Saturday Afternoon/Sunday Morning

SATURDAY

We went down to Torrey Pines for a bit of a walk.  We arrived rather late in the day, so we only had an hour and a half, or so, to go down a trail (Razor Point Trail) to the beach overlook (Razor Point), and then back before the rangers lock the place up.

So this view is looking down upon a canyon towards the beach.  The sun is getting low.

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This one is a little better, you can see the sea!

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Looking back up the trail, to the east, you can see the moon.

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Looking down at the beach, from on high.

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And here we have a hiker and his staff.

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A view to the south, from not quite at the view point.

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A panorama the stalwart hiker made for, and of, me.

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At the view point at last, looking north. The stake says stay on trail, but you can see footprints going out there. But do they come back?

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And looking south again, but from the view point this time.

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Looking sort of west-ish, you can see some surfers out there.

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A tiny little moon back there.

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At the view point, sitting down and resting, a couple of legs.

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 We went to Callahan's that evening for dinner.  During a little walk up the strip mall, to work off "dinner", we found a geocache.  Well, I didn't spot it, but we're a TEAM!

 SUNDAY

I went out to the Stonebridge area (east of Scripps Ranch) to replace a someone's cache I broke a while ago. I did that, and did some finding, too, so as not to waste the trip.

Here is some big cactus, I have no idea what kind, but I'm sure SOMEONE does...

A lite geocache.

I found eleven caches today.  I didn't have any altercations or problems driving, either, for a wonder!

So now at home I'm doing all sorts of piddly things, like:

I didn't know what this was, I thought maybe it was some kind of rose mutant alien thing.  It was explained that it's a rose hip.  And here I thought rose hips were the petals!

The birdbath, yet again.  There were BIRDS here, earlier, I swear!

Boy, I think I am plum out of stuff to say!  I think I shall walk up to the library and get something to read!

It's Saturday Morning And I Ain't Got Anything Better To Do --

or at least, anything I am inspired to do.

Some fooling around with the camera.

Makers Mark swag came today!

I like the previous picture more better.

At work I was given a bag of pizzelle (which I had to Google to recall) that her daughter made. She said it goes great with coffee.  It goes great with tea, too!

What is the point of wearing glasses if one can't make pictures with the reflections?

I was inspired to make these pictures by the Fark.com forum Photoshop what the FBI sees from your laptop.  There were only sixteen entries, some are NSFW (Not Safe For Work). I didn't enter, though.

                                                                                                                                     

I finished another Sudoku To Go (Volume 45) book of a 100 puzzles. New Puzzles, it says, that You Can Take Anywhere!

For statistical porpoises,  here are the final results:

Easy Level --  26 Successfully Completed  4 Just Plain Wrong
Medium Level --  30 Successfully Completed  5 Just Plain Wrong
Hard Level --  15 Successfully Completed  5 Just Plain Wrong
Diabolical Level --  10 Successfully Completed  5 Just Plain Wrong

                                                                                                                                  

I am full of hope I will accomplish something today.

On The Way To Work

The sky was quite lovely on the way to work this morning. I walked around the parking lots taking pictures west, east south, but not north.

Clouds.

More clouds.

Yet even more clouds.

I'm not saying their clouds, but...clouds.

And lastly, we have clouds.

No, THIS is the last clouds!

This file is named clouds, but it is not.  It is what the FBI would see if/when they are monitoring my laptop cam.

I welcome you cloud comments. Which is your favorite?

In The Depts Of Winter, SoCal-Style

I went up to Home Depot and bought ANOTHER heater today.  Yesterday, you will recall, I purchased a little ceramic/fan heater, one that very cutely swivels back and forth, noisily blowing what turned out to be a very small amount of warm-ish air a short distance, and quite sharply raising the amount of electricity I used by an inordinate amount.

Today, for the same price (39 bucks), I got the oil-filled radiant heater. It's awfully slow to heat, but it certainly seems to warm up the room. Eventually.  But it IS darn quiet!  No fan, you see!

It was 39 degrees this morning when I got up, by the way.  Outside!

Saturday at 1:02 PM

Weekly Round-Up

I painted the TV antenna, and re-arranged the wire properly, so here is its final incarnation. I also have a nice black circle of paint on the patio blocks, as I forgot to put paper down first.

I made a new Danish Christmas heart for the collection. The star one. It was really hard, it took about an hour to weave together, having to take it apart several times.  In consequence it finally tore in one place, which I had to glue.

A couple of sunflowers grew from spilled seed on the bird bath, this one has a flower!

That is all I can think of!

Tuesday

It got progressively cloudier this day, and now it is raining a bit.

I went to Target to buy bubble wrap, but the shelf was bare. So I walked ALL THE WAY across the mall, length-wise, to Wal Mart, and they had tons!  So I picked out a roll, then some peanut butter and some tea bags.  So I waited in line, then when it was my turn I found my giant and heavy backpack did not contain my wallet.  So I had to, morally, return all the stuff to their shelves.  And so I did.

When I got home I had a call from the doctor's office.  They said my labs were unremarkable. So that is good.  I was checking reddit while I was on hold.  I was disappointed to read that the Diane In Seat 7A story was a hoax. I really should have known.

Sunday In Sloane

I went out to Sloane Canyon Road, off of Dehesa Road to pick up some geocaches this morning.  It's my first and only big geocaching trip, as it were, of the vacation week.  I found ten caches, one of which hadn't been found in nearly three years.  And no wonder, it was quite overgrown with big bushes, fortunately it was an ammo can (with a very large Geocaching.com sticker on it) buried in leaves.  But I reigned triumphant.

So here is where I went, and the ones I found today have the pink arrows.  Yellow smilies are caches I have found.  As you can see there are quite a few to go!

This might be an impressive waterfall during the rainy season!

This is Al.  I poked him with my stick to make sure he wouldn't bite me.

I also stopped by Singing Hills.  It's very quiet today, not very many people around visiting.  I looked for the turtles but didn't see any.  Maybe they hibernate during winter.

I washed the clothes when I got home, painted the TV antenna base, varnished the various things I've been varnishing, listened to the ten songs I managed to get on the iPhone, and ate something, I'm sure.

Now back to work tomorrow!

Hot Stuff

Hey, I JUST noticed, when watering, that the pepper plant has a pepper!


It is a Poblano chile pepper.  There is another smaller one on the other side.  It is growing upside-down in one of them upside-down tomato-growing things.

So what do I do with it?

Day Three

That is, it is the third day of vacation.

I discovered Army headquarters in the Village of La Mesa the other day.

I am second to put up my Xmas lights on the street. I seem to have lost a hook there. A hook for the lights.  We shan't talk about the curtain and their associated hooks.

Finished Mrs. Mike, by Benedict & Nancy Freedman, today.  Good story.

Pulled weeds, fed the birds, sharpened the grass clippers and the hand pruner, somewhat. Drilled a hole through the handle and metal of the cultivating mattock and stuck a cotter pin in to secure it.   Dropped off a lab sample to the doctor's office.  That is about it for the day!

Sunday Morning: Opium Lords & Pancakes

I don't care for Mallomars.  Yes, I have eaten myself sick on them, back in  my youth, so it's not like I never have had them. They do have some kind of addicting substance to them.  Maybe it is that pseudo-chocolate covering (PCC).  My strategy was to freeze them.  Warm Mallomars are particularly disgusting.  Then bite off the marshmallow top and spit it into the trash can. I then scrap the PCC of the bottom cookie with my chipmunk teeth, then let the cookie dissolve in my mouth. Then repeat until nauseous.

 I had pancakes for breakfast this morning. It went well.

On Friday, at work, I made coffee forgetting to remove the tea bag from a previous cup of, uh, tea. I just thought you would be interested.

This is how you secure a lamp in earthquake-country!

I am full of hope that the bookcase won't fall over, though!

So far today I have made the pancakes, posted these images, and finished The Lord Of Opium, by Nancy Farmer.

But it is only 10 A.M.!

Saturday

Heard in the library yesterday:

"This dictionary is dumb. It just leads you to more words." -- A.C. 15Nov2013

Scary Adventure

Pray for me, I am going to Best Buy this afternoon...

Tuesday

I feel very clever that I alone, of this side of the building, put my trash out today.

Here is a more better posed picture of the alien skull from Saturday, with the flash reflecting off the purple cache container inside. With the iPhone for size comparison.

Four old planes flew over work today, several times, circling. I thought we wuz under attack, but later found that three of them look like WWII trainers.  The fourth one, I have no idea.

A mouse got himself caught today.  He is going on a trip to the country!

Saturday I learned that one should not fill an ingenuiTEA teapot while it is sitting on a lumpy wad of paper tile...least one have tea running all OVER the place!

Veteran's Day

I went back to Eastlake, or very near there, again this morning, just earlier, for more geocaching.  I found 16 caches, didn't find maybe four or so, and walked 5.037 miles.  Gmap-pedometer.com says that, and claims I used up 649.7335830553367 calories. I ate one Everyday Essentials Chewy Peanut Butter And Chocolate Chip granola bar @ 100 calories during the walk, so I guess I am ahead of the game.

I did NOT find any alien skull artifacts today.  I DID bang my head on a protruding branch in a very murky "forest".

Although I haven't figured out how to turn off the various "data" connections to the iPhone quite yet, to save battery power, you know, I did discover that my problem with the "PQ"s yesterday was related to the gnormous size of the file.  Today's file had 462 less caches in it, and worked just fine.

After posting yesterday I tried the light switch in the bedroom again, and it STILL was making the sparky sound, albeit much more quietly.  So I replaced the entire fixture with the new one, and it is SILENT.  The replacement went well, no shocks, but must have been quite a sight to see, for various reasons I shan't go into here.  I also completed three Sudoku (two mediums and an easy) during said various reasons. 

That is all I got today.  Over to you!

It's A Sunny Sunday!

 The other day I took a pic of the new iPhone in its new iCase, at work.

And Friday I finally tossed the old  panniers.  They were seriously rotted through in parts, and the one I used the most, the left one, was just a tad faded from the sun.  I cut off the cinching cord and used it on my Tilly hat to secure it to my head, in place of the gaudy blue rope-ette I used before.

What did I do on Saturday?  I can't really remember, except I read a bit, then in the very late afternoon I went for a walk of a couple of miles, to check on a geocache someone was complaining about, and just to get out of the house.  Did not see anything particularly interesting.  It was getting dark by the time I got home.

I sent Saturday evening creating a geocaching PQ (Pocket Query), which is a way of getting the cache data transferred from one device or program to another.  My aim was to get it into the iPhone, so I could go a-caching with using paper or the GPSr.  AND, the iPhone would be offline, too, to simulate being in a place with no cell coverage.  Well, the PQ came up with 500 caches, which WAY too many.  Even so I dutifully loaded it into the iPhone, which took forever (because of images and maps) and probably sent the data usage WAY up. It look ok, as far as I could tell, when finished, but this morning (that would be Sunday Morning) while breaking fast I loaded the PQ into GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) so I could edit (down to 38 caches!) and load them into the GPSr (belt AND suspenders) and print out some lists and maps.

The iPhone was fairly useless with the cell and wifi turned off.  I don't know if it was too many caches or what, but it basically did nothing.  When communications were restored it was fine.  So I mostly used the GPSr today to find the eleven caches I did, and using the iPhone only to check previous logs and hints.

Most of the caches were interesting, cute, or clever.  I managed to find all of them in ten minutes or less, so they weren't super hard or anything.  Here's one:

I was about to call 911, then I realized that wasn't a human skull, and remembered the cache name, which had to do with evidence of space aliens. And that white thing is an empty snail shell, not an eyeball.

After caching I went to Lowe's, since I HAD parked in their lot all morning, and purchased a ceiling light fixture to replace the sparking one in the bedroom.  I also wandered around the store looking at stuff.  I had to wait in line a very long time, I thought, since there were only two cashiers working.

On the way home I saw this olde Ford being driven by an olde (older than me!) guy and his, presumably, wife.  This looks very like the Ford model in which Pete taught me how to drive stick.

I probably should have gone grocery shopping, but I didn't.

I opened the new light fixture box and ripped all the bags apart to get all the parts out.  Then I took off the old light figure glass and turned it on.  Huh, the sparking sound seems to come for the fluorescent bulb up there, not the wiring.  Wires look fine enough.  Put in a regular bulb, no sparky noises.  Put fluorescent bulb in a regular (vertical) lamp, no noises.  Problem solved!!  Except now I got a cheap ceiling light fixture I don't need.

And that pretty much brings us up to date!

Nimimum Day

So I was talking to someone at work yesterday, asked them how they felt about the coaches in blackface uproar, did they feel offended?  No, they said. 

Today they said their daughter came home from high school yesterday ¹ where the incident had been discussed in a class.  The teacher asked if any of the students were offended, and to stand up -- Only the daughter and another girl, both black, stood up.  Later, the daughter said to her mother, "But momma, the teacher didn't let me say I wasn't offended because I'm black.  I was offended because I'm half Jamaican.  There are white people in Jamaica, I'm offended they weren't being represented!"

I suggested maybe the other girl was half Jamaican, too.

DISCLAIMER:  I am quoting from memory here.

                                                                                                                                              

Just finished Al Capone Does My Homework.  I really enjoyed reading it.  I read the first in the series many years ago (2004).  I seem to have missed the second one, though.

I am now reading Member Of The Wedding.  Nicely written, but laborious to read in the paperback edition, the letters are so tiny!



¹ Comma or no comma, that is the question.

Lurking Around

I got up early, but an hour later, to sneak around SDSU looking for geocaches.  Did not see very many people around. Maybe they were all up late working on their studies.

The first cache in the series (oh yeah, it was a series, by someone who works at SDSU.) was in full view of a dorm, but I found it pretty quickly, so I signed it and was away!  Like the wind!!

The next cache turned out to be under a stair, but the coordinates had me about fifty feet away. Previous logs gave me a clue as to where to look.  Thank goodness for the iPhone!

The third cache was on the roof of another parking structure.  A quick find, once I read in a previous log that it was on the roof.

The fourth cache was in a very pretty, and very short, shady little walk back in SDSU proper.

Cache five was in a parking lot almost down by the 8.  Bottom of the hill!  So I had to go way DOWN the stairs to that one.

On the way to number six I saw these/this Quonset hut(s).  Are these from World War Two?

Cache six was no where to be found. Several logs said they needed a lifeline to find it.  I have no lifeline, and so I didn't find it.  Saw these plants growing in a tree, though!

And closer...

Spotted this fake ivy while searching.  Yes, the odd green ones are plastic.

I saw a red-tail hawk, too.  Maybe even a pair, I'm not sure.

Afterwards I went to Walmart to look at their pathetic selection of cell phone accessories.  I bought a belt holster thingie that was on sale.  Also, a car USB charger.

Then I went to Albertson's for the weekly groceries, and my Rachel Ray Dinnerware stamps.

Then I came home and made pancakes for breakfast.

Almost Forgot

I forgotted!  One of the geocaches I looked for was hinted to be inside something, and you had to reach in through a little opening to feel around for it.  Well, I didn't much want to do that, but I got the inspiration, having learned earlier today how to switch to the iSight camera, to put the iPhone in selfie mode and, watching the screen through opening, spot the cache.  And it worked!

Now I gotta figure out the self-timer!

Saturday Morning In NTC

But first, I got this cookie yesterday, as a gift. I ate it.

I headed down to the NTC area to do a little geocaching.  I was a little surprised there were STILL a lot of people out, even though there wasn't any big running event going on.  There were still plenty of dog walkers, people walkers, and many little soccer players.

Jet on the rays of the rising sun. This pic was taken just after the one below.

I like this one more better. Plane taking off from Lindbergh Field.

I don't know what this is called, it's an inlet off of San Diego Bay (The BIG BAY, FYI!) east of NTC. Or, as it is now called, Liberty Station. The Mist..."The end of times has come. Not in flames, but in mist."

A boat coming out of the mist. What a relief, no tentacles!

This guy looks like he has one leg and a peg-leg, but I assure you it is just the camera angle.

At the U.S.S. Recruit.  Why am I puffing up my cheeks?

At Spanish Landing where they are building the San Salvador ship, a Spanish galleon sort-of-thing. Obviously, I do not have this "selfie" thing down yet.

I also walked around the old Camp Nimitz area of NTC where I saw a lot of interesting stuff  (Yes, that is a railroad tank car there) and took a couple of pictures--which magically disappeared from the iPhone!  On the other hand, where I expected only six or ten pictures, the ones above, there were around 118!  It has been suggested I was in "burst" mode.  I also got some nice pics of my shoes, but I am NOT posting those!

I managed to find five caches for today.

And then I drove all the way home on the freeway!

After lunch I sprayed the repainted gnomes with a matte protective spray and stuck them on the bird bath. I also remounted the copper pipe.  Added rocks, raised the plants up a bit.

Too much bucket showing, though!

That is enough for today!