Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This afternoon I had to go to the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner. While I was there, Cathy called me and said that our neighbor’s back house was on fire. It was fortunate that she was able to warn me about this, because there are few things more disturbing than to come around the corner and see three fire trucks and an ambulance parked in front of your house.

The fire department was very efficient, and they put the fire out pretty quickly. Have I ever mentioned that Pasadena has great city services?

Fortunately, nobody was hurt in this, although the entire neighborhood is probably going to be extra-sensitive to the smell of smoke for a while. Which is perhaps unfortunate in that I’m barbecuing dinner tonight…

Today there was a copy of “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country” included with the morning paper. Over the last ten years, I’ve handed out many of these booklets at disaster preparedness fairs all over L.A. I’m glad to see it getting wide distribution with the Times.

Next week is the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which was the event that pretty much started all of modern earthquake science. This is what led ultimately to the current understanding of the earthquake cycle and why we need to be prepared for earthquakes. And in some small way, it’s also what led my having a job running the computers for the Southern California Seismic Network. (Have I mentioned ever that I really like my job?) And I even got to contribute a little bit to the book. I made the map on page 30, showing the first hour’s activity after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The ‘recent earthquakes‘ maps didn’t exist back then, but I took a catalog listing of the first hour’s earthquakes and fed them into the map program to simulate what it would have looked like.

So for everyone who lives in California, keep watching the ground. And for everyone who doesn’t, Nyeah, Nyeah! there are earthquake hazards in lots of other places, too.

Route map and photo locations

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an item on The Smoking Gun about how Prince was being sued by his landlord because he had painted his house purple. The copy of the document on the site gave the address, so I immediately plotted a route to ride out and see it. Today was the day for sightseeing.

I met Gene at the park, and we headed out. Right after crossing the Colorado St. Bridge, we got a very good view of the burned out mansion in the San Rafael Hills, so I stopped for picture. Then we headed down into Eagle Rock.

We took Eagle Rock Blvd and Fletcher down into Silver Lake, and then across the Shakespeare Bridge and onto Hollywood Blvd. We rode all the way across Hollywood and then took a little side trip to see Dicks St.

From there, we went back up Doheny to Sunset and headed west again. Just before the Beverly Hills line, we turned and went up into the hills. We stopped for photos at Prince’s house. We saw the “3121” by the mailbox, which isn’t the address, but the title of his new album. The house was not purple, so I guess he had it painted again.

From there, we continued on up the hill. At first we missed a turn, so we went up a horrendous hill, only to have to come back down. Then we found Thrasher Ave, which was where Moe Howard lived. We stopped for a quick picture at Moe’s old house, and then continued on, going back down the canyon to get to Sunset Plaza.

A left turn on Sunset Plaza sent us uphill again. This time we rode all the way to the crest, stopping only briefly for a photo of the mobile dog-grooming van. There was also a construction site with a scaffold that had half of a mannequin on it. That was kind of strange and worthy of a photo. Then when we got to the top, we headed down the other side. We stopped for another photo of the foundations of a new house. Obviously, the definition of a ‘buildable lot’ is somewhat different in the hills.

Continuing on down the hill, we took a side road to get to Wonderland Ave. But Google Maps had lied to me, and the road ended partway down, so we had to turn around and come back up. Then we took Lookout Mountain the rest of the way down to Wonderland.

After a left on Wonderland, we groaned up yet another steep hill. I stopped for a picture of an Elvis mural on one house, and then we continued on to see the house that was the site of the 1981 Wonderland Murders. Then we turned back down and took Laurel Pass and Allenwood up to Mulholland. We stopped at the park there to get some water.

After just a short jaunt on Mulholland, we turned left on Laurel Canyon and headed down into the Valley. We stopped for a photo of the ruins of a house that had slid off its foundation earlier this winter. Then we went the rest of the way down the hill.

At the bottom, we stopped to see a house I’d seen on L.A. Curbed. 636 square feet on a 0.04 acre lot for $499,000. It made the $1.27 million house we’d seen in Laurel Canyon look like a bargain.

For the trip home, we took Moorpark and Riverside back across Studio City and Burbank, passing by Bob Hope’s old house in Toluca Lake. Then we went up to Kenneth and Mountain in Glendale and took them back to Verdugo.

The ride up Hospital Hill was all right. We had a little tail wind, which helped a tiny bit. Then we took the standard route home across La Cañada. I stopped to snap a picture of the Linda Vista overpass where the stencil said “LINDA VITSA”. They probably outsourced the stencil-making.

From there, it was downhill all the way home across Pasadena.

56 miles.
cycling

Yesterday, I saw that Heather B. Armstrong had posted a video of her dog Chuck wearing an ice cream container on his face. I thought this was tremendously funny, and I showed it to Cathy and Lucinda.

This evening, I finished off a container of ice cream. Lucinda immediately grabbed it and stuck it on Buddy’s face. We didn’t think that Buddy’s head would fit in it, but it did. And from the noises coming out of it, he was having Great Fun. He was even pushing it against the furniture to get his snout deeper into it. So perhaps this can be a new blog meme. Post pictures of your dog with a Dreyer’s Ice Cream container on his face…

It rained yesterday. Hard. I’m usually pretty skeptical of the weather forecasts, since it’s late in the season for rain here. So I rode my bike to work and was rewarded with a very wet ride home. The worst part of it had to be the ‘rooster tail’ of water coming off the front wheel that just happened to go exactly into my eyes. Yick.

This morning the forecast was for the rain to blow out during the day. I went outside and it wasn’t raining, and there was even a little blue showing through the clouds. So I got on my bike. I made it about a half-mile when the sky just opened up. I got totally soaked. Riding home in the rain isn’t too bad, since I can dry off when I get home. But riding in to work in the rain sucks. Sitting soaked all day in the office sucks. So I turned around and went home to get the car.

When I got in the car to drive in to work the rain had stopped and the sun came out. It’s a good thing I don’t believe in God. If I did, it would be really hard not to take this personally.

Today’s ride was the “Glendale Vistas” route. A trip all around Glendale, with a nice hill at the beginning and the end.

We started out from Victory Park and rode across Pasadena and into La Cañada. Then we turned left and rode up Chevy Chase, which is a nice little hill. Then at the top we rode down the other side into Glendale.

At the bottom of the hill, we continued on through Glendale all the way down almost to the L.A. River. Then we turned north and went back up to Glenoaks Blvd. We turned left and took Glenoaks out to our snack stop at Paradise Bakery.

They have the best chocolate eclairs at Paradise, and I made sure to have one today.

After the stop, we headed up to Kenneth and Mountain for the trip back across Glendale. Then we went left on Verdugo for the climb up to Hospital Hill. At the top, we took a right on Descanso and headed back down through La Cañada and back into Pasadena.

By the time we got back to the park, it had turned into a very nice spring day. Newton had ridden from his house in Covina, so I followed him part way back just to enjoy the nice sunshine. We rode out through Arcadia and Monrovia. I had heard that Velo Monrovia had changed its name to Stan’s Bicycles, so I had to stop for a photo-op. I always take pictures of signs that have my name on them. And I got to meet Stan, too.

Then I went back through Sierra Madre to my house. It was a very nice ride.

51 miles.
cycling

It’s April, and that means it’s time for our trip down to Seal Beach for dinner at Walt’s Wharf. That was the site of our first date. It was April 4, 1986. So this year marks twenty years together, which still sounds like a long time to us. We certainly don’t feel old enough to say, “We’ve been together twenty years”.

So we went down to Seal Beach. When we got to Walt’s, there was a wait. Apparently they don’t take reservations for dinner, so we got the little pager-thingy and went out walking on Main St. We walked down to the pier, but it was closed, apparently because they have some heavy equipment parked on it to repair a wall underneath. Then we browsed around in various stores until they had a table ready for us.

We were seated upstairs, just two tables over from where we sat the first time. We had a nice dinner, finished off with some killer desserts and a souvenier picture. So overall, it was a fun time, and a good way to mark twenty years together.

Today Lucinda and I went to a birthday party for a girl she knows from school. They had a big back yard and a very big jumper-slide for the kids to play in. And play they did. Pretty much the whole time except for cake and piñata. The while all of this was going on, the adults were chatting about real estate and taking tours of the newly-remodeled house. And by the end of the party, all the adults were trying out the jumper, too. It was a tall one. From the top we could see over the roof of the house, and it was a pretty long drop down the slide. I carried my camera up to the top and tried to get an ‘action shot’ on the way down the slide. And Lucinda learned to do her Spider-Girl thing and climb up the slide. It was fun.

On Friday we took out our old Sun Enterprise 5000 server. This was the big refrigerator-sized computer that was the main Southern California earthquake system for many years. It was a bit of a dinosaur, as it required a special 220V circuit in the computer room to feed it. We got this system back in 1997, and this particular computer has been nothing but trouble. If they had a ‘lemon law’ for computers it would have been sent back. But we finally got it to work, and it served us reasonably well for all these years.

Still, this machine had more than its share of stupid moments. One time it crashed mysteriously. When I went in to see what had happened, one of the small heat sinks on one of the CPU boards had fallen off and fallen onto the back of the CPU board below it. That shorted out things on the second board and caused the machine to freak out and die. Another time I had a set of new memory SIMMs to put in it, and it kept failing self-test. So I ended up having to reseat the chips about a dozen times, each time having to sit through the 20-minute self-test. I spent the whole afternoon shivering in the computer room, watching Das Blinkenlights. Fun times…

So Tammer and I got the machine unbolted from the floor, and we removed the CPU and IO boards to keep as spares for the E4000 we still have. Then we wheeled the carcass out of the computer room and down to the junk-collection room in the basement. It was a lot like the last scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. We dropped the computer carcass off in a big room filled with other big computer carcasses. And thus ended an era.

Have I mentioned recently how much I like my job?

It rained today. This is the tail end of the rainy season here in SoCal, and this winter hasn’t been particularly wet. Today was the first day in over a year that it’s been raining hard enough that I didn’t want to ride my bike to work. I checked my calendar, and the last time I drove to work was January 10, 2005. Every time I drive my car to work, I root for it to rain hard. If the sun comes out I feel like an idiot. But today it rained. Not quite to Biblical levels, but still hard enough that I was glad to not have to ride in it.

Caltech recently started charging for parking, and just last week I found out that as a bike commuter I could get three free parking passes a month. So the timing was good. Still, it was kind of sad to break such a long streak.

And to top it off, I had to buy gas on the way home. On average, I only buy gas about four times a year, and so I’m always a bit shocked at the price. But now my car is back in the garage, and I’m hoping to leaving it there for at least a month.