Category: Life

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For November 2013, I decided to try NaBloPoMo and post every day this month. I’d been getting all the NaNoWriMo emails, and while I didn’t have the time or story ideas (and Katie’s covering the “writing a novel” thing), I was a little nostalgic for a writing challenge. Today wraps up my participation in the event.

I learned two things about daily posting:

  1. It’s not as easy as it sounds, unless you’re willing to count the equivalent of a Tweet or Facebook status as a blog post.
  2. I would rather write fewer, higher-quality posts than more, lower-quality posts.

That quality vs. quantity issue especially bugged me when it came to my ongoing Les Miserables commentary. Those take a couple of hours to put together, and as a parent with a full-time job, free time is at a premium. I can think of a number of occasions when I sat down to work on my next article and realized no, I need to get a post up today, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to finish that one. Some of the resulting posts are worth it, including a few where I would have written a short note, but found that I had a lot more to say on the topic. Some, I’d probably delete tomorrow if I didn’t want to keep them up for the record.

I thought I’d do a breakdown of this month’s posts:

Broad Categories:
11 Life observations
9 Entertainment/reading
6 Photo-centric
4 Tech

Recurring Topics
5 Les Misérables
4 Trip to San Francisco
4 Local city observations
4 Comic conventions (the actual Long Beach con, wondering about WonderCon’s future)

Originality
19 Substantially new content at this blog only
4 Built around previously-posted photos (mostly from Instagram)
4 Short commentary posts linking to other content (3 of which were at least to my own stuff at another blog)
3 cross posts (two at Speed Force, one at Reading Les Mis)

I only resorted to blogging about blogging twice (except to fill out the links to my Les Mis articles and give them a little more substance), and only once did I just toss up a random photo to make deadline.

Full list (or if you prefer, a standard blog view of the posts):

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Halo Towers

I developed an interest in sun halos a while back. Bright rings and arcs can appear in the sky when ice crystals are lined up just right with your viewpoint, much as a rainbow forms when water droplets are lined up just right.

You see a lot more of them, and especially the most spectacular ones, in colder climates where ice crystals form more often. But I still see several circular halos and sundogs each year even in Southern California, particularly when there’s a thin layer of cirrus clouds. The ice crystals only need to be in a line of sight, not near the ground.

The arc at the top of this photo, looking like it’s bridging the two buildings, isn’t a rainbow — the colors are wrong and too pale, and it’s in the same direction as the sun (which is behind the building on the left). I think it’s a 22-degree circular halo, but I’m not certain. It looks a little bit too shallow, so it could be a tangent arc, but I’m not sure the sun was quite high enough for it to point downward from the tangent instead of upward.

Here are some other sun halo photos I’ve posted on this blog in the past.

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What is it about the holiday season that makes people forget how to drive, especially in parking lots? The other day, while I was trying to back out of a parking space at the grocery store, two cars independently barreled down the wrong way in a crowded one-way aisle. A third tried, but another driver’s honk made them realize they were asking for a head-on collision.

I actually shouted, “My three-year old can read those signs!”

OK, that isn’t entirely true. He’s not three yet.

But that kid can read the heck out of a “Do Not Enter” sign.

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Southern California at night from space (via NASA).

Last night, I saw more stars than I’d seen from home in years.

I’d just gotten back from a midnight grocery run (on which I’d had the disorienting experience of watching a three-quarter moon rise — talk about a “grin without a cat”), and the combination of recent rain, fewer house lights at that hour, and my own dark-adapted eyes made the night sky look more like what I remember from home in the suburbs when I was younger.

It was still depressingly few stars compared to those times I’ve been out camping in the desert, or even the time we went to San Simeon and I drove out of town a few miles to try to spot a comet (it didn’t work)…and nothing on the time we stopped in the middle of the Ka‘u lava fields on Hawai‘i. But it was enough that I could make out part of Orion’s arm and club, which is a lot more than I usually see here in the southwest of Los Angeles. If the moon hasn’t risen, Juipter would have dominated the view, and it seemed as bright as Venus had been just after sunset, though I now know that’s an illusion of memory. Even the Hyades were clear.

Of course, that was only in part of the sky: straight up, to the south, and to the west. North and east faded into the general haze of light from greater Los Angeles. Even the Pleiades, sadly, used to be easy to spot, but I could barely pick them out.

Earlier in the evening, I’d tried to point out Orion and Cassiopeia to my almost-three-year-old son, but he’d been completely uninterested. I wonder: Have I missed the window to show him how awesome the night sky can be?

On my flights up to San Francisco and back a few weeks ago, I noticed that the Los Angeles area at night, rather than being mostly dark with islands of light, is mostly light with islands of dark: the mountain ranges and hills. Today I stumbled on a photo from space that really demonstrates it: Artificial Light, taken by, well, it doesn’t actually identify the astronaut, but since it’s credited to NASA and dated July 21, 2013, it’s probably Karen Nyberg.

In this image, south is up and north is down. San Diego is at the top of the frame. The lower half is Orange County, the Los Angeles basin, and the San Gabriel Valley. The Santa Ana Mountains form an empty gap in the middle, bordered by the communities along the I-15 to the left. A narrower gap, Chino Hills and connected hills, extends downward to the right, ending at a bright spot that marks Downtown Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley is covered by clouds, though you can see a glow from beneath. I had no idea Hemet had grown so big.

I grew up next to that empty area in the middle, and at the time it was even bigger. A lot of farmland and open space has filled in over the last 25 years. And all those street lights leak light upward into the sky, where it scatters and hides more and more stars.

We don’t need all that light leaking into the sky. It doesn’t help visibility down on the ground, it’s a waste of energy…and it hides what used to be a basic source of wonder that anyone could experience.

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Los Angeles skyline in shadow, foreground in light. Los Angeles skyline in light, foreground in shadow.

I went out for a brief walk Thursday afternoon (sometimes you just need fresh air). It had been raining, but had stopped, and the sun had broken through the clouds. Something made me go up to the top of the nearby parking structure where I could see downtown Los Angeles. It turned out to still be completely in shadow, as the gloom stretched inland. But it made for a great contrast with the sunlit hotel in the foreground.

The next day, another of intermittent rain and sun, I glanced out my office window shortly before sunset and took another short walk, this time straight to the parking structure for a better view of the mountains. The sun was sinking past open patches in the cloud layer, and I realized it was only a matter of time before it lit up the city in the distance.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, downtown Los Angeles was lit up by the sunset, and while I was at the wrong angle to see the towers turn completely orange as I did once on the train nearly three years ago, I was able to line up the same angle as the photo from the previous day…because this time the nearby hotel was the building in shadow.

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I’ve found my lunchtime patterns fossilizing. Mostly, there aren’t a whole lot of places to eat within walking distance that aren’t hotel restaurants and therefore expensive, and parking is such a chore that it’s not worth driving anywhere. So I end up going to two fast food places and two cafes, over and over again.

The other day, I started to walk to Subway, and realized I just couldn’t bring myself to eat there again. So I did something I’d never done: I kept walking. As it turns out there wasn’t anyplace to eat past it, just two more hotels (neither of which advertised a restaurant) and an abandoned office building. From there I walked along Sepulveda until I reached In-N-Out.

Along the way, though, I spotted some interesting items, like this old warehouse:

Continue reading →

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So, I think I’ve lost the NaBloPoMo challenge, since I failed to write anything yesterday. I had something planned and everything, but I’ve been blogging in the evenings, and felt sick last night and completely forgot that I even needed to. All I remember is lying on the couch, reading Les Miserables, and reading kids’ books to my son.

Although technically I did write a post for Speed Force on Wednesday, so I suppose I’m still in the clear.

It’s been an interesting process. I’ve found myself stumbling on topics to write about, observations that ordinarily I’d let drop, or in some cases start writing and never come back to again.

It’s also been a problem. Specifically with my Les Miserables commentary. I’m on page 1162 reading, almost at the end, but my posts are only up to page 843. I’d really like to get that going again, but while I had plenty of free time in the evenings on my business trip, now that I’m back to my normal life, I have a lot less free time.

If I’ve got half an hour, and an obligation to blog something, I’m going to use that half hour for something that I can write quickly, not to get started on something that’s ultimately going to take me three hours spread out over several days to finish. And that, IMO, is counterproductive to the goal of blogging more. I’m still of the opinion that in the long run, less frequent high quality content is better than more frequent low quality content.

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