Category Archives: Daily Life

Spoke Too Soon

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Shortly after I posted my last post, the power went off again. It didn’t come on again until around 1:15 this morning…which is to say that our power was off from 6PM Friday evening until 1:15 AM Monday morning, with only a two-hour break on Saturday afternoon.

We coped; yesterday, figuring that we were going to be hot, sticky, inconvenienced, and waiting about no matter what we did, we decided we might as well have some fun at the same time…so we spent the day being hot, sticky, inconvenienced, and waiting about at Disneyland. It was a fine time, and included the delightful discovery that my almost five-year-old girl likes rollercoasters. She road Big Thunder Mountain (twice), the Matterhorn, and Space Mountain, and wanted to go on all of them again. (My eldest went on all them as well, but didn’t like the Matterhorn or Space Mountain.)

Today it’s back to work; and for once I’m grateful.

This and That

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So yesterday I arrived home at 10 PM from my business trip; that was two hours later than usual, as my plane out of Washington-Dulles was late because at the scheduled boarding time the pilots were still in Chicago. When I arrived home, I discovered that the power was out, had been out since about 6 PM, and they weren’t sure when it would come back on.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a low-carb supper when you’re trying not to open the refrigerator at all in hopes that the food won’t spoil before the power comes back on?

Be that as it may; the power came on around noon today (18 hours without power), and the stuff in the freezer is largely history. On top of that, it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit at our house–well, 100 degrees outside, since the power’s back on–and we are all trying to avoid doing much of anything at all, really. Later we’ll probably try to find a pool to swim in.

In other news, I’m a bit worried about Ian of Banana Oil. I’ve sent him a couple of e-mail messages since June 30th, and haven’t heard anything from him. Moreover, his blog hasn’t been updated since July 12th; if I’m not mistaken, all of the posts in July have been quotations from some book or other (the kind of post, in other words, which he preschedules when he knows he’s going to be too busy to blog); and as of today the blog is showing nothing but a WordPress database error. He’s a yankee in Shanghai; I hope nothing has happened to him.

Now That’s Fame

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Prompted by a blog post I read, I typed my full name into the Google search box, just to see what would come up. (Yeah, sure I’ve done it before; but it’s been quite a while.) I’m not used to the keyboard I’m using, though, and my fingers stumbled, and what I actually entered was

William H. Duquett

I left the “e” off of the end of my name. And so help me, Google responded with this:

Did you mean William H. Duquette?

Is that cool or what?

I’m Back

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Jane and I and our kids have just gotten home from a week’s vacation during which we had a wonderful time and no Internet access. I’m still catching up, and my laptop won’t be repaired until next week, so there won’t be any Ex Libris for a while; in fact I might skip July altogether.

I’ll probably have more to say later about our vacation; for now, suffice it to say that we went to the beach, we took lots of walks, we swam in the ocean, we went on a ferris wheel, and did all sorts of other delightful things, and it was very restful and tiring at the same time. ‘Twas wonderful.

Spilled Milk

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So this morning, through no fault of her own, Jane spilled a full glass of milk across the kitchen table…and onto my laptop, on which I was reading the morning’s news. I turned it off, and dried it off, and let it air dry during the day, and it appears to be working now. Except for two things: the CapsLock key doesn’t work (why? The milk didn’t land on that end of the keyboard), and I can only get a capital “I” using the shift key on the righthand side of the keyboard. The shift key on the lefthand side of the keyboard works fine for every key…but “I”.

Wait a minute….the “I” is working again….but the CapsLock still doesn’t work.

Now if only I could understand why “LeftShift-i” wasn’t giving me “I” to begin with. I can’t think of any reasons that make sense. I can think of reasons why the “i” key might fail altogether, and I can think of reasons why the LeftShift key might fail altogether, but I can’t think of any reason why that combination, and only that combination, would fail.

And how come my web browser says “Display a Menu” on the status line when I press the CapsLock key?

I’m confused.

Update: Now my “Down Arrow” key doesn’t work, and the guy at the computer store said, “By all means bring it in–it needs to get cleaned out as soon as possible. In the meantime, leave it turned off.” So I’ve hooked up my external backup drive to my kids’ eMac (and ain’t it slow, though!) and I’m presently copying all of my user files from my external backup drive to my other external drive so that I can run off of my external backup drive without feeling like I’ve got no backup. It looks like it’s got about two more hours to go. Then I can begin to think about paying the bills.

Note to readers: if you don’t have a good backup of your computer, make one. This can happen to you.

The Old Zoo

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Today I returned to a place I last saw when I was no more than three years old, and probably younger than that: the old Griffith Park Zoo. The old zoo was replaced by the current Los Angeles Zoo in 1966; it has since been turned into a picnic area, and is much frequented by walkers, joggers, and photographers. I have one dim and indistinct memory of the old zoo: the zoo trams were pulled by engines in the shape of elephant heads. Picture a giant “Dumbo” head, less the circus cap and giant ears, pulling a tram and you’ve got it. At least, so I remember it. I had caught sight of these trams and wanted a closer look, and I distinctly remember running towards one that was coming down the path in our direction. I wasn’t going to get in its way, but my mom scooped me up anyway. And that’s what I remember about the old zoo.

This morning, we packed up the kids and headed over there for a “family walk”. Naturally I grabbed the camera. As I say, it’s been converted into a picnic area:

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All of the modern amenities are close at hand (and apparently have seen considerable use).

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The zookeepers must have had a fun time feeding the animals; here’s a picture (slightly blurry, alas) looking up the stairs from the zookeeper’s entrance in the back of one enclosure:

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Looking at this cage, I really wonder how you were expected to see whatever kind of creature lived inside. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t likely to get out.

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Some of the cages are still occupied, if untended. Here we see some domestic ivy escaping into the wild.

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And one set of monkey cages still had inhabitants.

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Not-So-Wild Life

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Whilst walking through the park with my boys after dinner this evening, we spotted this little fellow:

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You can’t tell from this picture, but he was moving strangely, and his (or her, I suppose) other ear flopped around when he moved as though he could no longer make it stand up. Plus, he was nibbling grass in broad daylight over ten feet from any cover.

This, my friend, is no wild rabbit. As we realized later, this is a tame rabbit that has had, in all likelihood, the worst day of his life. How do I know? His behavior; his wide, staring eye; and then there’s his color. I’ve never seen a native rabbit that shade; all of our native rabbits are gray. In fact, they are just about the same color as this lizard, which we spotted at about the same time:

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About the only good thing we can say about this rabbit’s future is that by this time tomorrow he will no longer be hurt and terrified, because a coyote will have gotten him. The lizard, on the other hand, will be just fine.

Update: Jane saw this rabbit again several days later, still hopping about in the open in broad daylight (it was mid-morning), but still ambulatory. Apparently my predictions of its demise were over-pessimistic. Still, I think it’s unlikely to last the summer.

A Long Walk

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This morning I grabbed the cell phone (a recent acquisition) and headed out the door. The goal was to take a much longer walk than I usually would do, partially to impress Jane and partially to found out just how far I can walk in a morning before I run out of gas. As it happens I lasted for two hours of brisking walking (with frequent photo stops) and made it about five-and-a-half miles. And indeed, I saw a great many things on my walk.

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I don’t recall ever before having seen a fire hydrant painted quite this passionate a color.

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These have been popping up around town; perhaps they’ll last longer than the stencils they are replacing. Have to wonder how much just one of these cost the city to make, though.

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In 1934 there were heavy rains in L.A. for days on end. Folks in my town who worried about floods coming down from the mountains gathered for safety in the American Legion Hall, where volunteers supplied them with food and blankets. And then one of a number of flashfloods came roaring down the hill, and a mass of water, mud, and rocks swept the American Legion Hall completely away. Over thirty locals died, along with an unknown number of folks who’d been squatting in the canyons above town. This is a monument to the folks who died; it’s just where the American Legion Hall was. And running underneath it is one of the flood control channels built by the Corps of Engineers to prevent it from happening again. The location isn’t coincidental…..

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I ended my walk at point where a bridge crosses the Verdugo Wash, into which the channel shown above empties; the bridge was marked with this plaque.

Score!

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Yesterday Jane and I went on a date; and we went to downtown Glendale, where, as it happens, two used bookstores were having 20%-off sales. I found some delightful finds, including books of photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Atget, and a collection of photos of the Old West by a variety of early photographers from E.C. Watkins to Timothy O’Sullivan to Adam Clark Vroman, Pastoral by Nevil Shute, and a book by early 20th-century humorist Stephen Leacock entitled Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy. I got the latter on the recommendation of a fellow named Chuck Jones; he speaks highly of Leacock in his book Chuck Amuck, which is damn-fine credentials in my book. Reviews will follow!