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Ranger’s bark by the backdoor yesterday brought me to her to find something absolutely awesome: A large transient bee swarm had came from who knows where to literally hang out in the backyard fig tree for a spell, and of course I got footage of the experience from various angles, accompanied by my narration that won’t be making David Attenborough or Jeff Corwin nervous anytime soon.

In this first clip, being such an awesomely unusual event of course I ventured outside among them for a closer look:

After checking them out from the ground (in part 1), I went upstairs to look out the bathroom window and get a brief and closer look at where the bees had massed in the fig tree:

Then I set up the cam  with the  spotting scope to get an up-close look at the teeming bee mass up in the tree:

Lastly and most coolly, I was onhand about an hour later when the bees decided it was time to move on. What I most like about this clip is that as the group breaks up you can see what lies beheath: the living infrastructure they’ve built amongst each other to hold the mass together:

This time of year I can usually count on finding the occasional one maybe two dead bees in the vicinity of the patio table, but this morning the number of corpses (11 seen below, 17 total) concentrated in such a small area represented a cataclysmic and enigmatic die-off as far as our backyard is concerned:

UPDATED (1:37 p.m.): Twenty-four more found scattered around the patio table.  Could it be the bees are being bitten by and then rejected by spiders living in the fig tree branches extending over the patio area?

The historic Paddle The Los Angeles River pilot program begins next weekend (continuing Saturdays and Sundays through September 25) in which the public will be legally allowed to kayak/canoe in the Los Angeles River for the first time in I don’t even know how long… decades, at least.

Now, it’s not something as easy as dropping a raft anywhere along the river that you’re willing and able.  The event, a culmination of efforts between city officials, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and a variety of volunteer and environmental organizations, is hyper-organized, super-supervised, and takes place specifically along the section of the river in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area between Balboa and Burbank boulevards. And it’s not cheap. Tickets run $53.74 a person.

None of that hindered the 280* tickets available from quickly selling out after they went on sale this morning. Given how dear I hold the river to my heart, of course I was there at my computer when they became available at 7 a.m., reloading the registration page impatiently until it went live and I was able to order up two for August 21. A lot of other people weren’t as lucky. Less than an hour later they were all gone.

*Why so few? This inaugural program aims to assess the feasibility of the river for future recreational
uses, and its short timeframe only allows for a limited number of participants.

On this edition of “Will Rides The River Bed — Again!” this time I’m joined by my friend Andrew and together we did something that I think is pretty unique in the annals of Los Angeles cycling, we bridged the long (roughly 8-mile, as the water flows) gap from the southern end of the Los Angeles River Bikeway in Elysian Valley to where it begins again in Maywood, by riding entirely in the river bed between the two points.

The winter storms worked wonders for the channelized waterway known as Ballona Creek, leaving its banks cleaner and its wet stuff clearer than I’ve ever seen it, such as here at the water’s edge near the pedestrian/bike bridge that spans it between Overland and Sepulveda in Culver City.

But unless the rains that are forecast to fall in the next day or so are substantial enough for one last flush then things are going to get ugly and fast. The algae that’s already sprouted and growing rapidly beneath the surface (fed in part by nitrogen-rich runoff) is going to explode at its inevitable exponential rate.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

There is something about rampaging unstoppable wildfires and the literal and figurative pall they cast that both agitates and depresses me to marked degrees. It’s like such disasters create an internal tug-of-war wherein I want to got to irrational extremes — on one end I want to seek out destroy anyone even remotely resembling a past, present or future arsonist, and on the other I want to move to a place of permafrost and ice wherein there’s no chance of such disasters happening to me.

Because they do happen to me. Sure I’m not someone in the inferno’s path who’s lost property or suffered injury, but however indirectly and from whatever distance I am from the devastation I am nonetheless deeply affected by it.

As the following timelapse video of the Station Fire shows, I’m physically far away. From the roof of our Silver Lake home I set up the camera and captured the footage, condensed down to four minutes from an hour that passed last night beginning at 5 p.m.

It’s not very dramatic from a visual level, but with the spewing white plumes that power up above the hanging haze of ash and smoke, it makes me imagine gargantuan steam locomotives unseen behind a curtain of poison, destroying everything in their predatory paths. And it breaks my heart.

We’ve owned a handheld, rechargeable so-called “one-million candlepower” spotlight for going on four/five years now. I bought it at Pep Boys for $9.99. We’ve used it primarily to illuminate the backyard for wild critters prior to letting the dogs out for their nighttime pee.

No surprise: in the past few months the battery’s been on its last legs. Despite a full 12-hour charge, that used to keep the device shining bright for a week or more, the light has started dimming — now to the point where we only get a few seconds of brightness before it fades to black.

My first inclination was to pitch it and go get a new one, but I decided to crack it open and see if the battery was replaceable. Or if not that, at least recycled properly. Sure enough, I unscrew the six screws holding the thing together and find her powerplant to be a 6-volt, 4.5Ah brick of sealed lead-acid deadness. Hopping on the webernets, voila: I’m soon clicking a link to a battery warehouse site  where I find an exact duplicate for $7.95. Nice, but the trouble is shipping the thing’s going to cost me an additional $9.25 bringing the total cost to $17.20 (not including tax). I sigh and look at another battery website and their version is $12.95. I don’t bother checking the shipping. Instead I go over to Amazon and locate a new “one-million candlepower” light for $38.99. I’m pretty sure I could walk into any auto part/hardware store and find a high-powered spotlight for less than that, but then again… maybe $17.20 isn’t such a bad deal after all.

For my last trick, I load the battery up in my pack and bike it across town, on my way to work stopping in BatteriesPlus, a dedicated battery store on Sepulveda Boulevard in Culver City. The clerk tells me they normally stock that type, but they’re presently sold out and won’t get a new shipment in until Friday afternoon.

The cost? $19.95. I’m not sure if I’ll go back there, order it online or just get a totally new one, but at least I was able to leave the dead battery with the clerk who said he’d see it was properly recycled.

Epilogue: You can chalk this post up as one of life’s more trivial trivialities, but to me this shows me why our trashcans are loaded with items like these — and the batteries,too. It may not be entirely cheaper to throw the old out and go buy an entirely new one, but it’s certainly easier.