CKB – Page 14 – Quartz City

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.

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

This is the city…

It’s raining steadily in Los Angeles. We celebrate the coming of rain here by driving extra-dangerously while racing home to see how fast the local television news update their “Stormwatch!” graphics.

Last weekend was pretty nice. I took some photos out the window then but only just now found the PCMCIA adapter for the Cammedia card. So, while it doesn’t quite look like this right this minute, this is how it’s supposed to look.

A picture of my desk:

And looking out the window. Santa Catalina Island in the background.

DSL at last!

Finally on-line at the new place. Hooray for Speakeasy!

Sitting around doing a lot of thumb twiddling

Still awaiting DSL installation at the new place… As you might have guessed, blogging is going to be kinda limited for awhile.

Coffee achieving

So the first real test of any new neighborhood, even more than the grocery and restaurant test is what the coffee situation is like. Choice #1 is still the coffee I brew myself, but a close choice #2 is the Plantation Coffeehouse on the corner of 2nd St. and Ravenna (address is 5708 E. 2nd, Long Beach, CA) on Naples Island.

Been coffee achieving there every morning this week and like the coffee there a lot.

Escape from 714

Got though the major moving hump on Sunday and taking a break for a couple of days before I snag the remaining boxes of books. Advantage of living by the beach: hearing the ocean at night. Disadvantage of living by the beach: everything is damp and does not get dry.

In the ReadMe file for the Ricochet spam reporting agent. Funny thing here is that it’s a way old friends.net address from when Xplain still had the domain. Now friends.net is an dating service.
A Japanese site with an email address that’s over ten years old.
A forwarded article about a faked treasure find.
My 72nd place finish in the 1998 Lee Atwater Invitational Dead Pool.

Category: CKB