Limekiln Wildlife: Critters Edition

Here are some pictures of the animals we saw during our Limekiln camping trip:

In the first five minutes after getting there, there was a deer roaming the grounds, and I caught him like a ghost in the upper right-hand corner of this exposure:

An obvious addition to any trip to a California coast--seabirds:

Banana slugs in the wild! I'd never seen one before. It was pretty small, and I remember thinking, Who left a golden pepper out here? But it was moving! Cool:

Be careful and wary: smelly elephant seals brawling in the surf:

And sunning on the beach:

The big male on the upper right is nearly as big as my old Datsun 240-Z.

Look Out!

Piranhas! Attacking the Jungle Cruise ship, a rare specie that loves the sunny afternoons of Anaheim:

Pretty cool effect, anyway...

Columbus Circle

There was a cool scene from Taxi Driver where they frame the Senator Palantine during one of his speeches at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with his arms raised matching the statue, but both heads being cropped out of the picture, to show Travis' disconnect from the rest of the world. But I went by and took a few pictures of the zone for myself. The first two are of the same statue, Columbus, but from different angles:

The specific statue from Taxi Driver:

Going for a taste?

Who gets it?

Me and my Wire references...

Taking Pictures of my Computer Screen

The above picture is of my computer screen as I examine Google Maps. It was late at night and I was trying to get a sense of my morning bike ride. I ride from the white arrow on the right hand side to the whitish patch a half-inch away from the pen's point.

Sometime soon I'll have some better pictures of this area, otherwise known as "The 'Hood".

Shrike's Spikes

Sometimes I get maybe too into a subject. I'll spend hours reading about it online, and usually relay ideas here or work them into different aspects of other pieces I'm working on. One thing you learn if you're like that--having an insatiable thirst for knowledge and data--is that there's always something else cool that you've never heard of.

I've typed plenty of words over my plenty of blogs about the extant dinosauria--birds. I, like so many others, am intrigued by birds. On Netflix we found a BBC documentary series on birds, eight or nine episodes, and having watched them, another crazy piece of bird knowledge was bestowed upon my humble head.

Shrikes. I had never heard of the shrike, a series of passerine birds. Passerines are the perching-birds, but you would easily recognize other members as crows and ravens and jays and cardinals.

One of the crazy things about shrikes, though, is that they have a special way of storing food:

They leave their dead and/or dying prey impaled on thorn bushes or barbed-wire fencing or other sharp objects. They do it to bugs and lizards and small mammals, like the above I nabbed from a Google search.

How had I never come across shrikes before?

Not Quite Babylonian Gardens...

...But we have some hanging produce:

The large tomato plant that starred in my Lonely Harvest post has grown through the wire grating even more, and the weight of the tomato currently growing from it has caused this dangling look. I took the above picture from the street looking up at the balcony.

Balcony Blueberries Update

These guys are coming along nicely, if slowly:

The bigger ones are starting to get blue. Exciting times, indeed.

Dinosaur Tree 2

This post is a sequel to a post from June of 2009, a post about the non-flowering living fossil Ginko Biloba trees that find themselves all around the world.

Down here in the Long Beach corner of Southern California, in my neighborhood there are two different examples of more or less living fossil trees/plants.

The first they have along Broadway in some decorative locations. They are the fern trees:

Ferns are some of the oldest plants that aren't mosses. They don't respawn themselves from seed, rather they use especially tiny spores and the wind to replicate themselves. Having been around for hundreds of millions of years, they predate both the conifers and the flowering plants by many eons.

The view of the center of the fern, where new arms unfurl themselves is one of the recognizable characteristics of ferns.

The next plant is more of a small tree, but given enough time it could grow into what we today consider "tree-size". It's so ancient that it just does its own thing, and today we think it's small relative to the conifers and flowering trees that came later, and even smaller than the fern-trees from above. It's not older than ferns, but is older than conifers and flowering plants, and only related to seeded plants from very far back. I'm talking about cycads:

They look similar to palms, but have tougher fronds built of conifer-like waxy needles. The tips are sharp and annoying, and near the base of each fronds stalk are a series of serrated edges, making it a formidable plant indeed. The trunk, which may be hard to see here, is similar to the fern-tree.

The fronds don't really unfurl the way the fern's do, but they do propagate from the center. This plant, and others in the cycadia family, developed maybe one-hundred-fifty-million years ago in order to survive big, tough plant eating dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, in-turn, evolved into even tougher plant eaters, and the biggest and baddest digesters in the world aty the time, the triceratops and ankylosaurs of the later Cretacious, right before the extinction event 65 MYA, were able to digest this pointy wonder.

Today they grow naturally in random spots around the world, in Africa and South America. But they are hardy and look nice, and they have been used as decorative plants on more than a few occasions. The one I took pictures of is outside the four-plex I live in.

Also, in 2011, in the post about Zilker Prehistoric Garden in Austin, I incorrectly call the cycad that's growing out of a rock "an ancient palm". Cycads and palms are only very loosely related and developed similar looks through separate lines of evolution.

Mechanical Sauropods of Long Beach

Corrie likes to call these crane deals from the ports brontosaurs. They're kinda cool, giant mechanical sauropods, visible in the distance:

Milling about, having a confab...it keeps the vistas interesting:

Only the most giant sauroposeidons would have been this large...

(I'll probably be done with dinosaur related posts in just a few days.)

To Texas and Back for Grandma June

In 2004 I made my first trip to the Harrison Farm an hour southeast of Amarillo in Texas' Panhandle. Corrie's dad spent summers there as a kid, and graduated from Clarendon High (after attending three years at Permian High in Odessa, the school made famous by "Friday Night Lights" (I'm told)). His mom, Corrie's grandmother, the Dolman family matriarch and the occasionally mentioned Grandma June, started life as June Harrison, and spent many a year on her fam's land.

July of 2004 was both my first trip to the farm and first time meeting Corrie's extended family. I wasn't quite sure what type of response I would elicit. I didn't know too much beyond Ron and Carol, who were loving and generally progressive, and I was a free-balling math-graduate with long curly hair and a Left Coast outlook. 

That was the first time I met Grandma June. She was real sweet and full of love and had a mystic way of both knowing and paying attention to all the grandkids and the few present great grandkids. She had knowledge of everyone's school situations, love lives, band associations (when warranted), and general dispositions. It was like my memories of my own Grandma, except there were fifteen grandkids instead of four.

1.

"You should really keep better track of your speed."

We got the news that Grandma June had passed around 9 in the morning that day after my Robot Cricket book signing, on a Sunday. We made arrangements and were set to leave around 8:30 Monday night. I started driving. It was the usual way we leave Long Beach to get towards heading east on I-10: 710 to 91 to 60, through Riverside and onto Banning and meeting up with I-10. It was nice and late and I was making pretty good time. 

I made it to Phoenix in around five and a half hours, and from Phoenix to Tuscon in about an hour. Those cities are maybe a hundred miles apart. Soon I was in New Mexico and Corrie was fast asleep. Then I started to get a little tired. At some point my brain was hazing, and both my eyelids and pedal foot were getting heavy.

Then day started to break, and the sky went from inky black to blue, then to that neat mixture that gray and orange you get right before the sun comes out. I was admiring the view when the sun broke over the horizon. I was mostly staring at it, and then I noticed that the setting moon was visible in my rear-view mirror right above the rising sun. I thought that was pretty awesome.

Then I noticed that a cop was behind me. Then I noticed that I was driving nearly a hundred miles an hour. So that's when my turn driving needed to end. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" the NM patrolman asked. After 11.5 hours of driving, I was nearly pudding.

"I lost track of my speed and was going way too fast," I answered. 

After apologizing for needing to ticket me, he said, "You should really keep better track of your speed. Be safe."

2.

Returning to Dwyce

When we first moved to Texas from Brooklyn we lived at the Dwyce house; that is, the house was on Dwyce Dr, and is known affectionately in Austin among proper heads as "the Dwyce house". Once, while we still lived there and before we moved out to our own apartment, we had Grandma June over for dinner. It was a nice evening off for me, and I was able to make a nice lamb dish. The sky opened up while we were eating, and a torrential downpour commenced, making our little evening into a a little longer and closer night.

When we finally got to Austin around 6:30 pm local time, we first headed to the house we house-sit for for a fortnight in 2010, Uncle Bill's house. That's where Grandma June was living up until the end. We made our meet and greets there, and were soon sent back off to Dwyce as our Austin hub. We were the only people staying there, as the house is getting ready to be sold. It was Corrie and I, and Kaya the red Doberman and Tarzan the stump tailed tabby-cat. Dolgia, a female tuxedo cat that was mostly claimed by one of the Dwyce roommates, was still around. We heard she was a feral or a stray, but since Steph moved out a while ago, we were only mildly surprised to see her hanging out when we first arrived:

It was our first trip to the Dwyce house since our going-away party in April of 2011. It was eerie, but not like returning to a house you may have grew up in. At least not for me. 

For the few days we spent in Austin, we were stationed at Dwyce. It made a kind of sense. The next day, Wednesday, was the viewing, at a mortuary around the corner from Dwyce.

3. 

Old Habits Die Hard

I went over to one of my former work environments, and met with my old comrades and former bosses. They were happy to see me, which I appreciated, and my former boss made it known that he would set up a  reservation for a family group of us the next night. 

That next night when we went back we arrived in groups, and not at the same time. My group was first, so I went to the back to take a look and say hi. It turns out they were going down in flames, so I jumped on the microphone and ran the show for maybe a half-hour. I even burned my finger pretty good. 

4.

Two Random Observations

While living in Texas, you notice their two state mottoes for not littering: "Don't Mess with Texas" and "Keep Texas Beautiful". They're both official, and they're both emblazoned on signs and stickers around the large state.

I'm not sure what happened, but on the drive from Austin to Odessa, the roads were trashier than I've ever seen before. In parts that otherwise look like the surface of the moon, I started to think that we were in the vicinity of a landfill. The wind mixed with a landfill close by could explain all the plastic bag remnants and paper trash strewn along the highway and off to the horizon. When an hour past and still there was garbage everywhere, I gave up on the landfill theory.

After that section of the trip, I started to look everywhere. It was a serious problem. What the hell, Texas? A place that used to pride itself on the beauty of the landscape... 

Is it appropriate to blame Rick Perry? It's probably easy enough to find policies that he enacted or supported that reduced public funds for land beautification, but he's not the one out there tossing shit on the ground and moving on. Civic pride seemed diminished.

The other random observation was in Corrie's birthtown of Odessa. There's a section of town that I was driving through that had a business plaza called "Sherwood Business Center."  Then, close by, there was a "Sherwood Plaza". As we drove to a park near their old home, we passed the "Sherwood Church in Christ" and finally stopped at a multi-named park, one of which was "Sherwood Memorial Park" (or something similar).

Earlier we heard a story from one of Corrie's older cousins about how one of their shared ancestors had lived in a rural town and had done business with one of her husbands ancestors. That got some of Corrie's family thinking about my Sherwood relatives.

I tried to convince them I was pretty sure the Sherwoods of Odessa and the Sherwoods in my family were almost assuredly not connected, but it seemed like the romantic idea was too much, and I was mostly unsuccessful. I even tried to explain the commonness of the "Sherwood" last name. 

5.

Events

I'm trying to keep the bullet-paced nature of this trip in perspective, but mostly failing (I feel). We left Monday night, arrived Tuesday evening in Austin, had the viewing on Wednesday, the service on Thursday, Friday was reserved for the six hour drive from Austin to Odessa, and the burial on Saturday.

The viewing we showed up for a few hours after it started. The mortuary was close by to where we stayed, but we had errands to run for most of the day. There was a video running on a loop, one where the grandkids acted out Grandma June's life's story at her 90th birthday party at the farm during skit night. The great-grandchildren were running around that evening, but not in a mischievous way. We tried to pay our respects to both the body of Grandma June and her close kin from the Austin and environs area. 

In an honest moment my feelings were confirmed when Ron, shaking his head as he examined his mother's face in the coffin said "That's not her. They didn't...really..." He was right. They hadn't quite captured June. I wasn't going to say anything, but if her own son felt that way, I felt I could lend my support.

The service was held at June's oldest daughter's church. There was some singing and some prayer-making (I was respectful if uninvolved), there was some grazing and schmoozing (a retired judge complimented how well 'I clean up' before saying that I may not be ready for heaven just yet), and many family members were able to get up and say a few words. I felt like saying something, but then ultimately skipped it.

The burial was at a cemetery next to her first husband in Odessa, where they lived for a number of years. There was a different set of family members and people at this one, since some of June's remaining siblings could come from their corners of Idaho easier.

"I remember you...Corrine's husband, Patrick, right?" was how Uncle H.A. greeted me in the lobby of the Odessa Holiday Inn where we stayed. He was June's younger brother, more a farmer than a good-'ol-boy, but not not a good-'ol-boy, had met me once in 2004, but either had a fantastic memory or been supplied with photographs. He's an active farmer in Idaho, and must have signed off on the grandkids-as-pall bearers call.

As it turned out, I was asked to be a pall bearer for the first time in my life.

I felt honored to be a pall bearer. This was a woman that I respected and enjoyed being around, but with whom I didn't get to spend too much time. I was told she found me truly special, and though that Corrie and I were perfect together, and I guess that I could get a sense of that through our talks, but that would have been a bit presumptuous. Oh well.

I barely get updates on my own father's mother--she went into hospice but while there and taken off her heavy meds, she came back and was asked to leave hospice--but that's more a testament to my own family's dynamic. It's just different. I don't feel like it's any better or worse, because the crush of the family on Corrie's side can be a daunting and stressful task that my family doesn't ever impose on you. 

6. 

"She lived to see all of her kids become grandparents."

Grandma June had a subtle style of being a matriarch. She set the tone and used her own example of how she thought you should act around family--with a certain kind of love--that it seemed like everyone I've ever met from the family in the years I've been with my wife. She was a patron of the arts, supporting both her Morris grandchildren, Josh and Jacob, who are musicians, as well as me, being a frequent reader of my blogs and the purchaser of the first copy of my constructed book The Big Weirdness at auction.

I remember having a conversation with her after we first arrived in Austin at the end of 2009. She had a better idea of what was going on with everyone in town, including our own roommates, than we did, thanks to her ability to embrace newer technology like Facebook and texting.

Near the end, during her last conversation with Corrie, while she was in the hospital, she complained that although her daughters were there for her, they weren't letting her get onto the computer and she was feeling less connected to the outside world. A wonderful observation from a spry-to-the-end lady.

June had five children: Bill, Susie, Paula, Ron, and Debbie, in that order. Susie had kids first, and her kids had kids first, the first set of great-grandchildren. Then Paula had kids, then Ron and Carol, then Debbie, and then Bill and Martha. Ron and carol were the second set of parents to become grandparents, and then Paula, and, with Corrie's cousins Josh and Richard, both having kids within a month of each other, and right near the end of Grandma June's time among the living, led to Josh, during a brief word at the burial, making the observation:

"She lived to see all of her kids become grandparents."

7.

Returning to California

We left Saturday from Odessa a pair of hours after the burial for Phoenix, a maybe ten or eleven hour drive away. This time I embraced the cruise control. This time I didn't get from Tuscon to Phoenix in an hour. This time seeing my own Grandpa Tom almost became a priority. It didn't work out, but almost.

It was nice to see my mom, and have a night's sleep after all the car time. We still had a long drive home, but at least I was able to appreciate my own family while at it.

Soon to be Lonely Harvest 2

We have some new specimens that we'll be able to harvest in a few weeks:

Blueberries! I didn't even know they were something you could grow on a balcony. We saw a sale on plants and decided to run out and pick some up. Theses berries weren't on it when we picked them out, and it's cool to see it filling out.

There were flowers, though, on the two plants we got. The berries above are on an early season harvest, while the second plant, seen in the back below, is a late season harvest, and it has many more flowers.

They're done when the blueberries are blue and sagging the branches, implying they're heavy with sugar.

Drive Introduction

This is going o be the site where I describe the drive and visit to Texas; seeing Austin again for the first time since we left; visiting Odessa, Corrie's birth-town; but I've been sidetracked.

Not that anyone is too worried, but I'll be back soon...

Urban Wildlife

I realize that we live in basically an urban environment here in Long Beach, and I've posted before about our "Lonely Harvest" and the wasps that live in a tiny nest in the rafters of our balcony.

But, in addition to the wasps, I've been noticing our critter neighbors who struggle making a life in the immediate vicinity around our place.

There is a squirrel that teases Tuxedo and some of the other neighborhood cats. It'll stay up high in the trees and squawk down at them, taunting and screeching. It's amusing, but hard to photograph.

Another thing that's hard to photograph is the bee-hive that's on top of our apartment, but here's an attempt:

You can almost see them buzzing around the opening of the drainpipe. I think that's pretty close to their hive's opening.

There's also a murder of crows that have laid claim to this section of downtown Long Beach. They roll through on what I suppose are their rounds every few days and make a racket while silencing all the other birds. Sometimes in the mornings one will perch right on the top of the post centered in the picture below. That post is pretty close to our bedroom window, and the crow that perches there will make all sorts of noise.

That's when I stick my head through the blinds and squawk back at it, getting its attention. Eventually I scare it away, but it hesitates like the proper upper echelon predatory bird that it is around here.

Earlier today something had the crows worked up. That something? A hawk chilling on the sidewalk, paying them no mind. It took off before a picture could be had, but the crows didn't seem to take too kindly to that incursion.

Hawks, crows, bees, wasps, squirrels and cats...it's a regular nature show around here if you know where to look.

Exhaust Trail Shadows?

Seriously, check it out, the view from out balcony the other day, which was also the day of the Super Bowl:

The jet's exhaust or vapor trail is casting a shadow on the high cumulus clouds, making it look like a ceiling. Um...how exactly...is it me? Does this look cheesy fake to anybody else? How is that line of sight created? That vapor must be in front of some kind of screen made of clouds or the shadow cast at this angle appears flat against cloud surface that's irregularly distant.

It was closer to dusk than noon, and this is facing west, perpendicular to our beach, which faces south.

That picture can be disorienting. Here's the angle that it looked when you first see it with your own eyes:

Here's a super close up, just a tiny bit grainy, but the shadow looks good:

Weird sometimes.

Like, okay, look at the above picture. What do we see? Four wires, hazy clouds over a blueish sky, jet exhaust and shadow, and palm fronds.

Palm trees sneak up all the time in photos down here.

Long Bike Ride

In an attempt to fill up my days with hours sold to other folks doing stuff, I found myself chasing down some leads. Those turned out to be at Cal State U. at Dominguez Hills. CSUDH has one of the best teacher credentialing programs in the nation, and I've been doing some things with them, but on this particular day, I had a meeting up at campus.

CSU Dominguez Hills, in Carson, could be the only college campus with a professional team's field onsite. The LA Galaxy and Chivas USA soccer teams both play at the Home Depot Center, which is on campus.

In any case, with campus in Carson being close by, mostly, to Long Beach, I decided to ride the subway and take my bike and ride from the stop. Then, when I saw which stop I needed to get off at, I looked up the sheer miles: our apartment to DH campus.

Only ten miles.

That's when I decided to just go for it, and ride the whole way there. My knee needs the work, right?

If you start at the ocean, put your back to it, and then head away from it, it makes a certain sense that you'll be heading uphill.

That's how it worked out on paper. Ten miles. Five straight up the LA River bikeway, maybe one or one and a half from our house to the bikeway entrance. Two or three more from the river bikeway to Central Ave, and three or two up Central to campus.

That last stretch up Central is literally up Central.

Later on, talking with Vic (Tux's babysitter while we went to Europe), telling him about it he stopped and kinda yelled at me. Then, when Corrie got home, he asked her how she could let me do that, and told her she has to put her foot down on my crazy ideas. We all had a good laugh at that.

On the way home I took the train. Del Amo Blvd isn't really bike friendly (go figure), and I rode the sidewalk (when it was there) back to the train station and rode it home. I iced my knee afterwards, and the next day when I got back on the bike, my knee felt fine and maybe even a little stronger.

Carson and Long Beach and Southgate and Norwalk and Lynwood and Compton are all little "cities" that seem to snuggle altogether in South Central Los Angeles County, and they all look pretty much the same, and they're divided by invisible lines on maps. What Vic remembers the area being like (one that's certainly unsafe for a shaggy whitey like myself) and what it is today aren't congruent anymore..

This is NO Turkey

I lifted this from Cracked's site, but I think it's pretty creative. Gruesome, sure, but creative:

Not much to say about this, besides, "Cool, huh?"

Black and White Madness!

Action shots from all across the internet---and history!

When I heard that there was a spot called "Auto Polo" I thought, Now that's an awesome way to spend an afternoon. After I broke my leg, though, my days of dreaming of a revival of this game got shelved:

Places and times that had cool games like car polo also had other cool shit going on, like big cylinders with motorcycles and autos driving horizontal along the walls.

How can we make a motorcycle driving along the inside of a cylinder even more exciting?

Staff a sidecar with a lion. Ethel Purtle and the King, baby! Now here's a spectator activity I'd thoroughly enjoy.

The last two old-timey black and white pictures are from WWII. The first is a shot of the D-Day invasion after the beachhead was taken and the people and equipment started getting offloaded. It looks like a video game still, like it's too fake to be real, but it isn't, it's all reality:

Another thing about WWII pictures is that you'll find things that are so spectacular that if you were to use it during an action movie, the audience would believe that the explosion or whatever would be solely the work of the special effects team, because war can't be like that. Until you see the pictures from the aerial dogfights.

Spectacular...

Meaty Diagrams

Here are some diagrams for beef and pork. The first are from the UK, and the seconds (for both) are from the States.

Now, after working for some time in the restaurant industry, I can say I never committed these to memory. I almost would have thought the first diagrams are the US one, but I'd be wrong.

I think they're pretty cool.

Again, the UK beef diagram:

And the US beef diagram:

Here's the UK pork diagram:

And here's the US pork breakdown:

Everywhere I worked in New York had pork belly back when it was starting to trend in 2007. It was reasons like that that would trip me up in a blind quiz of these two sets of diagrams.

Random Picture: 2 and 3...

This picture is a slide from, obviously, Cracked.com.

I like the fact that Kat Dennings has a starring role in the show, or in any show really; there's not enough real looking girls on television. This show, however, has other problems. I've tried to watch it a few times, and can't ever sit through scenes long enough to fully grasp the character dynamics.

But this slide easily captures one of the things that bothers me.

Random Picture: Anwan Glover

I decided to mix these random picture posts up between the two main blogs.

This random picture is of the main public face of Anwan Glover, a Washington DC hip-hop artists, but in the style of the region, by which I mean go-go music. Go-go music is a style that is oddly clustered around DC. It is similar to other East Coast hip-hop, except with the call-and-response you find in Caribbean house-party music, or black churches.

Back in the '80s go-go clubs were getting shuttered. The violence from the heroin trade was finding its way into the spots where the soldiers were hanging out. Anwan himself has been shot a few times, and a close friend or family was killed.

The violence has largely subsided and go-go music has returned as the most important DC hip-hop music. And Anwan Glover turns out to be, with his many bands and incarnations, one of the leading figures in the go-go world.

Anwan Glover played the character of Slim Charles on The Wire, one of the great side characters in television history. Always a soldier and mercenary, he was one of the few gangsters with ample screen time who survived the series: no jail, no death. His beaded braids clacked faintly from Season 3 to Season 5.

Lunch?

Doesn't seeing a food-truck named as such make you hungry for sausages or grilled cheese?

Maybe you want to see their hand-sanitizing station...

Located right outside a San Diego brewery...

Happy 2013 everybody!

And by everybody, I guess I mean, the half-dozen people who read this site.

Now, I'm familiar with many things easily found on Urban Dictionary. I can say, though, that this honestly wasn't one of them. Dirty Sanchez, Angry Dragon, Rusty Trombone, Alabama Hot-Pocket (possibly the worst legal thing ever)...all acts that had definitions I was familiar with. But, for some reason, not "gooch". It seemed too easy, I guess. Still does.