June 26, 2021 · 23:22

It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets Squished!

Monsieur Badass has developed an annoying habit of treating it like a game of hide-and-seek when he’s sunning himself while simultaneously hiding from the crows by hiding under the tires of the car.

This is not Monsieur Badass but a different lizard. Still, you get the idea. M. Badass tends to be way, WAY in there in the shadow and it’s tough to get a decent picture of him there.

It’s COVID’s fault. For the past fifteen months these cars have only been driven twice a week, sometimes only once. To this generation of Household Fence Lizards, these are permanent objects.

But now that I’m going out several times a week, they have to either be shoo’d away from instant death by squishing flatter than a pancake, or they have to be squished to death (see, “flatter than a pancake” reference).

The guy shown in the picture and the other Doctor Lizardo clan are as skittish as normal lizards are, so if you walk to the care and look at them funny they’re scurrying for the bushes and rocks. No worries.

But Monsieur Badass is different! He’s started to turn it into a game.

First of all, he doesn’t run away when you approach. He’ll actually wait until I get to the car, bend over, and poke my finger or some paperwork at him.

Then, if he’s behind the rear tire, he’ll run around to the front side of the rear tire, which only means that he’ll get squished by the front tire.

So I poke at him again and he’ll run back around the backside of the rear tire. Poke again and he’ll go over to the left side rear tire. Poke again and he’ll go up behind one of the front tires…

This can go on for several minutes, especially when it’s HOT out there. He loves it! Me? Not so much.

Yesterday I thought that I had killed him. We did this whole dance, I knelt down on the scorching driveway to peek under the car, and it looked like “all clear!”

Just to make sure to scare him off if he was hiding I turn on the car, let it idle a minute (as well as get the air conditioning going on full), then put it into reverse and rock the car just a skosh a couple of times, let it roll back just a smidgen, and then finally back up slowly. I mean, jeez Louise! How much warning does he need?!

But then when I got down to the bottom of the driveway and was ready to back out into the street, I looked back up into the driveway and saw him sitting there, right where he would have been underneath the car as it backed up. From that distance I couldn’t tell if I had squished him or if he had been in the middle between the tires and I had backed right over him. He was gone when I got home a couple hours later and was back out there this morning, so it looks like he’s not only a Badass, but a Daredevil.

I want to think that he’s figured this out and he’s only moving as much as he needs to. Then I remember that his brain is like 1% the size of the head of a pin and the only three thoughts it’s capable of are “eat,” “lizard sex,” and “RUN!!”

Long live Monsieur Badass! Or, at least, if he gets squished as I’m backing out, let some crow haul off the carcass before I get back so that I can carry on in blissful ignorance!

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June 25, 2021 · 23:57

The New Normal – June 25th

This afternoon I went to get a smog check on my car. There was just the one guy in the shop. He wore a gaiter, I wore a mask. I was in his open-air shop for maybe ten minutes.

It was not quite up to the standards of “exhilarating,” but by the current standards it was definitely “novel.”

When I was done I drove over to the FedEx place to drop off a package. There was one other customer and three FedEx employees in the small-ish, indoor office. I was there maybe five minutes, everyone was wearing masks. I joked with the counter personnel about the truly helacious noise that the automatic sliding door makes every time someone walks in or out. I said it would make me insane, I would have to bring in my own can of WD-40 to lube it. They said they had already tried that and it hadn’t worked – you got used to the noise.

It’s “normal.” It’s not the same old normal.

 

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June 24, 2021 · 23:31

Random Old Photos – June 24th

I’ve probably seen more garish things in an office – probably. Maybe?

This wasn’t hung in a gallery or someone’s home – it was in a reasonably small office. And trust me, it was freakin’ HUGE. I’m guessing 3+ feet tall, probably four, four and a half feet wide? And heavy as crap, the frame probably weighed 30+ pounds.

Is the painting valuable? Famous? Maybe, but if I had to guess I would bet it was a cheap knockoff or something mass produced and bought online for $79.99. It would have fit in with everything else…

The things you find when you go diving blindly into the old photos files…

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June 23, 2021 · 23:33

Making Plans

I did some ordinary things today that I was surprised to see felt very much not ordinary. I blame COVID and the last fifteen months of quarantine and pandemic conditions.

First, there was an announcement that Elton John’s final US tour was coming in 2022, and it will end with two concerts at Dodger Stadium on November 19th & 20th, 2022. Tickets don’t go on sale to the general public until June 30th, but there are presale deals for American Express customers, so I was able to get “floor seats” (the stage will be in the outfield, we’ll be sitting on the outer edge of the infield dirt just to the right of 2nd base – which was not ever a sentence I expected to write…) for a very reasonable price. (Let’s define “reasonable” as considerably less than the $500 to $1,000 each, which is what I expected to be paying for those seats.)

So, seventeen months from now, we’ll presumably be at Dodger Stadium seeing Elton John live.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like seventeen months ago and how much has it changed? How “normal” will the next seventeen months be?

Shorter term, the 79th Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) will be in Washington, DC in mid-December. It’s normally in August or early September, but a huge problem with the convention hotel going bankrupt due to COVID has caused a change in schedule. It’s also caused the convention to only have about a quarter of the hotel rooms they normally would have reserved. While the hotel room block opened up just on Monday, it’s already sold out. We’ll be staying at the Hilton about a mile away and figuring out how to grab cabs or Uber or Lyft or whatever to get back and forth between the venues. I also went over the schedule with my bosses since that’s a busy time for us and made sure we had a plan for me to be gone then.

So, six months from now, we’ll presumably be in Washington, DC seeing friends we haven’t seen in a couple of years and probably on our first plane trip in over two years.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like six months ago and how much has it changed? On that time scale the changes are mostly for the better, but only because it was so bad at the beginning of 2021. Watching the news, both medically and politically, I think we’re all a lot more sensitive to how fast things can change for the worse and I know that I personally am not convinced at all that we’re completely safe and away from the thin ice.

Yet…

Hope springs eternal. We see threats coming on the horizon, but they’re vague and uncertain. We’re exhausted from the last eighteen months of COVID, and even more exhausted from the previous four years of one political party trying to turn our country into a third-rate dictatorship – yet we’re making plans. Plans for travel, plans to see friends, plans to go to concerts.

It feels normal and simultaneously feels anything BUT normal.

We might need to get used to that feeling, as much as we may dislike it.

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June 22, 2021 · 23:51

No Context For You – June 22nd

Too many Diet Cokes, or too few?

The bridge of the Enterprise? The Nostromo? The Millennium Falcon?

You’re getting warmer…

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June 21, 2021 · 23:32

Golden Hour Backyard Lizards

You’ve seen plenty of the front yard lizards recently, hanging out under the Volvo or the van, eating ants, living their best lives (except for all of the missing limbs and mutilations). But what about those in the back yard? I think the last one I showed you there was probably Tux.

Can you find that lizard? (That’s not original – watch on Twitter for the #FindThatLizard game to return in a few Wednesday nights. Earyn McGee [@Afro_herper] runs the game and she’s been successfully completing and defending her doctoral dissertation!)

It was one of those times when my watch had whined at me to get off my ass and walk a bit, so as I often do, I took a lap around our backyard sidewalk. This time it was just before sunset, the “golden hour” for photography due to the light. As I walked, almost every step had one of these little guys darting from the grass or bushes or dirt off into the shrubs that border the yard.

This dude didn’t make it to the shrubs, but made the smart move of freezing and hoping his natural camouflage would save him. It didn’t, but the fact that I wasn’t interested in killing and eating him (not necessarily in that order), did.

These skitterish backyard lizard dudes need to chill!

 

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June 20, 2021 · 23:11

Los Angeles Mask Usage Data – June 20th

First of all, Happy Solstice! At 03:32 UTC tonight (20:32 PDT, 23:32 EDT) we were at the point where the Sun is at the highest point relative to the North Pole due to the Earth’s 23.4° tilt relative to its orbital plane. In other words, the longest amount of daylight and the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the shortest amount of daylight and the beginning of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. From here on out, the days get shorter a bit more every day, until the situation is reversed and the Northern Hemisphere has its shortest daylight on Tuesday, December 21st, at 07:59 PST.

It’s a cyclic thing.

California has officially come out of the pandemic lockdown and as of Tuesday, June 15th, in most places masks are no longer required for fully vaccinated people.

Key words in there – “in most places,” “required,” and “for fully vaccinated people.”

I thought it would be interesting to see how many folks are still wearing masks in general today. In this section of California, compliance with the mask and social distancing mandate has been pretty darn good in most places. I don’t recall seeing a single unmasked person in the grocery store or any other indoor space in well over a year. Granted, I haven’t been out that much at all, mainly just to the grocery store once a week and the odd other store run here and there. But I figured that now that the mask requirements have been lifted, we’ll start seeing folks ditching the masks. I was curious as to how fast it will happen.

Places like the gas station, where you’re outdoors to begin with? I was sure that we would start seeing masks being a rare thing. Much to my surprise, I haven’t seen it yet. The last time I got gas, last Sunday, everyone at the pumps, without exception, was masked up. Let’s say that it was a pleasant surprise.

At the grocery store last week and this, I again was pleasantly surprised to see all employees and all customers masked up. I’m betting that a lot of places, particularly those handling food, will keep requiring their employees to be masked for some time, just to reassure  their customers that it’s safe. (And health care and hospital facilities are exception to the lifting of the mask mandate – EVERYONE’s still required to be masked up there, and my money says that requirement will stick for quite a while.) But I was sure that this week I would see at least one or two of the 50-60 customers in the grocery store going unmasked – nope, not yet!

At the restaurant where I pick up our to-go breakfast every week, it was packed due to Father’s Day and folks who were eating were of course unmasked. But of those waiting for a table or waiting to pay or waiting for a pickup order, all except for two young guys (20-ish?) were masked.

So we’ll see how long this goes on. I think there are a lot of other variables, in particular how the Delta variant affects infection, hospitalization, and death rates. We’re down to less than 10 deaths a day in LA County, and while that’s not zero, it’s a LOT better than the hundreds and hundreds per day that we saw just five or six months ago. But if Delta doesn’t cause a huge fourth wave, opening up the theaters and ballparks to full capacity doesn’t trigger a new outburst, and more and more people can finally get convinced to get vaccinated, we’ll see if mask usage becomes an “only when required” (i.e, hospitals, public transportation, etc) item within a few weeks.

Personally? I’ll still be wearing one in public and indoors for a while longer. I want to start getting outside for more exercise ASAP and I’ll carry one them should I end up in a crowd or indoors someplace (i.e., stopping at 7-11 to get something to drink while out on a walk or run) but I won’t use it or need it when I’m just walking down the sidewalk. On the other hand, any time I’m in a situation, indoors or outdoors, where someone else asks me to put a mask on, I will. It’s not a big deal.

As for anyone who wants to ask me why I’m still wearing a mask indoors when it’s not required? Well, they’re “special,” in particular those who want to be in your face out of nowhere about something that’s absolutely none of their god damn business, so they’ll get full frontal snark right between the eyes from the beginning. Just sayin’.

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Health, Los Angeles

June 19, 2021 · 23:06

Lizard Diet Conundrum

As you all remember since you’ve been following this deluge of daily diatribes, Monsieur Badass (a partially crippled Western fence lizard) hangs out under the Volvo when it’s parked in the driveway. Aside from the protection from birds and other predators, I also suspect that he hides there because there are ants to eat.

It’s also been hotter than Hell here in Southern California, and one side effect is a sharp increase in the number of black widow spider webs around the yard. Including one that keeps rebuilding under the Volvo, very near where Monsieur Badass hangs out. Now, I’m really not a fan of arachnids of any kind, but I’m really, REALLY opposed to the venomous arachnids. My first immediate reaction is to shriek and run away, but my second, more thoughtful, more mature and considered reaction is to rain nuclear fire on them (preferably from orbit). Or at the very least, soak the area in insecticide.

But doing that stands a good chance of also poisoning Monsieur Badass, which would be very bad.

Then on a hunch I checked out what Western fence lizards eat in the wild. There are ants, crickets, other small bugs and spiders…including black widow spiders.

As a result, I’m not going to scream, nor nuke, nor soak the web and car in poison. I’ll leave the widder spidder’s web there for now, on the off chance that it’s another food source for Monsieur Badass.

The things we do for our friends and pets… 🥴

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June 18, 2021 · 23:50

Monsoonal Flow

As pretty much everyone in North America west of the Mississippi knows, it’s been hot as Hell all week.

In this neck of the woods there’s also been some moisture coming up from a tropical storm off of Baja, so it hasn’t been a dry heat.

As the moist air hits the coast it rises a bit and starts to form clouds – as it hits the mountains, it rises a lot and starts to form thunderheads.

As much as we could use the rain (we’re in a massive drought, bordering on outright emergency conditions), all we usually get is lightning – which, added to the heat and drought, is threatening to make this a brush fire season that’s worse than last year, and last year was the worst EVER on record.

Going to be a long summer, folks.

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June 17, 2021 · 23:54

Calm Alternative

So, having utilized and enjoyed the Calm app yesterday, tonight I used it again for a while. And found that I need a bit more variety than rain on the strawberries or babbling brooks.

Not in a music mood (which is…odd) either, so what’s a good alternative?

Thanks, brain! That’s a good suggestion!

The LiveATC.net app fit the bill just fine, the LAX Tower (North/South) feed to be specific.

Whoever said that air traffic is picking back up hit the nail on the head – it’s almost midnight and the incoming and outgoing traffic is constant.

It’s a comforting noise for a pilot who hasn’t been in the left seat in far too long. Sort of like listening to a baseball game, wonderful, calm, happy background noise.

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