Birds

Thursday, February 20, 2025

One of our favorite things about living on the canyon is the sounds of nature that surround us. At any time of the day we can hear birds singing and in the evening we can hear the frogs and crickets. We hear the cayotes howling and sometimes they can get quite excited. Probably when they’re eating someones cat.

In addition to hearing them, we have seen the following animals in our backyard. Racoons, Cayotes, Possums, Gophers, Rats, Mice, Lizards, and countless birds. About the only thing we haven’t seen in our yard is a Rattlesnake. I’ve seen plenty of those in the canyon though.

Lisa especially loves the birds. She has an app on her phone that can listen to a bird call and tell you what kind of bird it is.

There is a Red Tailed Hawk that is always flying up and down our Canyon and Lisa acts like they are best friends. Maybe they are, because the hawk frequently lands on our deck railing and will sometimes lay down like a chicken. It is pretty cool. The hawk isn’t afraid of us, but at the same time we can’t get too close to her either.

I remember one day I was working in the yard next to the deck and the hawk flew in and landed on the railing not fifteen feet from me. It looked over at me and I could read his mind. He said, “Oh, you’re here. This is a bit too close for my comfort”, and then he flew off.

Last Saturday Jeff and Tiffany came over to complete the Christmas gift they gave me. We have had too many people walk into our sliding screen on the back door and it is ripped completely off. For Christmas he gave me the screen and rubber bead to repair it, but I haven’t gotton around to fixing it. Last Saturday they repaired it and we were all sitting on the patio enjoying each others company and the beautiful weather. 

A humming bird had been harassing us all day and we just assumed it wanted to get to the humming bird feeder but as we were sitting there Jeff noticed that it had a nest not two feet from our back door. There are a few dead twigs remaining from the vine that used to cover our patio and this nest was built in the fork of one of them. It is pretty cool. I’m watching it every day looking for a couple of pea sized heads to peer over the edge.

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Newborn babies have no knee caps

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A Quick Trip to Arizona

Thursday, February 20, 2025

A few weeks ago Sarah told us that her and Sam would be in Arizona for a few days. It is so difficult to get to Wyomeng that we jumped at the chance to see her and her sweet little family. We were excited to see her. Unfortunately, a few days before we were to go, her kids got sick and she didn’t want to travel with sick kids. She postponed the trip. Our tickets were cheap, about $45 each, round trip, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we just didn’t go but we decided that we should just go anyway. It would be great to see Ben and Kira and their families. So as soon as Lisa was done work on Thursday, January 23, we headed to the airport.

Since our temple has been closed for so long, Lisa loves to turn every trip into a temple trip if at all possible. Just to give you an idea, Friday morning at 8:00 we did an endowment session in the Gilbert Temple with Kira, Friday afternoon at we did an endowment session in the Mesa Temple while Kira went to meetings and other commitments and then Saturday morning we did sealings in the Gilbert Temple with Kira and Justin.

So Friday morning, after the temple, we met up with Ben and Kit at this cool barbecue / antique store.

This huge building is filled with all kinds of antiques but in one corner they have this amazing barbecue place. The barbecue place uses buns and bread that are made in a bakery that is also located on site. It is a pretty amazing experience except that I’m done with the antique store after about ten minutes. Perhaps the best thing I saw in the antique store was this sign.

After we were done, Ben went back to work, Kira headed to an appointment and Lisa and I headed to the Mesa Temple.

We’ve always wanted to go to the Mesa Temple but it has never worked out before.

When we’re in Arizona we want to spend as much time as we can with family so we only go to early morning sessions but the Mesa Temple doesn’t have early morning sessions.

We all gathered at Kira’s on Friday night for dinner and hung out with each other.

Saturday, we got up early and Kira, Justin, Lisa and I did sealings at the Gilbert Temple. We weren’t able to do much after the temple because Lisa and I had to get back for the adult session of Stake Conference. We would normally have skipped that but Lisa was singing in it, so, after the temple Justin had to go be with his kids and we had a few hours to kill before our flight so we went to the hole in the rock.

The hole in the rock is an interesting place. It is right in the middle of the city but you feel like you’re in the mountains. It is a short walk from the parking lot to the hole and there were a ton of people, but it was amazing.

While there we also checked out the George Hunt pyramid. George was a very popular governor of Arizona in the early 1900’s. He decided he wanted to be entombed in a pyramid, so, he built himself a pyramid. He and his wife and a few other family members are entombed here.

The pyramid and the hole in the rock are located right next to the zoo. It was funny to look across the fence and see several zoo animals.

Do you see the mountain goat on top of that big rock?

From there Kira dropped us off at the airport and we headed home. We knew the timing would be tight so we packed our Sunday clothes in the car ahead of time so we could head straight to the church. We changed in the bathroom and Lisa was just in time for their short rehearsal before the session started. They had a couple of women from each ward, and they sang beautifully.

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There are over 200 corpses on Mt Everest. Many of them are used as way points for climbers.

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Penasquitos Brush Fire

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

The fire in this picture is less than five miles from my house and headed my direction. This has happened before, but I used to take comfort in the fact that there are a thousand houses between me and the fire and there is no way they are going to let a thousand houses burn. Well, that just happened a few weeks ago with the Palisades fire. It burned more than 12,000 structures.

Despite that, I was still pretty sure that they would stop this fire because it was still small, and they were hitting it with everything they had. Having said that, it was close to the brush on Black Mountain, and if it got into the brush, there may have been no stopping it. Lisa was sequestered at Westview and I was taking pictures of everything in our house and yard for insurance purposes. All of my computer files are in the cloud so I didn’t have to worry about those and all of our photographs that aren’t digitized are in one place and could be quickly packed up, so we were ready to evacuate. Part of Penasquitos had already been evacuated. Thankfully they quickly got the fire out and we all let out a huge sigh of relief. In the end, this fire did not damage any structures. They later concluded that the fire started at a homeless camp.

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On January 23, 1556, more human beings died than on any other day in human history. 830,000 people died in an earthquake in China.

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Dixie & Marks Annual Trip

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

On Friday, January 17, Dixie and Mark arrived for their annual visit. I love that they have this conference every year and that they make the extra effort to come to San Diego for a visit.

They arrived in the morning and we just sat and visited until Lisa got home from work. We then headed out to the Point Loma lighthouse.

We checked out the visitors center adjacent to the parking lot and then the museum adjacent to the lighthouse, we climbed the stairs and took a look at the light and then we watched a beautiful sunset.

When we were done at the lighthouse we headed on into Point Loma and had dinner at a restaurant in Fishmans Landing.

On Saturday we headed down to check out Balboa Park. Lisa and I really wanted to see the newly renovated Botanical Gardens but we also checked out the organ pavillion and most of the country houses plus a couple of museums.

On Sunday they came to church with us and then headed up to Las Vegas right after an early dinner.

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Worms frozen for 46,000 years in Siberian permafrost came back to life as the soil melted.

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Youth Fireside

Monday, February 17, 2025

Sunday (Jan 5) we kissed Kira and her kids good bye and then we tried to recover our house before the youth fireside that evening. We try to have a fireside for the youth in our ward every month or two but this fireswide was being broadcast from Salt Lake. We were trying to find a place where we could have it. When no one was volunteering, I talked to Lisa and she agreed that we could have it at our house.

The only problem was that after having dozens of kids in the house for two weeks the house was not ready to receive guests. To make matters worse, our Chinese kids were all coming home from their Christmas break in China so we had to do their rooms as well.

When I came home from my meetings, I saw Linda Bessey cleaning our toilet. I guess when they announced the fireside that evening at our house she knew that the last of our kids were leaving that morning and figured we would need help. She showed up on our doorstep unanounced. What a good friend. In the end, the house was beautiful when every one arrived.

Our next problem was that way more people arrived than we had planned on and people were tucked into every corner. It was a bit miraculous but in the end I think only me and one other person didn’t have a seat.

After the fireside, I asked the young men to haul the folding chairs into the back yard so we could have room to maneuver. Many of those young men had been to my backyard back when I first started to work on my yard. It was fun to see them reminising. They were pointing to where they had dug out a tree trunk or where they had dug up brush and where they had helped to haul out a huge pile of dirt. I was glad that they were able to see what finally became of their hard work. My back yard is beautiful, but it only happened with the help of a lot of people. Especially the Andrew family.

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NASA's Parker Solar probe hit a speed of 692,000 kilometers per hour. That is fast enough to travel from New York to Tokyo in under a minute.

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Palm Springs

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Out of the blue, mom got a text message from Monetta Smoot. She moved to Utah several years ago so it was a bit of a surprise. They had a condo booked in Palms Springs but had to leave early so she thought of us and asked if wanted to use the rest of her week.

By this time we were down to just Kira and her three youngest kids and we thought it would be fun. We got there early enough of Friday evening that we could relax a bit and enjoy some time in our own semi-private hot tub. That was nice.

The condo is a part of a huge hotel complex. I think it was a Marriot. Part of the hotel has part of a lake inside of it and they gave boat rides around the lake. The boats actually pass right outside our back door. Do you see the goose inside the hotel?

Around noon on Saturday we headed back to reality but we had Peter and Many over for another one of their rootbeer tasting activities.

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The son of a pro ball player is eight hundred times more likely to make it in the majors than some other random kid.

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Muscle Beach

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Since Charlotte arrived from St Louis after Christmas, and would have been travelling alone, Brandon & Ally asked Ronnie if he would travel with her. This would be less stressful for Charlotte and would give Ronnie time to spend with his son. Ronnie really wanted to see Muscle Beach (at Venice Beach) so we planned a trip to Hollywood. On Jan 2nd we headed up to Muscle Beach. The plan was to see Muscle Beach then head over to Rodeo Drive and then to Hollywood Blvd and check out the Chinese Theater and the Stars on the sidewalk. I also wanted to see the HOLLYWOOD sign.

From Hollywood we planned to head on over to downtown Los Angeles. We wanted to see The Angels Flight Railway, The Last Book Store and the Grand Central Train Station and eat at Phillipes because they are all supposed to be cool. We were running out of time so we dropped Angels Flight Railway and Grand Central Station and chose to eat at Phillipes and check out the bookstore.

Muscle Beach was quite interesting. You have to be pretty confident if you are going to work out there.

I did think that this body builder looked pretty good.

While chekcing out the shops at Muscle Beach, we came across a street show. It took a lot longer than I wanted to be waiting, but it was a great show. The grand finale was this guy jumping over the backs of eight men. The guy third from the left is Ronnie.

This is Rodeo Drive. From here it looks pretty much like any other fancy street, but the names of the shops are all big names and you can’t just walk into many of the stores. They need to come to the door and let you in.

The stars on the sidewalk. We didn’t have time to stop and check them out.

The Hollywood sign on the side of the mountain.

The bookstore was very cool. I couldn’t possibly describe all of the fun little things they have done like making tunnels out of books but the amazing part is that the book store is in what used to be a bank.

 They even have books in the big walk-in vault.

Phillipes was amazing. The place is famous for their Beef Dip sandwich so that is what I went for. It lived up to its reputation. If you’re ever in Los Angeles you should check it out.

They even had old-fashioned phone booths. We found Santa making a call in the middle phone booth. I suppose when this place first opened back in 1908 these phones booths probably really worked. 

We got home very late, and Brandon and his family were leaving early so he made them load up the van before they could go to bed. They were NOT happy, but I think he was smart. They would have been much more upset if they had to load it the next morning at 4:00AM.

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A Scram Jet could fly from New York to Beijing in 19 minutes

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New Years Day

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

On New Years Day we had a relaxed morning and then headed to Old Town to donate 
at the Giving Machine. This year we bought some chickens and some school supplies.

We wanted to hang out at Old Town for a little bit so Brandons bunch headed to go tide pooling while we checked out Old Town and then we went to join them.

Unfortunately, google maps was confused with the name of the beach and we ended up at two different tide pools. Because low tide was so late in the day, we didn’t have time to relocate so we checked out two different tide pools.

As always, there were a lot of sea anemones.

We were lucky enough to find a few good sized star fish.

It was too hazy to see much of a sunset but the lights on the pier were quite amazing.

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Abalones (a snail) have 5 butt holes

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