September 10, 2026 · 22:12

Bottleneck

One serious disadvantage to living in the High Desert is that there’s only one real reasonable route to get “down the hill” to the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles – the I-15 freeway.

If that’s got an accident or a brush fire or construction or just heavy traffic going to or from Las Vegas, you’re screwed. That 35-minute trip to Ontario International Airport can turn into 1:45+ in a heartbeat.

Yes, in theory, there are alternate routes. You can head west toward Antelope Valley on a (mostly) two-lane state highway, complete with stoplights, crossings, driveways, small towns with 35 mph speed traps, and after about 45 miles get on the 14 Freeway south, which in another 45 miles will get you to the San Fernando Valley, which in another 15 to 45 miles will get you to Downtown LA or Orange County. Of course, if 100,000 or so of your closest friends are also trying to squeeze into that alternate route, it might slow things down even more, as difficult as that might be to believe.

If that’s not your style for an alternative, head west toward Big Bear or Wrightwood and try to get down the hill on some of the two-lane mountain roads, twisting and turning for mile after mile after mile, stuck doing walking speed with no option to turn back or pull over if you need gas, coffee, or a bathroom. Good times!

It did occur to me at one point that, since I was picking someone up at Ontario Airport, it might just be faster to find a way to turn around, go north to Apple Valley Airport, spend a couple hours with the flight school there, get my bi-annual review done and get current on my pilot’s license, rent a plane from them, and fly the fifteen or twenty minutes down to Ontario. The question wasn’t whether the idea was crazy, it was if it was crazy enough!

Soooooo much red ahead… An extra ten minutes, my ass! Try an extra 20-25 from this point, and I was barely a dozen miles from home after more than an hour on the road already.

You can’t get there from here.

And let’s hope there’s an extra special place in Hell reserved for the self-centered, narcissistic assholes (ALL driving Mercedes, BMWs, or Teslas) who think it’s okay to cruise down the shoulder or the center divider to pass everyone, because of course when Karma rears her ugly head and wipes them out, they’ll take some innocent folks with them and make the backup EVEN WORSE for the rest of us.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography

September 9, 2026 · 22:49

Gotta Keep The East-Facing Shutters OPEN!

This house has a ton of windows, LOTS of light. One of the things we love, and The Long Suffering Wife loves the plantation shutters throughout.

The master bedroom windows face east, so we’ve generally kept them closed so that the rising Sun doesn’t wake us up too early.

With all of the tropical moisture that’s been moving through from the outer bands of some tropical storm off of Baja, that might be a bad move.

I’m not ready to get up every single day pre-dawn to watch the sunrise – sunsets are more my style.

But if it’s going to look like this, I’ll take Casper’s accidental kick as a fortuitous wake up call. It was stunning!!

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

September 8, 2026 · 21:44

Lessons From Casper – September 08th

He loves laying on the turf.

Casper has discovered the feral cat that sometimes hangs out on our back porch. Casper HATES cats with the white hot fire of a thousand suns. Casper had the cat cornered, barking like a maniac, with the cat making demonic hissing and spitting and mewling noises. Fun times!

36 hours and almost $400 later, for food, treats, pup cups, dishes, leads, poop bags, toys, tennis balls, and Greenies – all he wants to do is go full berserker on a feral cat.

Sometime in the middle of the night last night he discovered all of Ronnie’s stuffed bears in the guest room closet and started carrying them out into the living room to behead and disembowel. (The stuffed bears all lived, the closet is now closed. Lesson learned.)

We will never, EVER again eat without being stared at mournfully, brownish-orange eyes brimming with sorrow at the injustices of fate that let food go into our mouths and not his.

He poops like a bull elephant. I need to start breeding an army of dung beetles.

Buy stock in Kleenex, we may be going through an inordinate amount of tissues in the near future. Casper has an irrational fury toward tissues, either used single sheets snagged from the trash, or whole boxes left unattended. He taught THAT box of tissues who’s the boss!

Sunrise is at 06:28 but it starts getting light at about 5:45 – close enough! When’s breakfast?!

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Filed under Dogs, Forever Home, Photography

September 7, 2026 · 21:04

Casper

We didn’t have enough chaos in our lives.

Say hello to Casper, our household’s new Chief Chaos Officer.

One of the reasons we wanted to buy a house instead of continuing to rent was so that we could get a dog again. We had dogs before when we owned our own house, but it had been about ten years. Ronnie had always wanted a harlequin great dane, and she wanted to get an older, rescue dog. Now that Worldcon was over last week and we didn’t have any travel planned for the next several months, it was time to start seriously looking.

She found Casper. He’s younger, a black lab / great dane mix, a rescue, and now he’s ours.

He’s very bright, a snuggle bunny, and very well behaved on a leash for a walk around the block. Good first day grades on his part.

We have tons of intersting birds and critters in the back yard, lots of intersting and comfy places to take naps, and lots of pets and scritches. Apparent good first day grades on our part.

It will, of course, be a process to get used to each other and settle into a routine. We’ll see how well we sleep through the night in a new home…

Expect many of my quick “proof of life” pictures and posts to be of this goofball instead of birds and clouds!

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Filed under Dogs, Forever Home, Photography

September 6, 2026 · 23:21

National Hummingbird Day

It was yesterday, Saturday, September 5th, and I missed it. But, better late than never…

Most days there’s a pair of them out there, and it seems there are more about but they zip around from tree to tree in the neighbors’ yard and over the back wall, so it’s hard to be sure.

Just in case, because I don’t want that territorial war and fighting going on that we had back at the Scarborough house, where “Little Bastard” would run off a dozen others, I now have a second and a third feeder set up in the back, plus one in the front (a really, really nice glass one that I got as a gift from a dear friend).

Let’s see if we can build up the local population!

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography

September 5, 2026 · 23:21

Reflections From The Eastern Hills

Right before sunset, if you’re looking to the east, opposite the setting Sun, where the hills of eastern Apple Valley are covered with houses and ranches, there are inevitably a handful that just happen to be perfectly aligned to reflect the setting Sun to reflect its bright light through the dusk and gloom right back at me.

The hills glow red, while the foreground starts to get dark, but a handful of brilliant, bright, golden sparks stand out.

As the shadow creeps up the side of the hills they blink out one by one, sometimes replaced by a new light as the Earth rotates into position.

The sunsets up here are so beautiful every day, even if you’re standing with your back to the Sun.

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Sunsets

September 4, 2026 · 23:32

Proof Of Life – September 04th

As hot as it’s been throughout August, I’ve been keeping a bowl of fresh water out for the critters. The tiny birds, finches and wrens, all use it, as well as the bigger birds (pigeons, crows, and ravens). I’ve also seen the squirrel and feral cat over there.

Next time I’m feeling like decorating a bit, a bigger fountain of some kind would look nice out there.

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography

September 3, 2026 · 22:07

Covey

It’s a covey of quail. There were at least twelve of them, might have been a couple more. They were scurrying about and refused to count off, no matter how nicely I asked.

It was just before sunset. They all stayed in the shadows.

They didn’t spook, even when I opened the shutters on the window to get a better view. Their markings and coloration were spectacular!

Most were brown like this one above, but a couple were jet black while still having the same patterns. I don’t know if that a different subspecies, one was male, the other female, or if it’s a total coincidence and normal variation within the species.

Between these guys and the roadrunner, it’s been a busy bird week at the Willett Nature Sanctuary (a.k.a., our back yard)!

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Paul

September 2, 2026 · 22:52

No Context For You – September 02nd

There’s a line from Bilbo early in “The Fellowship Of The Ring,” when he’s talking to Frodo about how tired he is, something like he feels “thin, soft of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

I get it.

Getting old is not for the cowardly. The growing list of nagging physical twitches and foibles are not helping.

Nor is the news. But ignoring the news isn’t a good option either. I want to see the evil fuckers coming and have as much of a head’s up as possible.

I should make time to watch more Ted Lasso…

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Filed under Paul, Photography

September 1, 2026 · 23:29

Fine Feathered Friends – September 01st

Weird bird on the wall this morning.

Bigger than the quail and pigeons, and some of them aren’t particularly small. On closer examination it’s not a quail, doesn’t have that little bobbing thing over the forehead. Wrong body shape for a pigeon. Turtle dove? Maybe, the head shape is sort of, kinda similar.

Grab a camera with a honkin’ big zoom lens.

Interesting feather pattern. Interesting shape. Seems a little familiar…

It’s looking a little bit ragged and ratty. And I thought they were strictly ground birds. (I was wrong!) What’s it doing on top of the wall?

Walking, and there’s no doubt left. As delighted as I was to see the quail, seeing a road runner in the yard is even better!

And then it ran off down the wall, that tail bobbing like a rudder!

WOW!!

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Filed under Birds, Forever Home, Photography