Stan’s Obligatory Blog

One day this week I was sitting in my office and started smelling a pie baking in the kitchen downstairs. This happens sometimes, since my office is in a house, and we have a fully-functioning kitchen. It was a peach pie, and a half-gallon of ice cream appeared, too. It was quite good. And I was suddenly seized by an urge to make an apple pie. I’ve only made a pie from scratch once before, and never made an apple pie. But there’s no fighting these urges.

I got some apples today when I went to do our grocery shopping. I looked up a pie crust recipe. And I got down to business.

Making the crust wasn’t too hard. I used to make quiches, so I’m not a stranger to pie crust. But this was the first time in many years. The worst part of the whole process was peeling and cutting the apples. Then I cooked the apples for the filling, which wasn’t too hard.

The instructions said to cool the apples to room temperature before assembling the pie, but I was a bit impatient. They were still a little bit warm, but I don’t think it hurt anything.

I baked the pie for just about 38 minutes before it looked perfectly done. So I took it out and put it in the laundry room to cool. Again, the instructions said to cool it completely before cutting it. But I was impatient. I wanted to try it out. So I cut a piece and ate it.

It was good.

Lucinda looked at me kind of strangely, since I think this is the first dessert she’s ever seen me make that didn’t involve chocolate in some form. But it was a fun little project.

Today’s bike ride was down to Larchmont Village for a bagel at Noah’s. Sure, there’s closer bagel places, but that’s not the point.

We rode out across Pasadena to Eagle Rock, and then down to the L.A. River and into Silver Lake. We rode around the reservoir and down the hill by the dog park. Then across Koreatown to Hancock Park. When we got to Larchmont, we saw Snow White’s wishing well.

The bagel at Noah’s was quite good, and they had fresh-squeezed orange juice, so I was happy.

The big movie billboards on the wall of Paramount Studios were pitching a movie called “Things We Lost in the Fire”, which seemed appropriate enough right now.

After the stop, we rode up Wilton to Franklin, and then east across the Shakespeare Bridge. Then back home through Eagle Rock to La Loma in Pasadena.

It was a very nice ride.

44 miles.
cycling

Today’s ride was a combination of the regular La Tuna Canyon ride, coupled with Gene’s “No Tuna for Me” return route. It was a bit chilly in the morning, but warmed up nicely once we got going.

We went out by the regular route up through La Cañada and Montrose. That was where we saw The Cone. Ever since going to the “Cone Migration” art show, I look at every cone to see if it’s part of the project. And today, it was. It was Cone number 6. The label said that it was released into the wild on September 8th. And now it’s sitting in front of the Montrose Village Newsstand at 2329 Honolulu Ave. I took some pictures to document the location and condition of the cone, and I logged the sighting on Lana Shuttleworth’s web site.

We regrouped at the top of La Tuna Canyon. By then, it was quite warm, so nobody was cold on the four-mile downhill into Sun Valley. Then we rode up past the dump and took the back streets back to Sunland Blvd.

We rode a short distance on Sunland Blvd before turning off to take Apperson, which is a nice, quiet street that parallels it. Along the way, I saw a truck parked in front of a house. It looked like another family was getting leopard-print carpet like ours.

Our snack stop was listed on the route slip as being at Oven Fresh in Montrose. But we like Berolina better, so we went there. It’s just down the block. I got a big fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is a nice treat.

From there, we headed back the way we went out. Back up Hospital Hill and then down past Descanso Gardens and back into Pasadena.

It was a fun ride.

45 miles.
cycling

Here’s the report from Halloween night. Lucinda went out with Cathy and some of the other kids from our neighborhood, while I stayed home and handed out candy. I set up my telescope in the front yard and let the kids look a Jupiter and also Comet Holmes. The comet was a special treat, since I’m usually kind of hard up for something interesting to look at if Jupiter or Saturn isn’t up.

Overall it was a good evening. Lucinda came home with 7.5 pounds (3.4 kg) of candy, which we all considered to be a good haul.

There is a large web in the back of my garage, with a nice big black widow on it. This is easily the largest one of these spiders I’ve seen around here. I guess it’s well fed on all the other creepy-crawly things that live in our garage.

I snapped a few more pictures of Comet Holmes last night. It’s a bit dimmer now. The first picture is a 10-second exposure on ISO 400. I finally figured out how to set the camera for long shutter times. Compare the second picture today with the second picture yesterday. Both are 1-second exposures on ISO 800. They look pretty similar, but for some reason, it looked a lot dimmer to the eye.

Just for the record, the telescope was a Celestron C-8 with a 32mm eyepiece, giving about 60x. The photos were all cropped and then scaled down by a factor of 1.9, so they are all showing the same size field. The camera is a Canon A560, and most importantly, it was attached to the telescope with Scotch® brand packing tape.

Today I heard about Comet Holmes, so I wanted to go out for a look. And it’s nice and bright. It should make for a good show on Wednesday when I do candy-and-telescopes for the neighborhood kids.

It was bright enough that I thought I’d try to photograph it. I’ve done duct-tape astrophotography before. So I got some packing tape and attached my new camera to the eyepiece. Then I set it on manual, no flash, 10-second timer and shot some pictures. The top one is with it set on ISO1600, which came out pretty grainy. The lower one is on ISO800, and it’s a bit cleaner, but doesn’t show the dust cloud around the comet as well. Still, it’s pretty remarkable as these things go. And it’s a bit more spectacular than the last time I tried to photograph a comet. Anyway, I think it’s not bad for a basic point-and-shoot camera taped to the eyepiece.

The calendar says that we’ve been married for 19 years today. But it must be a mistake. We’re not old enough for that to be true…

But we went out for a nice dinner at Cafe Bizou anyway.

Today’s ride was one that I’ve been thinking about for several years. And since this is the weekend before Halloween, the time was right for a trip out to Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City to visit the grave of Bela Lugosi.

(If you want, you can cue the song by Bauhaus.)

The route out there was basically the same as when we rode to visit Moe Howard’s grave, and also when we went to the bike race at West L.A. College.

It was a nice day for riding. We headed down Huntington Drive and Mission Road into downtown L.A. Then south almost to USC before we turned on Adams for the ride out to the west side. That was where we saw the somewhat odd-looking house. It was reminiscent of the Witch’s House in Beverly Hills, and also the Viking house we saw in Tujunga.

When we got to the cemetery, I got out the map I’d downloaded and we went looking. Bela Lugosi’s grave is pretty easy to find. He’s in The Grotto, and not far away, we found Bing Crosby, too. The next stop was Barney Oldfield. He’s best remembered as the first great race-car driver, but not many people know that he was a professional bicycle racer in the 1890s.

We went over by the big crucifixion statue to fine Eadie and Elena Del Rubio. Years ago, we saw the Del Rubio Triplets in the Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood. Today, Eadie and Elena are buried right near each other, with one more space between them, presumably for Milly when the time comes.

The last stop was to see Darby Crash from the seminal punk band, The Germs. Be sure to go read the story of the band. They had a lot of influence and really made their mark, even though they were only active for a short time.

Heading back, we went up to Venice Blvd. I got a flat. We stopped at a little French bakery in the Helms Bakery complex. The eclair there was pretty good, but we were kind of annoyed by the fact that they wouldn’t let us sit at the outside tables unless we ordered from the menu.

The rest of the ride was pretty straightforward. We took Venice all the way back into downtown, and then north on San Pedro and Alameda to get to North Main. Then back home the way we’d gone out in the morning.

It was a fairly nice ride, although the traffic on Venice was kind of heavy on the way back.

As always, I put the pictures in my Graves photo album. And yes, so far I’m quite happy with my new camera.

55 miles.
cycling

My new camera came yesterday. I took it for a short ride today, just to try it out. I didn’t feel up to doing the full club ride today. I was sick this week, so I’m trying to rest a bit.

I rode over to Arcadia to meet the group. Then, from there, we all rode over to the Elks Lodge in Pasadena to see if anyone was there for the ride. At that point, I turned off and went up past the Rose Bowl and back home across Altadena.

I stopped at the curve overlooking JPL. There is a trail there, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the ‘Fire Danger’ sign say anything but ‘Extreme’, but this week I can actually believe it.

There was an empty house on Ventura St that had a big ‘Auction’ sign in front of it. This is the first one I’ve seen, but I don’t think it will be the last.

I saw the people on “Christmas Tree Lane” putting up the lights for their big display. I didn’t know that they started on it so early. We’ve lived here for 12 years and never gone to see their big show.

I also saw a yard sale with a strange sign in front. I kind of liked the touch of the flowers with the half-a-mannequin.

27 miles.
cycling