Stan’s Obligatory Blog

…and I got to go for a ride after all. So I did the same ride as last Sunday, to Old Town Glendora, but since I was riding alone, I took my camera along. So here arejust a few sights from along the ride. A radiator shop in Irwindale, a decorated mailbox in Azusa, and a somewhat enigmatic political statement in Monrovia. 40 miles.

  

…isnt’ going to happen. It’s raining here in L.A. for the first time of the season. Auuggghhh! I’m melting! I’m melting! Ohhhhh, what a world, what a world.

Oh well, there’s always next week.

I gave a short talk today at the Earthquake Research Affiliates meeting. The subject was the electronic mailing lists that I’ve set up for earthquake notification. Specifically, we have a set of mailing lists that people can subscribe to for notifications of earthquakes in California. Also, I’m working on a Virtual Mailing List that will use a database to allow people to select custom notification formats, thresholds and geographic boundaries. So I got to get up and talk about all this today. Fortunately, I don’t have a major fear of public speaking. I got over that years ago when I worked as an aerobics instructor and also when I took the ‘How to Perform Stand-Up Comedy’ class at UCLA Extension. So it was a fun time.



Also, I noticed that there is now a marker on the outside of the building commemorating the invention of the pH meter. I never knew that the American Chemical Society placed markers for stuff like this.

I checked, and my I Hate Texas page is number one in a Google search for “I hate Texas”. Heh. It’s kind of fun having the number one result for something.

It seems that every town has an ‘Old Town’ these days. And Glendora is no exception. Today’s ride went through Temple City and Irwindale to Glendora, where we stopped for a snack at the Classic Car Gallery coffee shop. On the way back, we went through Azusa, Monrovia and Sierra Madre. The ride was 39 miles, and with my ‘warmup’ beforehand the total was 51 miles.

Today at lunchtime I rode my bike over to the old Kresge Lab in the San Rafael hills in Pasadena. This is the old seismo lab, and I’d heard that there are deer that graze on the property. So I wanted to take a look. When I got there, I could see lots of trails up and down the hills, and lots of little hoof prints on the trails, but no actual deer. Still, it was interesting to see the place again.
 
And just to prove that there are deer there, here are some pictures of them that my friend Anthony took yesterday: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~aguarino/

Later on in the day, I had to fix one of the computers, and while it was self-testing I had a look in the Media Room. The Parkfield earthquake last week had made for a busy time here, and there were still signs of all the activity.
 

Today’s ride was through Highland Park and Los Feliz to Griffith Park. Then we rode up past the Greek Theater and over Mt Hollywood Drive until we came out by Travel Town. We had a snack stop at Priscilla’s in Burbank before coming home through Glendale and La Canada, complete with the climb up Hospital Hill. The main ride was 45 miles, and I did a short 10-mile warmup before the ride, so the day’s total was 55 miles.

We went to the latest opening party at The Underground Arts Society in Altadena this evening. The featured artist this month is Susanna Eggli, and she works with bones, shells, and other such odd items. She had pieces with crab claws and fish heads, and a whole series with what looked like rat skulls. It was interesting and amusing.

Being a transplant from Back East, it took me several years to get used to the idea that citrus fruit just grows on trees in peoples’ back yards here. I’ve accepted this. But this evening, I needed a lemon from our neighbor’s tree, and I saw these weird-looking mutant lemons growing on it. You won’t find these for sale in the produce section:
 

After pestering Gene for several weeks, he agreed to do the La Tuna Canyon ride again. So today was the day. We had a big group going out. 13 at the start. We had a lot of stops to regroup when people missed turns or took wrong turns. Still, the climb was fun, and it was a good day for it. The snack stop was a Paradise Bakery in Glendale, where I had two chocolate eclairs and a quart of water. When we got back to the park, I had 46.5 miles, so my neighbor James and I rode just a little bit more to push the total over 50 for the day.