Happy Birthday, my Son.
He is 31 years old today.
This photo is from 2017 and is of him and his future girlfriend. It still amazes me that they are making a life together in Michigan.
Good thing I saw them both a few weeks ago, though Covid made the idea of a major celebration impossible. It makes it easier for me to not see him on the day of his birth.
I know, I know, get used to it, Mother. :-)
My number 2 nephew has a 3 month old child!
I am so happy to see the family and how old the baby is getting already.
Social smile, holding his head up on his own.
It is just so cute and reminds me of raising my own.
Next great nephew is coming along toward the end of the year.
A busy year for my family.
I worked in a Tape Library for 8 years and in that time I erased hundreds...if not thousands of videotapes. It was part of my job to do so.
I didn't think much about it, until when I was ready to leave and knew that we had some shows that would be lost forever, if something was not done.
The reason was deteriorating 2" tape. I saved Hollywood Television Theater, "Steambath", due to that problem and I thank my engineer friend, who made the dub to 1" for me.
The fact that WNET has DVD's on Amazon and will sell them to you, is due to this fact. :-)
The attitude of the station I worked for, was going through a similar thought process as the BBC was, in THIS story.
I wanted no part of it and that was one of the reasons I left and moved on to Traffic.
I still cry a little thinking of what might be gone, forever.
I am glad that BBC did find some of their missing Doctor Who shows. It was a start at restitution.
You never know what you are going to see, when it's plant watering time.
I was lucky, I brought my cell phone with me, when I went outside.
It was stunning and worth the effort to capture.
Just over a week more and we change time.
That means sunset at 5PM.
Steely Dan 10-25-21:
Hippodrome Theatre, Baltimore, MD
The only comment I heard was that Donald was very happy to be back performing and it showed.
Set List:
Phantom Raiders
Night By Night
Bodhisattva
Hey Nineteen
Kid Charlemagne
Aja
Home At Last
Janie Runaway
Josie
Time Out of Mind
Dirty Work
Rikki
Let the Good Times Roll (Band Intros)
Peg
Pretzel Logic
Reelin' In the Years
My Old School
A Man Ain't Supposed to Cry (Walk Off)
Concert photo by Maria Byrne
It rained on Monday!
We are over-the-moon happy to see it.
It looks like we got just over a half inch, but when you get nothing, month after month, it is welcome.
I hear Northern California really got socked, which they need (though they don't need the mud slides.
Welcome end of the fire season (hopefully).
My Water Post For Today.
I show off Glacier Bay quite often, but the other day a woman was saying how much she wanted to go to Alaska and I could not resist showing off a photo of the Bay.
It is not the best photo, because it was raining that day, but I love the glass look of the water.
Also the blue color of the glacier itself.
I will not cruise again (at least not in the immediate future) but maybe someday...
I was out on Saturday shooting the sunset and saw our across the street neighbor has quite a set up in front of his house.
You can't see it in the photo, but the pumpkin's eyes turn in circles.
Very weird. :-)
Nice to have some real decorating this year.
Bring on Halloween!
My Husband saw this recipe a few months ago in one of those newspaper pull outs.
He wanted me to make it and finally I decided to do so.
It wanted 3 hot dogs and 3 eggs and that just seemed too many eggs for hot dogs and so I doubled the rest of the ingredients like the hot dogs, the corn dogs and cheese.
So here is a slightly different recipe.
6 Hot dogs sliced in half and then cut in 3 segments.
3 eggs beaten
3 cups of corn flakes crushed
2/3 cup parmesan cheese
Mix the corn flakes and cheese together. Dip the hot dogs in flour then dredge into the eggs.
Finally coat in the corn flakes and cheese. Place on a tray and cook in the oven at 350 degrees for at least 20 minutes.
You can add a bamboo stick if you want, but I did not.
I ended my garden for the 2021 season on Wednesday.
It has been getting colder overnight and I started heating the house on Monday.
All plants (minus the carrots I planted in mid-July) have been tossed and the dirt has been tossed, also.
They always say it is important to start with a fresh amount of dirt next growing season.
Sad to see them go, but happy I don't have much to water in the evening.
"Most people are familiar with the large clumps of lush, grass-like foliage and creamy white feathery plumes of pampas grass. Pampas grass (Cortaderia) is an attractive ornamental grass that is popular in many landscapes. While they’re extremely easy to grow, however, it’s important to know what you’re getting into before planting pampas grass around the home. Don’t be so quick to plant it simply because it looks good. It’s actually a very fast grower and can become quite large, anywhere from 5 and 10 feet (1.5-3 m.) high and wide, and even invasive." (From Gardening Know How website).
I found this lovely Pampas Grass in Jake Kuredjian County Park in Stevenson Ranch.
I personally would have loved to grow some in my yard, but the fact that it is invasive and can grow to 10 feet tall, turned me off to them.
They are beautiful though.
So nice and fluffy and they act like feathers, when the wind blows.
This is Pico Canyon.
It is home to the first commercially successful oil well in California, Pico #4.
It has a marker tree at the entrance to the canyon itself, that the Tataviam Indians used to find the asphaltum that flowed in the stream, coming out of the canyon.
My Husband used to work right there at a point in time, when he worked at Walmart in Stevenson Ranch.
I have wanted to take a photo of the formation itself, for decades and finally got to do so on Sunday.
A beautiful mountain, with so much history.
Back in 2002 a developer wanted to build houses in the Stevenson Ranch area of Santa Clarita.
One of the trees scheduled for destruction, was this one. A heritage tree that was over 400 years old.
A tree hugger, John Quigley, got involved and climbed into the tree and spent 72 days there, to try to save it.
It went viral and finally the developer agreed to move the tree to a park, to save it.
John Quigley was not happy that they were going to move it, but he hoped for the best and against all odds, the tree has not only survived, but thrived.
I have never visited it, but on a day when I had an hour to kill, I did so.
What got me the most upset is that there is no indication that this tree is Old Glory.
You can read an article about the move, HERE.
My Water Post For Today.
It turns up in the news every day. The United States busiest port. The Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro.
The City of Los Angeles annexed (in 1909) the port area via (basically) the future Harbor Freeway area.
Called "The Shoestring", it is 16 miles long so that the City is a contiguous body of land.
It is how we grew to what we are now and as a result, there are a huge amount of ships sitting outside that port.
Enjoy the harbor area from 2019, when there were less ships waiting to unload.
My Magic "Son" is off in South Carolina for a few months. He is part of a crew that is shooting a movie.
It is a big project and we have been worried that the IATSE strike that has been looming in the background, might come to pass.
Thankfully, Saturday word came out that a tentative agreement had been reached for the entire US.
It still needs to be ratified by the rank and file, but from what I can see, they got quite a bit.
More to come, if it is not accepted.
Go IATSE!
My apologies if I have had an unusual amount of posts about trains.
What is going on is that I am doing an Applied Project (Thesis) on helping people book train travel, instead of just sitting at home, because they are afraid.
It is literally my first day putting something into Wordpress, so I am a newbee at it.
You can see the site, HERE.
Or here is the physical address: https://traintravelhelp.com/
I was lucky that I could get exactly what I needed to have in the way of a Domain name.
Feel free to sign up to get notices about posts, if you like. Note that it is not ready for Prime Time yet.
It is not like this blog, it is totally Public (which I do not like). I have sent a question to my advisor and maybe she can help me in that regard.
The list on the right will hopefully link to each of the routes I have taken over the years. I ran out of time this afternoon, so I will do it another day.
Put any comments you have, onto this blog.
We are private here. :-)
Here is the lemon I told you about yesterday.
It is half yellow and seriously, I was surprised to see it.
I think it will be ready for Thanksgiving and maybe I will make Lemon Bread (recipe is HERE).
This lemon tree had exactly 1 lemon last year...and this year it is around 30 little ones.
That's the way fruit trees go, one year on and one year off.
Note the green one behind the yellow one. :-)
Seasons change and so did I, you need not wonder why. . . you need not wonder why. . .
Yes, it is the end of the garden season at the angel house.
I have 2 medium sized tomatoes on the big plants and a few cherry tomatoes on the little ones.
I have lots of little eggplants (that I don't know what to do with) and some of them have turned orange. Say what?
I also have some jalapeños still growing, but they get smaller and smaller. Still taste good, so I continue to harvest them.
In good news, my lemon tree fruit is starting to turn yellow. I have something like 30 lemon's, though most of them are small.
I am still growing my second crop of carrots, so they should continue to do well, in the cooler weather.
It has been a farely good year, garden wise, I am happy.
Back when we were in Michigan, my Son brought us to his "go to" apple and cider farm...Spicer Orchards Farm Market.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is a great place and they managed to have crops to pick, most of the year.
When we were there it was the last of the blueberries, and of course, cherries. Michigan is known for their cherries.
Last Sunday my Son and girlfriend went and picked some apples and bought mucho cider.
I am sure they had fudge and jams and jellies as they had when we visited.
Hopefully, everyone had a good time.
Masking is STILL important!
I just heard that a friend of mine (not my Son who is pictured) just tested positive for Covid.
The man is a year older than I am and is double vaccinated. He ended up at an event where people were standing around and eating. Things we did in our old world. A cocktail party type thing. 2 days later the tickle in his throat started.
He ignored it and went to the sudden death Dodger game against St. Louis. I can only imagine who he might have given his friend to.
Thursday he felt worse and ended up not going to work and got tested. Yep, Covid had arrived.
Though he is feeling bad, it is nothing like getting it without being vaccinated. So, God willing, he will recover.
I won't go into the finer details of how it affects his future work (or life), but there are consequences.
Please wear a mask!
My Water Post For Today.
The BEST thing I scheduled for our vacation in Michigan, was using the very top of the mitten as our jumping off point to the Upper Peninsula.
This view of the Mackinac Bridge was our home port and I loved it every time we would go off on our adventures and then return.
Being it is a straight between 2 great lakes, it is a very interesting place to be, during the day and at sunset.
If you can manage it, it is worth the trip.
I hope you enjoy.
A few weeks ago my Magic "Son" had a movie shoot in Ship Rock.
Among the three photos he sent me, was this one.
What a beautiful sunset photo. He truly outdid himself.
Enjoy Ship Rock, New Mexico, once again.
By the way, he is now shooting a movie in South Carolina. Good luck to him.
I was lucky on Friday morning.
THIS video came up on a list of Youtube videos and I got to ride along with the Virtual Railfan Whistle Stop Tour. Since I have taken the North East Corridor trip, it was not a surprise to me. I enjoyed watching them travel through New Jersey and part of Pennsylvania.
The tour is from Penn Station NYC to Pittsburgh Penn. Later in the day, I happened to catch the train passing through the Altoona Horseshoe curve and if you look close, you can see the railfans all watching at the window. They, of course, knew where the camera was located.
It was a fast pass through, but I enjoyed seeing people having a good time.
It is quite expensive, btw. $1400 a person, round trip.
I did not go outside to check the camera at the time of the sunset...or at least not deliberately. But here we are.
I took the photo of my Son's camera on the roof of the garage and then looked over my shoulder and saw this.
It was late in the process, but from what I can see, it must have been a beautiful sunset.
Glad he got something, for all his work beforehand.
Miss you Son.
My Son has safely landed back in Michigan. Back to the remote "grind", for him.
His last day here, he decided to shoot the sunset from the roof of my garage.
You know that view well, I shoot it all the time, but he wanted to do a time lapse of the entire evening.
He set it all up and then went off for a final dinner of Sushi.
He left us in charge of making sure the camera did not get stolen.
It made it through the experience with no problems.
Now send me the final product, when you edit it together, Son.
My "Magic" Son lives a half mile from my house.
Monday night we had one heck of a lightning storm hit our area, right around dinner time.
Facebook had just come back online and so people posted some of the fires we had going, around the area.
One of them was just a block from my Other Son and 4 houses down. In other words, close to him and not too far from me.
You can read about it HERE.
Photo is from The Signal SCV.
I have been writing a train blog for the past month and over that time I mentioned that I would love to schedule a quick trip to Tucson, Arizona.
Not a week later, I am watching the Virtual Railfan train cameras and see in the chat room that something is going on in Tucson.
I switched over. There was a lot of conversation in regard to pulling down the camera feed and while that was going on, I had back-tracked a bit and was watching the near past part of the feed. Suddenly, not only the main camera goes down, but so did access to the feed.
I don't blame the owner of those camera's, but I kind of feel like I was part of this incident...in the smallest way.
I guess no trip in the near future.
Sadness for the DEA agent killed in the incident.
They call themselves the Hooligans.
From what I can tell, they are the folks who hang out on the La Plata Virtual Railfans camera.
This past weekend they had a rivers and rails event, with rail watching, river watching at Keokuk lock #19 and dinners at the Kingsley Inn.
They were gathered at the soon to be opened Fort Madison Station, both morning and evening and seemed to be enjoying each other...and the trains, of course.
Next week is the Pennsylvanian trip from NYC to Pittsburgh. Too bad I am not even thinking of going, because I truly loved that journey.
My Water Post For Today.
Lots of action at Fort Madison, in particular, the marina.
About 2 weeks ago they totally emptied out the boats and sold the wooden docks, so there is nothing there anymore.
Now they are uprooting the trees you see in the back of the photo. They intend to raise the park height, to keep the area from flooding. You can view the projected plan HERE.
We have been viewing the work at Fort Madison and will it will take 4 years to complete the dredging and building.
It was quite the thing to see, earlier in the year from the train and I guess I will miss it.
I hope you enjoy.
I was asked early in the week, if I would accompany my Son for some Dim Sum. I was not sure, especially with all the Covid restrictions, but I signed on.
We went to 888 Seafood Restaurant in Rosemead, which if you click the link, does not exactly inform you of what they do Covid wise.
They do require masking, except when eating and they give you a paper menu that you fill out. Not carts coming around, but it worked out just fine getting everything at once.
We knew what we had coming and it was all as we remembered.
A fun time with my Magic Son and with my real one.
FYI, we had a double order of tripe, because my Magic Son could not decide which one he wanted. They were both good, btw.
One of the things I expected to do after I left my job in January of 2020 was go have breakfast at a place called Thelma's Morning Cafe.
I went on a cruise late in January and did not return til mid February, so the earliest I was going to be able to go, was March.
Then the Corona Virus lockdown happened and the end of any plans of going to a restaurant.
Since my Son is in town, I asked him if he would accompany me to the cafe and have breakfast. He agreed.
We went on Friday morning and he had eggs benedict and I had Thelma's eggs and biscuit. Both were quite good and I will go again.
Especially since it is walking distance from my house.
The menu is HERE.
One thing off my wish list.
Back in August I decided that I wanted to have a monitor on the side of my laptop.
I thought it would be a good idea, especially since my class started the end of the month, for my thesis.
Talked to my Son who said we should buy a bigger monitor for our desktop computer and then take the old one and use it for the laptop.
That became a big deal, but we found one via pcpartpicker.com. It was in stock at Walmart and it was pretty inexpensive.
After a month or so, we decided that them being "out of stock" of something they said was in stock, was just us spinning our wheels.
This time we used Amazon and even though it was scheduled about 2 weeks into the future, we bought it. Note it was $50 more than the first one.
Six days early, the monitor arrived, thankfully when our Son is in town.
He blew out the dust on the electronics inside our desktop (with canned air) and yelled at us about how we need to clean it more often. :-(
I now have a new monitor and later tonight I will try the laptop with the side monitor on a Zoom call. Our Friday call always seems to deal with looking up stuff and that way I should be able to share screen with the others.
I can't wait.
