August 29, 2025 · 23:15

Perfect Alignment

I’m sure that it’s a seasonal thing, and probably will end up being for just a couple of days, probably twice a year. I didn’t notice it at all for the first four weeks we were here, but for the last day or two, just before sunset, walking down the somewhat darkened hallway from the living room toward the front door, the orange light from the setting Sun comes straight through the peep hole in the front door like a laser beam!

(Please ignore the box – I just bought a new, fancy, ergonomic office chair to try and give some relief to my back, butt, and hip. One of this weekend’s projects to assemble.)

The Sun’s shifting a bit north and south every day with the seasons, the door faces pretty much due west, the door is thick and that peephole is thin, so everything has to align just perfectly. This week is the time for the Fall Apparition!

It’s blindingly bright!

It’s our own private version of Manhattanhenge!

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home

August 28, 2025 · 23:38

Proof Of Life – August 28th

The good news is that word has spread among the local songbirds about the seed feeder that I hung last weekend.

The hummingbirds found those feeders almost immediately, and we now routinely see three or four or seven at a time. They’re amazing.

It took a little bit longer for the seed feeder to get discovered. And then, it was just one bird for several days. Then two, but that was it.

This morning when I got up, there were two dozen or more sparrows and finches out there, three or four at a time at the feeder, the rest either perched on the pergola above while they waited their turn or on the astroturf down below picking at the droppings. I’ll probably have to expedite putting up a second or third seed feeder.

I also saw a large scrub jay up on top of the pergola, surveying the whole scene. It’s probably not going to fit at the feeder, and I don’t think they’re feeding on smaller birds, so it might just be curiosity.

Who knew that one of my goals in life was to have the local scrub jay population watching me and wondering what the hell I’m up to next?

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home

August 27, 2025 · 23:29

Proof Of Life – August 27th

I know that, as a rule, we all sorta hate Mondays. For, reasons. Legitimate reasons.

But Wednesdays are starting to really get on my nerves as well.

Peeking over the multiple monitors on my desk, it’s scary just how much stuff is still just piled up in semi-orderly stacks. Not to mention what’s still out in the driveway in the PODS units. But there are only so many hours in the day.

On this side of the monitors it’s much more orderly and coherent. I would be a blubbering idiot by now if that hadn’t happened. It’s a little oasis of order (at least, order-ish) where I can find things that I need and have room to move about. The computer works, the internet is up and stable, I have my tunes, even most of the cables are in some sort of neat-ish arrangement. It’s functional.

But over there… I found the glowing star ball and the three champagne corks from the three recent Chiefs Super Bowl wins and put them in their place of glory. Beyond that, it’s slightly sorted chaos.

Maybe this upcoming long weekend will offer at least a few hours to attack. Or at least empty out a PODS unit into the garage.

Any progress is good progress.

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August 26, 2025 · 23:48

Clear & A Couple Hundred

The monsoonal flow shifted and there was flash flooding up in the Central Valley, but it was a nice enough day here, with just the tops of a few thunderheads peeking over the horizon here and there.

Good timing too, since the thinnest sliver of a crescent Moon was back to be spotted in the evening sky.

 

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Filed under Astronomy, Forever Home, Photography

August 25, 2025 · 22:51

Lobbing Up Softballs

Another atmospherically unstable day with a huge stream of monsoonal moisture coming up all the way from the Gulf of California to past Las Vegas. We didn’t get any rain here, but it was cool, breezy, and we could see the thunderheads building around us in every direction. A number of places like Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and Barstow had flash flood warnings out.

Comes sundown, and everything’s pink and orange and red and purple, different layers of clouds with different levels and color of illumination, being pushed by the wind in different directions. I’ve gotta find the tripods and unpack them, it would have been amazing as a time-lapse video.

I don’t want to be a one-trick pony on this site with only pictures of clouds and sunsets, but we don’t have that many birds or lizards or flowers yet, so if the Universe is going to lob up softballs with sights like this right outside my front door, I’m gonna swing for the fences! Needless to say, it’s a “busier than god” time at work, I’m still unpacking, I still haven’t caught up on sleep (by an order of magnitude) lost over the past eight weeks, so if I need something quick for the day and this is available…

Get real!

There’s a whole new world out there to explore, and I’m looking forward to getting out there and going hiking and up into the mountains and up toward Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead and looking for trains and a gazillion other new sights and experiences. And I promise, lots of pictures from all of those adventures! But for today, wallow in the stunning sunsets.

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August 24, 2025 · 23:28

Once More, With FEELING And Four-Part Harmony

It’s late Sunday night, tomorrow is Monday and we start all over again.

The good news is that the cyclic nature of life means we get a chance every day to have thunderboomers like yesterday or sunsets like this.

And every day has the potential for joys, small and large. Today, I saw a sparrow discover the new birdseed feeder that I put up, the first that I know of to visit. It’s a start!

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August 23, 2025 · 23:22

First Rain

I am a god! Zeus, apparently! I can trigger lightning!

It’s easy! When we get a thunderstorm nearby, I turn on my cell phone camera trying to capture video of lightning. There will be no lighting to be seen for the entire time that I’m recording. However, within two seconds of ending the recording, lighting will strike right in the middle of the frame! It happened multiple times today. I can trigger lightning! I am Zeus!

It remains to be seen if I can cause lightning to appear on command (or lack of a command) out of a clear, blue sky. If I can… Let’s just say that there’s a list, and there will be signs that I have a new toy to play with.

I got up this morning to find not just a few scattered clouds, but complete overcast with some nasty, dark, low clouds moving in from the southwest. The weather radar was showing light showers down over the “Inland Empire” areas of the LA metro area, which were turning into convective cells (i.e., thunderstorms) as they were pushed up the mountains and got heated over the desert.

The weather app also said we had a 55% chance of rain today – that couldn’t be right!!

An hour later, I was sure that I was hearing thunder. For a reason, it turns out.

We had two separate thunderstorm cells near us, one to the west, and one to the southeast. Based on the timing between the lightning flashes and the thunder arriving, this was about three and a half miles away and coming straight at us.

I moved a chair out into the back yard, started watching the thunderstorm and rain, watching the four or five hummingbirds that were feeding at our two feeders, and listening to the trains from two different lines running past our house on either side. The Long-Suffering Wife referred to me as being “in hog heaven,” and she’s not wrong.

This went on for the better part of an hour, after which it moved on toward Barstow and parts north.

I know for many you who have weather like this on a regular basis, my reaction sounds overblown and hyperbolic. But we don’t get this sort of activity often. In LA, while we might have eight or ten or a dozen rainy days a year (maybe), we would only get more violent weather like this once every several years. It’s slightly more common up here in the desert, but not much. To get it out of nowhere with little or no warning just a month after moving up here is quite a treat!

LET ME HAVE MY JOY!

There were more New Forever Home Firsts (NFHFs) later in the day. I saw our first squirrel up on the brick wall in the back yard. (Coincidentally, I also put up the first birdseed feeder near that wall earlier today, but he didn’t seem aware of it and never went near. Concidence, or timing?) I also saw our first fence lizard, a decent-sized (8 inches maybe?), all black critter skittering along the back wall toward a row of planters in that back corner.

Finally, there were some interesting tidbits that may point to a most interesting first-time realization about our new house. At the height of the storm, about 10:45, the Virtual Railfan webcam that’s less than a mile away went off the air. Folks were talking about the power being out as SC Edison cut power in a lot of places due to the wind and lightning, in an attempt to minimize the chances of starting a brush fire is something went wrong. And when we went out to dinner, the restaurant was closed (no power?) and we saw a couple of traffic lights that were out or had been out.

So all signs point to a reasonably widespread power outage from about 10:45 to 17:00. Were we lucky that we never lost power or noticed any problem at all? Well, if you think it’s “lucky” that we have a whole slew of solar power panels on the roof…

Not a blip, not an iota of problems with our A/C, computers, lights, refrigerators, cable, internet, etc…

Yet another reason we’re both really liking this house!

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Video, Weather

August 22, 2025 · 22:02

Forever Home – Close Of Escrow Plus One Month

You’ll recall that we closed escrow on Tuesday, July 22nd and started moving in – it’s been a month now. While we’re making progress, I continue to be astonished by how little my expectations and perceptions of reality actually match up to real reality in the sense that every single freakin’ facet of this entire process of packing, moving, and unpacking takes so, so, SOOOOO much longer than I expect it to. In terms of just functioning (i.e., sleeping and moving and walking and that sort of thing) I continue to be way “behind the plane” and it’s making me nuts. (“Behind the plane” refers to flying and how as a pilot you want as much as possible to be in control, proactive instead of reactive, and anticipating what you’re going to need and do next BEFORE you get there. You want to be ahead of the plane, not be behind it. Many things in life have the same lesson apply.)

Today I could see some convective activity off to the north and east, out where I-15 heads up to Barstow and on to Las Vegas. I know that at times there can be some big thunderstorms building up out here – I’m really looking forward to that. I love watching thunderstorms. (Safely.) Nothing too near to us today, but the weather radar apps were showing a few lightning strikes out there.

In the month we’ve been here, I think it’s the little things that are different that are adding up. The lineup of TV channels is all different. At both the Pomelo house (35+ years) and the Scarborough Peak house (7+ years) we had the same cable company and the same channel lineup. If you travel, of course it’s different in your hotel room, but that’s always temporary, just a day or two, maybe a week. Now, about two weeks in, it hits you that it’s different and that’s the way it’s gonna be forever.

And it’s not just which order the channels are in. There are a lot more of the “holy roller,” fundamentalist televangelist networks here, and where in LA they were buried off in the middle of thousands of channels, here they’re right up front in the first dozen or so. Lots and lots of screaming assholes who I would really, really like to see following Dobson sooner rather than later. Can I get a discount if I block all of them? More to the point, is there an option to pay more and have all of them blocked at the source?

Aside from that, there are a lot more channels showing nothing but hour after hour of old reruns from the 1950’s and 1960’s and 1970’s, and most of them are in the lower, “prime” channels as well. I guess I’m not the target demographic.

With all of that said, one thing that I expected but have seen very little of is the open, fanatical, cult following of MAGAts. I know of one house a couple miles away that I’ve seen have a Trump flag. That’s it. I haven’t seen anyone doing the fully-armed, open carry, 2A cult thing, and I haven’t even seen any vehicles covered in right-wing bumper stickers and cult paraphanalia. It’s a relief to not (yet) be exposed that sort of toxic bullshit.

We’ll see what happens if/when that changes and I come face to face with that level of stupidity and hatred. I know it has to be out there. I suspect that despite a deeply ingrained discomfort with confrontation, I will have limited tolerance for entitled fools.

We can hope!

Overall, we’re doing well a month in. We both still love the new house, and while I had hoped for better on the pace of the transition, I’m learning to allow myself some grace and just do the best I can and not beat myself up when that best doesn’t meet (possibly questionable) expectations. We’re learning our way around town, we’re learning where the stores are, we’re starting our colony of hummingbirds, and I’m getting all of the change of address notices processed. I’ve got the autopay set up for the gas and mortgage and solar and water, and some days (not all!) I can actually find things I need instead of just going out and buying new. (I was working on payroll last week and ran out of printer paper late in the evening – I managed to scavange enough paper from three other printers combined to get through the task, but the next day we hit a Staples to get a couple more reams of paper, despite the fact that I know that SOMEWHERE in those PODS units there are two cases, 20 reams, of new paper. It’s no good to me if I can’t find it. “A bird in the hand…” and all of that.)

I hope all of you are doing well also.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Weather

August 21, 2025 · 23:46

One Problem At A Time

We went to try to solve our phone problem today – we’re all on AT&T and their coverage in this area sucks. So we’re going to switch carriers.

Sundown was nice, lots of contrails and “mare’s tail” clouds.

Gorgeous!

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

August 20, 2025 · 22:38

TEENSY TINY MONSTER!

This little dude was chilling in the astroturf just before sunset yesterday.

Maybe an inch long.

Remember to be grateful every day that they don’t grow to human-sized. They would rule the planet like xenomorphs or Predators, so fast, so viscious.

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Filed under Critters, Forever Home, Photography