In case anyone heard of a fire in the Santa Clarita area-- it's across the freeway from where I live, so there's no real danger here, unless you count nasty snoke and ash fall.  This promises to be a killer fire season-- horribly hot and bone-dry.

Today I actually decided to do something interesting and go meet Tracy, Brian and Samantha at Malibu Lagoon.  Hilights of that trip include rescueing stranded sea hares and catching a ton of kelp flies to feed the mantises.  Of course, the one day out of like 2 weeks I leave Santa Clarita, there's a huge brush fire on the 5 freeway which horribly ( Read more... )

Yesterday I went to water the front yard with the hose.  When I picked it up, this stuff that looked like sand poured out the end of it.  It turns out it was zillions of ants and pupa.  For some reason the ants thought it would be a good idea to move a ton of pupa into the garden hose.  Since there were still ants pouring out the end of the hose, I ( Read more... )

I went down to the Westside yesterday to attend a Kickstarter seminar with Tracy R.  It was 'interesting.'  My favorite question was someone who asked if it was a good idea to put up some kind of ticker counting down the time until their Kickstarter launched.

(In a remarkable display of self-restraint, instead of saying "WTF kind of dumb idea is ( Read more... )

I went down to Malibu beach today with Dwight to watch the exceptionally high surf.  There's a hurricane south of here (not a danger to us) that's causing huge waves ( Read more... )

A couple of x-posting things from my Facebook, for those who don't do FB ( Read more... )

We pulled into the local off-brand gas station a couple days ago.  It used to be a Valero.  Don't remember what it is now, but it has cheap gas, so we try to go there if we're paying cash ( Read more... )

The LA Times did an article yesterday about how a Nevada mental hospital was putting released patients onto buses to California.  This is reminiscent of a similar scandal a few years ago where private hospitals would take indigent patients down to Skid Row and abandon them there, sometimes still in their hospital gowns.  When confronted with the ( Read more... )

Temps up to 'broil' recently.

Finished the Bigfoot vs. Bones short.  I think of everything I've read so far this year, this wins the 'improbability prize' for most unbelievable character reactions to events.  I may have read a few things with more outlandish plots (the Japanese WWII torture island in modern times comes to mind) or worse writing, ( Read more... )

Still spending about 80% of my waking hours in front of the computer trying to get the damn comic done.  however, I did go out to run some errands yesterday, which included a trip to the store and the do-it-yourself carwash ( Read more... )