December 31, 2025 · 22:46

2005 Was Like Sirius

To be clear, 2005 for me was like Sirius the star, the astronomical object, not Sirius the satellite music service.

Sirius (the star) is the brightest star (other than the Sun) as seen from Earth, over twice as bright as the second brightest (Canopus). It’s been known for thousands and thousands of years since it’s so prominent. It’s the “Dog Star” and when it appears as the morning star it’s the beginning of summer and the “dog days.” Lots of interesting facts about Sirius and it’s history.

Despite being known and prominent for centuries, it wasn’t until 1844 that astronomers noted that it’s part of a binary star system. The huge, bright star we see is now known as “Sirius A” – there’s a much smaller, much dimmer white dwarf which can only be seen with a good sized telescope that’s known now as “Sirius B.”

This is where I make the comparison to 2025.

“Sirius A” = all of the pain and bullshit that was the world (Russia vs Ukraine, etm…) and US politics (the rigged and stolen Presidential election that no one seems to care about, the Mango Manchurian Candidate and all of his disgusting actions and idiotic, psychotic rantings and misinformation, the billionaires who bought Congress and the Supreme Court, the Epstein files, the National Guard in our cities, ICE, Brain-Worm Bobby and his [literally] insane health policies, and on and on and on and one, etm…)

“Sirius B” = our Forever Home, finding it after years of searching, getting the purchase done, getting the move (more or less) done, and still being amazed on a daily basis that we own and live in such a COOL place!

Given the enormous difference in magnitude between the two, it almost seems inappropriate or embarrassing to be so pleased about the house, given the enormity of the suffering and death around the world and in our country. Yet, on an individual level, it really shouldn’t be ignored or lost in the chaos. Yes, big picture, it’s a tiny thing compared to the potential end of US democracy or the start of the Second US Civil War, but it’s a HUGE freakin’ thing in our personal lives.

So, it reminded me of Sirius.

What about 2026? Well, as I might have hinted at, I think Trump should be in jail for the rest of his life, or tried and executed for high treason, and then we need to find a way to sweep the GOP and our illegitimate Supreme Court out of power and change the rules so this can never happen again. I suspect there might be more than enough bribery, perjury, embezzlement, and other crimes in there to put a LOT of the GOP into cells next to Trump’s. Time to clean house and take our country back. (I wish I knew how to do that, but that’s above my pay grade. I’m open to suggestions.)

That’s the biggest day in, day out, universal objective for the new year, but there’s the usual on a personal level as well. There are always things that I can and want to do better, and since I’ll be hitting one of those “red-letter” birthdays in March, as always I need to do a better job of taking care of myself physically.

We’ll see. The intentions are good. The spirit is strong, but the body is weak.

Stupid body. (And holy guacamole, Batman! That’s a metric shit ton of grey hair. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯)

I hope all y’all get through the New Years’ celebrations safely and in one piece. I’m sure you all have your own list of things to be aware of and improve on where possible – best of luck to you all and may the odds be ever in your favor.

If nothing else, “Project Hail Mary” hits theaters in March. How bad can a year be with that coming out to look forward to? (He asks innocently, fully understanding that he’s probably tempting the Fates with such a statement.)

I’ll see all y’all on the other side.

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Paul, Photography, Politics

December 30, 2025 · 22:52

Mountain Under The Cloud Deck

Solid overcast today as the next storm moves in overnight, but for a few minutes this morning there was a perfectly positioned thin spot that let some sunlight in to illuminate Mount San Antonio and its fresh layer of snow.

With everything else darker around it, the effect was stunning.

The new incoming storm isn’t supposed to deliver nearly as much rain as last week’s storm did, but we’re still being warned of possible flash flooding and mudslides below the burn scar areas from earlier this year. (We’re not in one of those areas.) I’m not too worried about this one personally, but it will be damp and cold pretty much every day for the next week.

Probably no ice cream trucks showing up for a few days. And anyone camping out on the sidewalk for the Rose Parade in Pasadena down the hill might be miserable. But we’ll be warm and cozy here – not going anywhere!

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December 29, 2025 · 23:05

Sunday Morning Mountain

For years we have gone out to breakfast on Sunday mornings, followed by our major weekly trip to the grocery store. COVID put a hitch in our getalong for a while (we ordered breakfast to go and I went shopping by myself to get in and get out) but now we’re getting back to that routine in Hesperia. It’s nice.

A couple of the places we go are about five miles away, near the post office, so it’s a good chance to also swing by and clean out the PO Box. The place we went this last Sunday is right near the Main Street overpass of the BNSF mainline railroad tracks, which might be one of the taller structures in the area. And it was the first day after the clouds had finally cleared out following the Christmas storm.

While we were waiting for breakfast to get cooked and served, I took a short hike.

That’s the back (north) side of Mount San Antonio, known better as “Old Baldy.”

With several inches of fresh snow, it was beautiful! Too bad that with several major mountain roads closed and washed out by the flooding, no one could get up to the ski resorts there.

While I was up there for five minutes, I also got to see two freight trains, seen here just before they meet going in opposite directions. The one on the left is headed down into Cajon Pass and down the hill into the Los Angeles area rail yards, while the one on the right has just come up the hill and is headed to points east. The main line goes through Barstow, Flagstaff, Kansas City, Fort Madison, and Chicago.

Later, from a lower point of view, i.e., atop the fence surrounding the flood control basin near where I took last night’s pictures of the Christmas lights hanging over the back yard wall, you can see the mountain rising about twenty miles to the southwest of the Forever Home.

I’m thinking we won’t get tired of that view any time soon.

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December 28, 2025 · 23:29

Which House Is Ours?

As mentioned a couple of times, our street, as lovely as it is (and is really *IS*), is one street of seven in our subdivision, with none of the other streets ever being developed, leaving nothing but empty, graded, ready for construction lots for the last couple of decades. Weird, but it is what it is.

As I mentioned earlier this weekend, because of that, there’s nothing but dirt and weeds on the other side of our back wall, so I started hanging extra Christmas lights on the other side of the back wall. Theoretically I guess that would be in someone else’s yard if they ever built a house on that lot, but they haven’t, so I put lights up that can be seen when you come off of the main street into the back way into the subdivision.

Tonight I walked the two blocks down to the corner where the back entrance is and looked back toward the line of back yard walls on our street. Guess which house is ours!

I think it looks great. As I’ve said, next year I want to extend it out about twenty feet to both sides along the brick wall, and add a couple more loops below these. It will be amazing!

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December 27, 2025 · 23:00

Quarter Moon O’er The Pergola Lights

Cleaning up some of the (minor) wind damage from this latest storm, had the quarter moon almost straight overhead. From the pergola…

My other discovery about the “new” Forever Home (which I should have discovered five months ago if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an idiot) is that when:

  • I’m in my office and
  • the only other person in the house is The Long-Suffering Wife and
  • she’s a couple of rooms away and
  • we’re in a larger-sized house in a subdivision where all of the houses are on reasonably big lots and thus set away from each other and
  • a song that I really, REALLY like comes on the Sirius Channel 33 (“1st Wave”) Saturday Night Safety Dance

it’s okay for me to turn it up REALLY FUCKING LOUD!!!

That whole flooding thing on Wednesday sorta sucked, but being able to do that makes up for it!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Music

December 26, 2025 · 23:39

Hesperia Christmas Lights 2025 – Day Five

The back yard – a new frontier!

I’ve always put 99% of the lights up in the front yard where they could be seen by the neighbors and passers by. Yes, I want to show them off! That last 1% went round the sides of the roofline to give a bit of a 3-D sense and something to look at while you’re coming at the house from the side. To give the whole light display some depth.

And so it’s been this year, although with the huge driveway on one side and the garage doors on the side, it’s more like 75% in front and 25% on the one side. No worries, it looks good.

But the Forever Home doesn’t have anything in back of it, no neighbors, no houses, just several vacant, graded pads where houses have never been built. You can sort of see it from the intersection with the main road a block away, and you can see it clearly as you turn off of the main road and come toward our street. The pergola with all of the bird feeders sticks up above the cinder block wall.

And that’s a canvas that I had to start putting lights on this year.

As seen from the house, there are a couple of strings of lights hanging down from the support posts of the pergola. EASY to put up and support, no hooks or hangars or anything else needed. And with the low-power LED lights, you can have thousands of lights in a single string going back and forth.

What you can’t see from this view are the first (top) string running right along the top beam of the pergola and facing outward, and the fourth and fifth arcs of lights, which hang down on the outside of the wall so that they’re visible only from the outside.

(I am SOOOOOOO glad that I didn’t drop my phone over the wall taking this picture, leaning way out.)

I now have the rest of the lights that can fit onto this one string and next year I want to add another loop or two hanging below these two, then I want to extend the loops out from the top of the cinder block wall on either side of the pergola. I think it will look amazing and bright and colorful for anyone coming into the subdivision off of the back entrance from the main road.

As always…

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December 25, 2025 · 23:10

Christmas 2025

For those of you who celebrate, I hope this was a peaceful and pleasant holiday. For those who do not celebrate, I hope you had a quiet Thursday without too many inconveniences caused by everything being closed due to everyone else taking the day off.

We had two of the three kids (plus the one son-in-law) here, and we had a Zoom with the out-of-town daughter. The Long-Suffering Wife made our traditional Christmas feast featuring Joe’s BBQ from Kansas City, and there were a gazillion calories to be consumed. It was wonderful.

It was cool (mid 40’s) and windy as Hell, with the next band of rain (not as bad as yesterday) hitting after midnight tonight. Because everything’s already saturated with areas of flooding (nothing too bad near us) we’re back on a Flash Flood Watch. It will be be fine. At least our yard, interior courtyard, and garage no longer have any standing water. Let the healing (i.e., the drying out) begin!

This whole weekend storm has taught us that the City of Hesperia and the County of San Bernardino are aggressive and efficient about communicating about potential hazards. I didn’t necessarily expect that, but I most certainly appreciate it.

Technically tomorrow’s a day off at work, but I’ll likely spend most of the day trying to get caught up on paperwork and data entry. That’s going to be my Christmas gift to myself, spending that time to buy myself a little peace of mind and freedom from some of the usual time pressure. Put on some music or a football game or five, get some snacks, check a dozen or so things off the to-do list from Hell… Golden!

Adulting…

It sucks, but it’s probably better than most of the options.

(Oh, Khan’s gone from the wreath on the front door. Someone twenty miles downwind is going to find that picture in their front yard and I can only imagine what they’ll think about it. KHAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!)

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December 24, 2025 · 23:44

The Great Christmas Eve Flash Flood Of 2025

Standing in six inches of freezing cold water in a downpour with a bucket, desperately shoveling water into a large, rolling trash container so that it didn’t flood into the shiny, new, amazing Forever Home was NOT how I expected to spend Christmas Eve. But here we were!

They said we were going to just get a bit of this storm, nowhere near the worst of it. Either they lied, got it badly wrong, or Jeez Louise it must have been really, REALLY bad down by the coast.

It was a long, long night between the winds and the rain. Hey, did anyone else know that the cover on the flue to the fireplace in the master bedroom sounds just like a snare drum in a Neil Peart solo in a deluge?

(Image: Weather Underground app)

The yellow spots weren’t so bad after some of the orange and red blobs. And the City of Hesperia and County of San Bernardino do an extremely thorough and efficient job of notifying us of flash flood warnings, flash flood watches, tornado warnings, and tropical storm warnings by text, voice mail, email, and phone calls. Even in the middle of the night…

The problem in the back yard was annoying, but not much of a threat. It was when we noticed the rising water levels in the interior courtyard that things got exciting. There’s a drain, but it was apparently blocked by leaves. There are doors on all four sides, three of which lead into the house, particularly into my office, the hallway by the dining room, and the living room. Fortunately (by accident or otherwise), the fourth door is the lowest by about two inches and it leads into the garage where there was minimal damage to be suffered. Not a crisis, just a mess.

So out I go into the deluge and the ankle deep, ice cold water, to clear the leaves, set up a sump pump, and grab a bucket to help get the water level down faster than it was going up with all of the runoff from the gutters.

The joys of home ownership! Althought, to be honest, even if we were renting, I still would have been stuck doing this.

After about four hours we finally got the upper hand and the flow into the garage stopped. When the rain finally slacked off to just a Level 8 instead of an 11, I was able to get some warm and dry clothes again.

Being Christmas Eve, while I was bailing and pumping, The Long-Suffering Wife was cooking our first holiday dinner of the weekend. It was wonderful.

A quick check of the Christmas lights shows a couple of strands down on the ground due to the winds, but they all seem to still be on. No short circuits, no water damage. I love it when a plan works!

And we all lived happily ever after. Except, of course, for the mess that I still have to dry out and clean up in the garage. But given the fact that there’s rain expected every day for the next week, maybe we’ll just hold off on that.

 

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Forever Home, Weather

December 23, 2025 · 23:41

The Atmospheric River Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Okay, so it’s more “roaring” than “slouching,” with another HUGE rain event expected (along with the accompanying flooding and mudslides below last summer’s burn areas) and extremely high winds.

No snow for us – snow levels are only supposed to be down around 7,000 feet, and we’re at about 3,950. We should miss the worst of the rain as well – that will be down in the mountains rimming the LA Basin where some places will get nearly a foot of rain in the next four or five days combined. We should get 2-3 inches, which is wet and windy, but hardly a disaster.

It does give the lights a nice, dramatic look!

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December 22, 2025 · 23:22

The New Tree – Layer Two

New, bigger, better house – new, bigger, better Christmas tree. An array of options for the built in lighting, we chose to go with twinkling white lights.

Next, it’s time to two full strings of colored lights, plus two full strings of bubble lights.

I do love me some of those bubble lights. A fond memory from my childhood, even if they were the very old-fashioned kind that were both highly flammable and poisonous. (Or should that be venomous?)

The modern lights are safer. But they will still break if banged around, and today the algorithm brought me a string of videos of large dogs, particularly great danes, obliterating Christmas trees, and The Long-Suffering Wife dearly wants a great dane, so… Let’s hope this isn’t a foreshadowing comment.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Dogs, Photography, Ronnie