Author: Chris Barrus

Up the hill. Down the hill. Repeat many times.

So the last time I was skiing was roughly twenty years ago: new wave was still king and MTV had yet to air a single video. So it was rather random to go up to Mammoth for a couple of days (credit goes to my mom, who’s 78 and still skies a couple weeks every year).

Amazingly, there’s still a lot of snow even this late in the season and no one is skiing on Mondays. So I had the whole mountain to myself, which is just as well since I was pretty much a public health hazard for the first couple of hours while I got my ski legs back.

uphill

downhill

By the afternoon, I was right back to where I left off in high school when I was skiing all the time. Could have stayed another couple of days!

Tonight’s total lunar eclipse

There was a early evening ocean haze here in Long Beach that was making totality rather hard to see. But once the moon just peeked out from under the Earth’s shadow it was high enough in the sky to clear the haze and just be absolutely spectactular.

In retrospect I wish I fished my telescope out of the garage, but there’s barely any room left here on the roof for anything. However, here’s a nicely overexposed featureless pixelated photo. I need to get a new camera adapter for the scope.

200305lunareclipse

Homeowner’s Associations out of control again

The Seattle Times reports on a couple who are being evicted from their house because the house is too small.

Alan Hord and Sharon Adams celebrated their third wedding anniversary yesterday by being evicted.

The couple were forced out of their 2,000-square-foot home south of Monroe because it didn’t meet the standards set by their tiny neighborhood association. The problem: The house isn’t big enough.

Hord bought the 5-acre property with a view of Mount Rainier about six years ago for $415,000. He moved into a home that had been converted from a barn.

But at 2,000 square feet, the barn off 238th Place Southeast didn’t satisfy the Mountain View Country Estates Homeowners Association’s rules. All homes must be at least 3,000 square feet.

County seeks Klingon interpreter for mental health patients

A sign of the times perhaps?

County research has shown that Klingon has gone from being a fictional tongue to what many people — and not just fans — consider a complete language, with its own grammar, syntax and vocabulary.

If a patient speaks only Klingon, the county is obligated to respond with a Klingon interpreter. So officials have decided to include it with about 55 languages, some of which, such as Russian and Vietnamese, are widely spoken, and some, such as Dari and Tongan, are seldom spoken.

The county’s purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway, greeted the request to include Klingon with skepticism.

But, she said, “There are some cases where we’ve had mental health patients where this was all they would speak.”