SWCAMBORNE

Yesterday Corina Knoll from the LA Times called and interviewed me for a story about the Mt Wilson Toll Road.  Today there is a nice story in the Times on Line that quotes me and mentions my blog about the trail.

It has been a long wait but it is nice to know that the Toll Road is finally reopening.  Perhaps my gadfly blog had a tiny effect on the outcome. Click here to see my Mount Wilson Toll Road Informer Blog.  Or here to learn the answer to one of the oldest rhetorical questions in the world.

When we were in Charleston, SC in December we drove by a sign for the United Order of Tents.  I insisted that we circle back and get a picture.

Subsequently Rebecca did some research.  The United Order of Tents is a secret society for black women founded during the Civil War.  It is so secret that there is not a Wikipedia article about it.  It must be like the free masons, whatever they are like.

We have seen a Hooded Oriole several times recently.  The bird book says it is common but we had never seen it before.

Picture was taken from the local bird book, mine came out lousy

Link to the book:

Birds of the Los Angeles Region

Usually we saw it in the evening while eating dinner or having a glass of wine on our beautiful patio.

Life is good!

“Adversity is the mother of donation.”

Leslie Lenkowsky

Why is it that when 8 million people a year move from one state to another within the USA it is no problem, but when a half million people a year move here from Mexico it is a big problem?

Read a discussion of this question on Radical Immigration

Sixteen years ago we visited the Baha’i Temple in Haifa, Israel.   I was fascinated by the fact that walkways in the gardens were made out of broken pottery, the technical word for which is “shards.”  A few days later we were in Casaerea and found heaps and heaps of pottery shards.  Here is a link to a photo of the walkways at the Baha’i Temple.

When we got home I put the two ideas above together and had the idea of commercializing the shard pathway.  Of course I never really did anything about it except I started to save broken terra cotta pots.  Last month after 15 years I had Ruben, my assistant this summer, build this small walkway with the shards I had collected.

It looks great. More pictures.

Read the rest of this entry »

After two years the algae are back in the pond.

The green colors are beautiful but the overall look is definitely worse and you can’t see the fish.  I checked the UV filter bulb and it was still working.  However Steve at PTF told me that the bulb can be glowing but not “UVing” (the verb form of UV).  I ordered a new bulb and we shall see.

For now we will enjoy the luminescent greens.

And you thought it was a: pot of gold.

Thanks to Paul D. for sending this photo.

I don’t really have a dog in the health-care debate since I’m less than 1000 days away from the Medicare buffet.  But the politics of the debate have captured me and the media bias that it exposes is instructive.

The Obama administration and their friends in the media are denouncing the sometimes loud dissent that liberals are facing in town hall meetings on health care.  It’s worth looking back a few years to see how some of those same journalists celebrated anti-Bush dissenters and denounced what they claimed was the Republican administration’s attempts to stifle dissent.  In 2003, Keith Olbermann saluted the anti-Iraq war protests: “It is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it,” while PBS’s Bill Moyers found it “galling” to see “all those moralistic ideologues in Washington…attacking dissenters as un-American.”  The above quotes came from the Media Research Center.

How would I “fix” health care.  I’d move in the direction proposed by John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods in an oped in the 8/12/09 WSJ, towards a more market driven system.  The federal government is an awfully large, very blunt instrument.  It cannot adjust easily to changes in technology, markets and costs.  The market on the other hand is ugly and unfair but it delivers goods and services better than government.

Last year while helping Rebecca move I learned the idea of using grocery bags as a substitute for boxes when moving. This week I was helping Lillian move from San Diego to Las Vegas and learned a super way to move clothes.  Buy the Glad Draw String 30 Gallon Bags.  Pull the bag up over the clothes and cinch it up around the hanger.  Tie the draw strings tight around the hangers.

Another moving secret

I love this idea.  The bags are cheap they are easy to stow in the truck or van and the clothes arrive in very good shape.    Lillian’s move went really well, nothing broke and I didn’t injure my back.  Life is good.