When I started getting e-stickers in my comment, I was five years old all over again.
I was doing pretty well. This was from June 4th.
But there are rules, apparently. And an atomic clock with no soul, no slack, no understanding of the need some of have to have something in our lives we can count on & control, no matter how miniscule that “atta boy!” might be.
So on June 5th, like many, many other days, I was running late, on a deadline, trying to get something quick posted, and trying to make the pictures look nice. And I probably took one more pass through Photoshop to eliminate some dust on the sensor in one of the pictures – and I posted this at about 00:00:06 AM. And I did not get an e-sticker that night. Or on the next. Or the next.
The string was broken.
But finally on June 10th, I was congratulated for posting 5 days in a row. And back at it, last night I got:
There but for a few tardy seconds, tonight would be day #524 in a row. But it’s not.
Fight on!
Adrenaline Junkie
So the times and schedules come and go and overlap as they will, and sometimes all of the bits line up and you end up with multiple massive, major, critical deadlines all coming due within a day or two.
So it is with me, as you can tell by the increasingly frantic tone of my posts. The annual audit, this meeting, that review, this update, and payroll (which everyone agrees should NOT be pushed off onto a back burner…).
And then, after busting your butt for WEEKS on the audit, today’s the day to get the final draft, but after bugging the auditors repeatedly they say, “Wait, we’ve sent this four times, why aren’t you getting it?” So you check with your IT guy and he finally says, “Oooh, something happened, I don’t know what or why, but our email system decided to delete without notice all email from that domain.” WHAT??!! (Say that in the same voice & tone as Princess Leia when Grand Moff Tarkin decides to blow up Alderaan anyway, even after she gave him the location of the Rebel base.) Fix that, please – instantly will be fine, sooner would be better. What do you mean, 24 to 48 hours?
And then that wicked pain from what you suspect is a worsening ear infection goes from “Wow, that’s really getting sore” to “Shit, who shoved the freakin’ ice pick into the side of my head?!” So when you finally get a chance to take a breath you end up spending two hours in Urgent Care, and the 45 minutes of care to clear it out and clean it up (yep, that was a mess) turns out to be absolute agony, the kind of pain I haven’t experienced since I first had kidney stones.
So, the good news is that I’m a FREAKIN’ SUPERSTAR and the four simultaneous huge deadlines (plus payroll!) HAVE BEEN MET. Everyone’s happy. And the ear thing has been cleared without my head actually exploding and I have some drugs. Not the really, REALLY good drugs, but some pretty okay drugs.
But coming down off of all of that adrenaline? Wow! I’ve been abusing the adrenal gland 25/8 for about a month and now that I have a moment to breathe, I’m going to just stare off into space , maybe get caught up on a few episodes of “Ted Lasso,” or rewatch “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” and eat some ice cream that I’m not supposed to have. I’ve earned it.
There’s an excellent plan for you!
(P.S. – had the ice cream, got WICKED BAD brain freeze, almost as bad as the ear thing. God hates me.)
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 