Coco

She hates me. It’s her nature.

Coco is a tiny dog, some sort of mutt with a lot of poodle or terrier if I had to guess. She belongs to our neighbors on the north side and Coco’s job is to defend our wonderful, kind, friendly neighbors from all sorts of evil terrors. ***I*** am the evil terror, just in case I was being too subtle.

There’s a 6′ chain link fence between our yards, covered in vines (I’m sure you can catch glimpses of it in any one of hundreds of photos from the past six years) so I don’t see Coco well and she doesn’t see me, but that doesn’t matter. She’s sound activated. Any sound from me and she is sounding the alarm.

Me taking the trash out is the absolute bane of her existence. The trash barrel is over along that fence and when I open the lid on the trash can or recycling bin it often bangs into the fence and rattles it. She’s often barking at me long before I get there, set off by my footsteps, but the sound of the trash bin being opened and closed is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Even when I just go out to walk around the yard and stretch my legs, it’s anathama to Coco. This aggression will not stand. man!

I hear my neighbors trying to shush Coco, but she will not be silenced. She has a job to do and she’s going to do it!

I do not taunt her, ever. I don’t call her name. I don’t stand on my side of the fence and bark back at her. I don’t scream, “COME AT ME, COCO! GIVE ME YOUR BEST SHOT! LEAP THAT FENCE, COME OVER HERE AND GO FOR MY THROAT! TAKE ME DOWN AND PROVE YOUR DOMINANCE! SHOW ME WHO’S THE ALPHA CRITTER!!!” I don’t do any of that. I think about it… But I’ve been good.

So I understand my role, my part in this particular drama. I go outside, quietly, often with trash, minding my own business, and Coco goes berserk to make sure everyone knows I’m outside in the yard without supervision, footloose and fancy free, an obvious threat to the future of Western Civilization.

What kills me are the squirrels. We’ve got many of them (plus all of those birds!) and I’ve never once in six years heard Coco barking at the squirrels. Those little rat bastards scamper all over the yard and up one side of the tree and back down the other, along the top of the fence, in and out of all of the vines, and Coco ignores them completely. Isn’t THAT the EXACT sort of thing that terriers were originally bred for? Not for Coco, whose noble ancestors might be spinning in their graves at what their proud lineage has become. But god forbid that I should go out in my own yard with a camera to take pictures of a hawk.

A hawk…

Gee, it would be a pity if our juvenile red-shouldered hawk got a bit bigger and stronger and more capable and saw Coco as prey. Poor, poor, edible little Coco.

Time to start training and befriending hawks!

Fine Feathered Friends (May 16th)

After seeing the woodpecker earlier and then getting distracted by the sleeping owl, there was another notable visitor at sunset, when I went out looking for the owl again.

Our resident young red-shouldered hawk was sitting just about 20 feet off the end of the back yared, eating something.

Given the feathers hanging from its beak, I’m guessing there was a mourning dove or some other bird that was today’s prey.

Yeah, I got the hairy eyeball after the first couple dozen photos. It’s a gorgeous bird.

Fine Feathered Friends (May 14th)

Yesterday, before I got distracted by the unknown object (sleeping great horned owl) up in the top of the pine tree down the block, what had I seen just off the end of our yard that had caused me to drop everything, grab the camera, and hustle across the yard to get some closeups?

This gal!

The Cornell University Merlin app can’t quite decide if it’s a female Nuttall’s Woodpecker or a female Ladder-backed Woodpecker…

…but I think it’s more likely a Nuttall’s Woodpecker. If you click on the pictures to blow them up to full sized, you’ll see a tiny patch of yellow by her beak, which isn’t mentioned as an identifying mark but which can be seen in Merlin’s pictures of other Nuttall’s Woodpeckers, but not in any of their pictures of Ladder-backed Woodpeckers.

I know it’s a female because males of both species have red heads, while females are just black and white.

Either way, it was a bad day to be a bug or a termite on that pine tree. Feast away!

Up In The Tree Tops

It was early afternoon (13:30) and out of the kitchen window I had spotted a rare feathered friend visitor (pictures later). I grabbed the camera and hustled on out, but when the bird I was photographing spooked and bugged out, I started looking around.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay up high in one of the pine trees on the hilside below our yard there was a large brown object that I had never seen before.

Brown, some stripes and details, about the size of a backpack. My first thought was that it might be a hornet’s nest or something like that.

It was still there an hour later, and an hour after that. When I finally remembered to grab my binoculars and go out to get a closer look about 18:00, it was gone.

Looking at the couple of pictures that I got, the ears give it away. This would be a sleeping great horned owl.

We hear them almost every night, and I’ve seen a couple close up during the day, but this is the first time I’ve seen one all tucked in to sleep during the daytime.

Mother Memories – 2024

It’s Mother’s Day, 2024. We were watching the Angels game this afternoon and of course all of the players were being interviewed and talking about their mothers. I was thinking about my mother, in particular in terms of all of the Angels games we saw over the years, and rememberd the time she tried to have me arrested at an Angels game.

I should note that my mother, and her wacky sisters, were all world-class practical jokers. While many of the more legendary jokes were elaborate collaborations which involved costumes and cross-country travel, they never passed up a chance at improv. Some time I might tell the story of the Mother’s Day  1974 story in the DC area at the big plantation brunch with my aunt, uncle, and cousins…

Anyway, in this particular case it was probably Mother’s Day, or some other Sunday afternoon game in Anaheim. I think by that time Mom was living back in Vermont again, but she was visiting and so we had made arrangements to all meet up for the Angels game. So that we would all  be sitting together, I had bought a block of about 15 or 20 tickets. We had gotten there plenty early, and my wife had taken the kids up to the seats, leaving me standing out in front with a handful of tickets for all of my relatives.

One by one, several brothers, sisters, in-laws, and kids wandered up, got a handful of tickets, and gave me wads of cash to reimburse me to for their share of the ticket purchase. Then they would wander off into the stadium to meet up with the rest of the family.

Finally, Mom came up, handed me cash, got her tickets, and we both looked at the large and menacing figure of an Anaheim police officer who had suddenly appeared behind me.

The cop looked at me, looked at my mom, looked at the tickets, looked at the cash, and said, “Scalping tickets is illegal, and I’ve watched you sell at least a dozen. Please tell me that this nice lady is your mother.”

To which Mom replied, with a totally straight face, “I’m sorry, officer, I’ve never seen this man before today. I just responded to an ad I saw.”

“Mom, that’s NOT funny. Officer, this is my mother, visiting from Vermont, the other people were my brothers and sisters. I bought the tickets so we could all sit together and I’m not scalping tickets.”

The cop glanced over at my mom, who looked at me and said, “YOU SHOULD SEE THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE!”

Mom finally fessed up that yes, I was her son and yes, we were all family members meeting for the game, and no, it wasn’t necessary to arrest me, at least, not right at that moment for that particular crime.

The cop had a sense of humor, some common sense, and it was pretty obvious what was actually going on, so we all laughed and went our separate ways. A good time was had by all.

No Context For You – May 11th

IT’S MAY???!!! And a third of the way through it?? WHO KNEW?

Well, I guess that I sort of did in the sense that the deadlines I had this week on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday all got met, but for my internal calendar and clock it was more like these are critical and they’re due Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, not May 7th, May 9th, and May 10th. It might seem to be a subtle distinction, but it’s a big difference in my head.

(YES,  the interior of my head might be a bizarre place at times. Anyone reading this site for a decent chunk of the last 11+ years should have noticed that before now.)

Some may wonder – “What *IS* a ‘No Context For You’ post?” Well, first and foremost, it’s an indication that my brain is fried and my creativity on that day is probably at a low point. So, you know how when making a TV series there were various tricks they use to create a weekly episode or two to catch up with the calendar when they were falling behind schedule? The original series of “Star Trek” for example, re-edited the original pilot with a few minutes of quick, simple new footage using only a couple of actors to come up with the two-part episode, “The Menagerie.” Even shows like “Murder She Wrote” and “M*A*S*H” did this sort of thing.

“No Context For You” is similar for my use. They usually use an image which gets taken by accident (the photographic equivelent of a “butt dial” on my cellphone camera) but which I keep instead of delete because I find it somehow interesting or useful. Then I stick it on here with some random train of thought blatherationings (like…THIS!) that have nothing to do with the image and generally doesn’t explain a thing.

Presto! Change-o! We have a daily post and pray for more inspiration (or time, or both) tomorrow. Thank god for “tomorrow!”

No Aurora For Me

Another obvious bucket list item for me would be to see the Northern Lights or aurora. I figured I would need to book a trip to Iceland or Northern Canada or Alaska to see them, but tonight a huge CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) from the Sun has slamdanced the Earth and we’re getting the most vivid and widespread aurora in 50+ years. On social media there are amazing and detailed photos from places like Detroit, Chicago, upstate New York, and even as far south as Nashville and Ohio. Even further south, there are photos of the sky glowing red and purple from Miami, Texas, and Mississippi, and even Southern California. I saw one set of pictures from Thousand Oaks, which is only a dozen miles from here.

Here, I’ve been taking cell phone pictures and looking a couple times an hour all night, but with no luck. We have light pollution near the horizone and the Little Dipper, and some haze and clouds off to the north.

Straight overhead you can see the Big Dipper, which would look even better if I wasn’t too lazy to go get the iPhone tripod and use it instead of shooting these pictures handheld. But no aurora, no purple or red tint to the sky. And now the clouds have moved in here.

Maybe on the next once in a lifetime occurrance. Maybe that will either be stronger so that the skies light up even at 34º12’03″N, or I’ll be somewhere further north so that I can see them.

If you’re further north tonight, I hope you had clear skies and a great view of a colorful sky, excited by high energy particles and plasma thrown out from the Sun! Enjoy!!!

And please, everyone try to take a peek for aurora on Saturday and Sunday as well. This solar storm might be strong enough to last a couple of days. If at first you don’t succeed…

LOVE That BOOM!

I’ve been REALLY busy all day, a tight deadline looming.

On the one hand, I knew that SpaceX had a Vandenberg launch scheduled for tonight, and it was going to be right at sunset so it had a good chance of being spectacular, but then I got a notice that it had been bumped by a couple hours to 21:30-ish. I didn’t even know exactly what time, and I was TOTALLY heads-down in the deadline tasks.

Until, at about 21:45-ish, the wall and west-facing window in my office gave a good, sharp, shake and rattle from the sonice boom from the Falcon 9 that had launched and gone supersonic off of the Ventura coast about t6hirteen minutes earlier.

I’ve heard it before when I’ve been listening for it, but for some reason, when I was NOT expecting it, it seems so much louder and more distinct.

I love living “near” (100+ miles) a freakin’ spaceport!!!

Roses Are Pink (At Least, Some Of Them Are)

That whole “Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue” thing is PR at best, BS at worst.

I don’t have any violets in the yard, but while some of the roses are red, most of ours are not.

This is almost fluorescent pink.

Hot pink, mixed with touches of yellow and lots of white.

And the shapes and curls!

Life on Earth – it can be wonderful. If only we could stop screwing it up for a while.

Two Hundred Years

Two hundred years ago today (apparently) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was played in public for the first time.

You’re probably most familiar with the final movement, the Ode to Joy, which is one of the most stunning, brilliant, and beautiful pieces ever created anywhere, any time, by anyone.

If the alien overlords land and point at Trump and Gaza and ask why we as a species should be allowed to live, I’ll point to this.