Poignancy

Our yard is blessed each year to be frequented by beautiful western tiger swallowtail butterflies. Magnificent specimens who flit, dart, and dodge around and through the spring and summer air in search of nectar. The big bougainvillea beneath one of our backyard palms is a regular stop on their journeys, but they rarely light upon …

Get-A-Way To Idle-A-While

Susan and I didn’t get to take a full-blown vacation this year. No two weeks spent in the Far East or, on a 4,500-mile road trip around the western United States. Not even a long weekend anywhere. So when the end of my recently completed first module of training started to draw near she emphasized …

Shooting Range: 20 Rounds

Twenty rounds at about 10 yards. First half aimed at center mass. Second half aimed at the head. Gotta work on tightening my groupings with the first, and a slightly low sight alignment on the second, but overall there’s improvement in my results. Weapon: 9mm Glock. Location: Firing Line, Burbank

Gut Check Time

The public safety training program within which I’m enrolled at Rio Hondo College began its second module yesterday. In the first module the physical aspect of the course was minimized. And initially this module wasn’t going to focus much stronger upon it. But that changed early on in the first module when the schedule for …

Crystal Blue Persuasion

The above screen cap (click it for the bigger picture) is brought to you from the greatest television show in the history of my television viewership: Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan. Specifically, this is a moment from Season 2, Episode 9, which coincidentally is how far I’ve caught up thank the good lord for …

The Hunger Games: Squirrel 1, Hawk 0

What you’re looking at above (click it for the bigger picture) is not something you see everyday, nor the kind of life/death animal action many urban humans get to find themselves so close to. It’s a still from some really bad video I captured, depicting the last moment of a rather epic backyard fig tree …

7th Heaven

Originally posted at Blogging.la One of the oldest spans across the Los Angeles River, the 7th Street Bridge dates back to 1910 when the at-grade version included two-sets of trolley tracks. It quickly became one of the most congested ways across the river and by the late 1920s it was decided that rather than demolish …