[sic]

This crystal clear morning provided a nice vista from my office of the distant San Gabriels dusted with some of that mythical white stuff (click to biggify):

Snap of the storm breaking up over LAX  and the Palos Verdes Peninsula as seen from my office window yesterday at 11:42 a.m. (click to quadruplicate).

At first I thought the sound I was hearing was from my neighbor’s predawn sprinklers working a little overtime, but you can bet I was surprised to find the rare and far more natural form of irrigation at work when I got up this morning.

Rain?

I haven’t been an ardent follower of the local weather report, but still on the bike ride home last night there wasn’t much in the way of meteorological hints that showers were threatening.

And just to give any of you hope that I’m not a total nutbar, I will be breaking the five-days-straight-biking plan and not be pedaling into work today (even though it’s not doing much more than sprinkling at present). Plus there’s a sequence to my sanity: by driving in I’ll be able to get a couple things checked off my “Things To Do This Weekend” list on the way home: general groceries; and maybe a visit to The Kobbler King (I might even pick up that discarded fence post I spotted a couple weeks ago on Jefferson (don’t ask; if I get it you’ll see what I mean). Hell I even through a load of laundry in this morning to get a jump on things.

Of course, weather permitting, that means I’ll have to make up for today’s lost cycling with an extended bike ride tomorrow morning in order to put me up over the 3,700 mile mark. Oh gee darn.

In my history as a native, I can’t recall a Santa Ana winds event in the fire season where it so decidedly blew like crazy everywhere except where I am. And the results are devestating: 15,000 acres burned in the Agua Dulce fire; 12,000 in Castaic 4,00o in East Orange County, 1,200 in Malibu.

In the meantime, the Los Angeles basin — or at least the part of it where we are — was freakishly calm. Susan and I kept waiting for the gusts to get here, but they never did.

Instead it was a quiet beautiful day with the exception of all the smoke out there on the horizons.

Weird.

First the good news: I’m reeeeeeally pleased with how todays clouds timelapse came out. And that means only more good news: that my attempt to capture the rich cumulo-nimbus display from our Silver Lake rooftop melted neither the computer nor the camera — amazingly, because it was mighty dang hot up there.

But I won’t waste anymore time other than to say go look at what I done caught, or check out the embedded YouTube version below. Purty cool, eh?

Hey there. It’s your friendly neighborhood mad scientist/engineer/documentationalist/timelapsologist again, coming to you live from the tippity top of roof of our Silver Lake abode, where I got the bug to install my laptop and digicam in an attempt to capture what hopefully will be the building of another day’s “thunderhat” above and beyond the Verdugo Mountains centered out there in the distance as seen below:

As you can see there’s nothing much happening but a lotta blue sky right now but I’m hopeful that as the hours march so will the cumulo-nimbussessess way out over the Antelope Valley as they have rather spectacularly the last few days. If the clouds come back and it all works out (meaning that the heat/direct sunlight doesn’t melt the camera, the tripod, the cabling, and the laptop — which it very well might, despite the rudimentary shading I erected) I should be able to post a timelapse movie compiled from images made every 30 seconds that will be a treat to watch as it slowly unfolds. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE (12:36 p.m.): I must’ve been reading my friend Frazgo’s mind because upon our return from grocery shopping I immediately went up top with an umbrella and rigged up some of the very shade he recommended in the comment that I just found when I came back down to upload pics of the set-up still fully functional, perhaps made a little more so by the extra sunscreen (after the jump):

(more…)

UPDATE: If you’re visiting from Jalopnik, welcome and thanks to them for the link love… I think. As to their subheadline sass over asking “who calls a horn a honker,” the answer is: not me. Down near the end of this post “honker” refers not to a horn itself, but is rather the agent noun form of  the verb “honk” and describes the person honking the horn. But seriously, agent nouns? Yeah, you know… walk/walker, talk/talker, misinterpret/misinterpreter. Clear? Clear.

The good news was that the dude was too wasted to carjack me stuck in traffic tonight there on Vermont Avenue next to the USC campus in the middle of a downpour. The bad news was that he was too wasted to walk a straight line out in front of my truck. where he tipped over across the wet hood with a whump before uprighting and feeling his way around to the driver’s side where at first he politely and almost disinterestedly tapped on the window glass but quickly set to hammering at it when I didn’t respond.

I’m pretty sure he would’ve continued with increasing ferocity until it broke had I not rolled it down and when I did he didn’t bother with the exchange of any pleasantries.

“You gotta give me something,” he said furtively and seriously slurred. “I’m hurting, man.”

I suggested that pummeling his fists against my truck might not be the best way to enlist my support and that was the only time he looked directly at me with eyes that were glassy and distant beneath heavy lids.  Then he looked away and said “Huh?” before repeating that I needed to give him something and do it right now.

“Never mind,” I replied, flipping open the center console lid. “I got some change for you if that’ll help. He semi-grunted and wobbled unsteadily on his feet while  swinging his head up and down the street until a scooped up what probably amounted to about a buck’s worth of nickels, dimes and pennies and held it out to him, dropping them into his cupped hands.

“My girlfriend just broke up with me,” he said.

“Smart girl” is what entered my mind, but “Oh man, that sucks!” is what exited my mouth.

“Yeah, she kicked me out!” He blinked slowly and started a portside list but caught himself before gravity fully kicked in.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “Hope that helps.”

He looked down at the coins I’d given him and for a moment I thought I saw a look of disapproval pass across his face, but the line of cars in front of me had started moving and a sharp blast of the horn from the vehicle behind us got his attention. Seemingly involuntarily the hand holding my donation rose and with extending middle finger was directed to the honker, which caused the money fell from it to the pavement where it tinkled and rang as it landed on the soaked street.

Taking that as my queue to bid the dude adieu, I hit the gas and put my assailing panhandler in my rearview mirror.

Not that this post will register even so much as a distant blip from the far outer banks of any of the great blog lakes, but one never knows what rings of what pebble dropped into its waters might resonate out far enough to register. So at the potential risk of this post getting noticed and thus incurring the scorn of the Boing Boing loving world (of which I’m normally a devoted member), I sometimes have to wonder hopefully and in wide-eyed skepticism (and a good measure of greening envy) if self-promotional posts such as this one:

…by the site’s co-founder Mark Frauenfelder are cooked up with a sheepish wink and a nod and posted with at least something of a knowledge aforethought that apparently there’s nothing they can’t make, autograph, overprice and deliver — no matter how trivial — that their adoring readership won’t snap up.

Yes, I know Frauenfelder is a virtual lord of the internest and his cred is not to be questioned and certainly not be the z-list likes of me. But as a non-fawner I have to admit to a level of incredulity not only when I see stuff like that being so blatantly shilled, but that it sells like limited edition hotcakes.

Perhaps there’s some context or connection I’m missing. Maybe this gape-mouthed gremlin is much sought-after iconography that my lack of fimilarity with his work precludes me from understanding. But even so… six bucks for a palm-sized cahier notebook? Even one with a fancy cover, signature and gape-mouthed gremlin? Maybe that makes a ripple as a gott-have-it bargain in some ponds, but not in mine.

Though we trotted the video camera around with us throughout the entire vacation, oddly I ended up only using it twice, once to capture aspects of the storm that deluged us while we were in Arches National Park and once to catch some condors flying waaaaaay off in the distance when we were in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

The condor footage is primarily useless, but during that thunderstorm I got a few bolts of lightning landing not so far away from where we were parked that I deemed worthy of stills: