September 1, 2025 · 23:22

The Mesa Panorama

Blow it up to all of its full sized glory, I’m giving you the raw file, not a compressed version.

This is from a spot across from the Hesperia airport and the BNSF main line train tracks, overlooking one of the dry river beds that lead down from the Victor Valley (Hesperia, Victorville, Apple Valley) into the Mesa, which leads downhill through Cajon Pass into the Inland Empire region between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

Way, way over on the right you can see a small, yellow building – that’s Don Reyes Airport Cafe, which was pretty stinkin’ good.

Just to the right of center you can see houses, streets, and whole developments down in the gulch at the bottom of the dry river bed. That can’t be a good place to be when the rains come…

That mountain that I was talking about yesterday is just to the left of center. Looking at the “All Trails” hiking app with its topo maps, I’m wondering if that might be Luna Mountain, with Round Mountain the similarly sized mountain to its left. We’ll see.

The plants filling that gulch? I think the taller, more angular ones are yucca trees, while the more squat and bushy ones dotting the scene everywhere are creosote. And the small, scraggly ones in the immediate foreground are tumbleweeds.

Are there rattlesnakes and critters out there? I did not go looking to see. Let’s just assume that there were and I’ll leave them alone if they’ll do the same for me. I’m not a fan of the more venomous reptiles, fine with sticking with the Freds and Bubbas of the fence lizard worlds.

 

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August 31, 2025 · 23:48

What Is That Mountain?

It’s clearly visible in the default position for the Hesperia Virtual Railfan camera. Three peaks, each higher than the one on the left of it.

This is the view from near the Hesperia Airport, which is just a few hundred yards north of that railcam, looking over one of the dry river beds that lead off of “The Mesa” area of southern Hesperia, leading down into the Cajon Pass.

You can also see it over the wall from our back yard, at about 107º on the compass, so ESE. That makes me think it’s over behind the Deep Creek Hiking Area.

One way to find out! Maybe in the next few weeks it will cool a little bit, I’ll get enough unpacking and catch-up work done to be able to take a day off, and I’ll go exploring.

Stand by.

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August 30, 2025 · 23:54

Bird Buffet

To be perfectly clear, because I don’t want to be considered a monster, we have set up a buffet to feed the local birds, we are not having a buffet for ourselves consisting of birds.

In the last month I got two of the hummingbird feeders up and one of the seed feeders, but we’ve attracted enough birds so that there’s sometimes a traffic jam, particularly at the one seed feeder. Today I found more of our bird feeders in all of the stacks of boxes filling up the garage and did some work out on the pergola putting up hooks, then cleaned all of the feeders. When all was said and done, we now have four of each kind of feeder, the four hummingbird feeders at the back over the brick wall and the four seed feeders at the front hanging over the turf.

If you look at the first hummingbird feeder on the far left in the first picture, you’ll see this one wasting no time in testing out the new nectar. I literally had just put it up and walked off to take the picture, maybe ten or fifteen seconds, and this one was all over it. And stupid me was worried that it might take a while for the birds to “find” the new feeders.

Here you can see all eight, so let the feasting begin!

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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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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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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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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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