Moving West

Skiing

2011-01-30T17:13:00.000-08:00

Around about forever ago, I bought a Vholdr helmet mountable video camera (because it was an Amazon deal of the day, and was several times cheaper than the ones they have now). So long ago that the company has changed its name and seems to have no record of the camera I've got.

The idea was to record videos on my bike, like this one (which was handlebar mounted). It wasn't easy to mount horizontally on my bike helmet, and I didn't want to use up the sticker that it came with, so I never got around to it. But the boys and I went skiing for the first time two weeks ago (first time for all of us) and it seemed much easier to attach to my skiing helmet. So that's what I've done.

The first video is where I'm riding the moving carpet, and the twins ski down. They are both wearing beige jackets and black trousers. Dan comes first and has a black helmet, Alex comes second and has a blue helmet.

Alex challenged me to a race. When the boys looked at the video later they asked why I recorded it in slow motion. I explained that it made it look more exciting. They almost believed me.

Lake Casitas Camping

2010-09-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

About 3 years ago, we bought a tent, sleeping bags, stuff like that. Last weekend we finally got around to using them. We went to Lake Casitas, which we chose because it had a water park. The water park was closed, but we went there anyway. It's a long time since we'd been camping, and never with kiddies, so we took John and Frauke and Muriel and Madeline to show us what to do.

It's a vast campsite, or really network of campsites, labelled from A (Angler) to O (Osprey). We stayed at Creekside (C). Although the creek seemed to be dried up. In the UK when you book a campsite, they show you a field (at least in my experience), in the US, you get a very specific place - when we booked we were told we'd got spaces 4 and 5. Space 5 was about three times bigger than space 4. It was kind of near a road, which kept some people awake too. Map below shows (about) where spaces 4 and 5 are.

View Lake Casitas, Campsite C in a larger map

Walking around the campsite, we realized the best space (if there was just one group of you) was number 18 - it was set further back from the road, and had its own private drive (well, sort of). The campsite had a playground, and the toilets weren't too unpleasant - they were sort of flushing, but were like aeroplane toilets where you press a lever to open a slot, so everything falls through, then some water trickles through. It was well worth walking to the real toilets, which were about 10 minutes walk away (and had showers).

Here's Susanne having breakfast:

And here are the kiddies walking back from the playground:

Susanne hadn't spent quite so much time outside in all her life, and asked when the fun was going to begin, on more than one occasion.

We hired a surrey - I had no idea that those bike things with 3 wheels and lots of seats were called surreys (and I was born in Surrey). Amazingly, it took one of them to hold all 8 of us:
.

There was a boat hire place too, there was a great deal of debate and confusion about what kind of boat to hire, and for how long. The price list had a large boat, which held 8 of us, on the price list at $170 for 5 hours. But we didn't want a boat for 5 hours, 'cos we'd all get bored. Smaller boats (kayaks, canoes, rowing boats) were hirable for an hour, but there was reluctance by some people to go on some of them (and in the case of the kayaks, almost everyone but me; I thought it would be character building). After lots of shouting, the people at the hire place said that the larger boat was also available for an hour, so we got that.

I forgot to take a photo of the boat, but they called it a patio boat - it was like a big flat platform with an outboard motor, and some plastic chairs scattered about on it. And a steering wheel. Here's Frauke:

An hour was enough time to go all the way around the lake and see all the exciting sights. There's an airport for remote control planes. You can tell it's not for real planes, because it's got an X at each end of the runway, so you should not try to land on it. Presumably you know that if you actually fly real planes. Or if you didn't, you do now and can thank me.

View Lake Casitas, Campsite C in a larger map

Look really closely, and you can see a plane on this picture:

What? You can't see it? Hold on. I'll zoom in.

The lake is used for drinking water, so you're not allowed to swim in it, and you're not allowed to let your dog swim in it, and you're really, really not allowed to pee in it. To discourage this, there are floating restrooms:

This (people who know more about such stuff than me tell me) is a turkey vulture, and it's eating a fish.

Strolling

2010-07-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

We dragged the boys away from their Wiis and DSs and PCs and TVs for the day, to go to a place called Solstice Canyon Park, in Malibu. It's a National Park, so you can take dogs (not a State Park, where you can't). Oma and Michael came too.

It's not obvious, but this hollow tree had a bee nest (or whatever it's called that bees live in that isn't a hive).

There are two abandoned houses. The first was one of the first houses built in Malibu, and it burned down. Sadly, it was fenced off, so we couldn't get to it (although Dan still tried)

The second house was built in 1952, by Frederick Roberts, who (amongst other claims to fame) was the first Black member of the California State Assembly. He was killed in a car accident before he moved in, and the house burned down in 1982. Given that it's relatively recent, there is surprisingly little of it left.

One imagines this was the kitchen.

And this might have been the living room.

There's a waterfall there (the house was constructed so that the water would stop it burning, but after the house was abandoned the water systems weren't repaired), and it looks like there was some sort of tiled patio here.

The waterfall wasn't super-impressive, but given that it last rained about 3 months ago, I was a little surprised it was doing anything.

There had been a fire in the canyon about 3 years ago, and there were still burnt, dead trees around the place.

But purty flowers too.

The area used to be used for cattle (despite the fact that it looks completely unsuitable) and I imagine that this dead windmill was something to do with that.

You can also see a bizarre cantilevered house, that's sometimes called the Darth Vader House.

We've got a swimming pool

2010-04-03T20:57:00.001-07:00

I'll post more sometime, but I seem to find that I'm spending a lot of my spare time on an inflatable chair.

Concrete

2010-03-18T21:21:00.000-07:00

After a lot of waiting for rain to stop, the concrete has finally been poured. The concrete people took one day to prepare the ground for concreting, then we had to wait for an inspector to come and inspect the earth (ground) on the rails, and then they could return to concrete.

Joe (from JDC Concrete) was very efficient. We decided to have some steps made at the same time as they were here, and we changed our minds about where the concrete should end about 5 times. After they'd prepared everything for concreting, we changed our minds again, and they rearranged things in the morning without complaining about it.

What's that? You want some photos? OK.

This is the pool area prepared to be concreted:

They are finishing off the concrete here, and it's still wet, hence it's dark:

The concrete still isn't quite dry. They put bubble wrap to protect the coping around the pool while they concreted - they will come back and pull the last bits out, and fill the gap with mastic.

Pool Door Alarms

2010-03-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

Today the inspector was due to give the final inspection before the pool can be completed (I think there's another inspection after the pool is completed) when they checked the gates, fence and doors. The gates and fence around the yard have to be 5 feet high (I knew about that, we were fine) and the gap under the gate has to be less than 4 inches (I didn't know that one, but we scraped through at 3 15/16ths). All doors from the house to the yard have to have door alarms - these are possibly the most irritating things I've ever known.

After you open a door, you have 7 seconds to press the button on the alarm (which has to be high enough off the ground that kids can't reach it). You then have about 15 seconds to get out of the door and close it. If you don't close it, the alarm will go off - even if you continually press the button. You can never leave the door open - you would need to employ someone to press the button, wait 20 seconds, close the door, open it again, press the button, wait 20 seconds, etc. (Several people I've described this to are convinced I've got it wrong, because it sounds so insane.)

The alarm is designed very cleverly to be hard to disable. As soon as you detach it from the door, it's going to go off every 15 seconds or so, until you can get the battery out. And you can't get the battery out without removing it from the door and then undoing four screws. And you can't get it back on the door without a battery (that's kind of clever, in an irritating way).

The dogs are always a bit hesitant to leave the comforts of the house for the yard. (Well, they're a bit hesitant to do anything). So to get the dogs into the yard, I need to get them to the door - this is a challenge, because by the time the second dog has arrived at the door, the first dog has got bored and wandered off. Then I open the door and try to get them out, but they've only got 20 seconds before the alarm goes off, which frightens them and makes them run back into the house. And I usually can't get then both through the door in that time, so getting the dogs out of the house is close to impossible.

But a door alarm might be useful. I can see that there are times when I might want a door alarm - like if we've got visitors with kiddies. However, the rules about door alarms make them so irritating that as soon as the inspector has done the final inspection, they are removed. But because the rules insist that a door alarm is absolutely 100% effective (well, maybe 99%) , it makes it so that no one uses it at all. It's like those paracetamol (acetaminophen) that had Acetylcysteine (a treatment for paracetamol overdose) in them, but they cost more, so no one bought them. Because, either you're not planning to OD on paracetamol, in which case why pay more? Or you are planning to, in which case, why pay more?

But I have a cunning ploy. I've ordered two switches from Amazon for 99 cents each (plus $4.50 p&p), which I'll attach to the alarms, so I can detach the battery without dismantling them, and will, in theory, have the best of both worlds. But we'll see. Check back later.

Our first avocado harvest

2010-03-13T17:54:00.001-08:00

Our first avocado harvest
Originally uploaded by BeautifulFreaks

The avocado tree in the yard has had avocados on it for quite some time, which looked ready to pick. I thought I'd wait for one to fall off, and that would be the sign that they were ripe - but I waited and waited and they didn't fall. And the tree started to make flowers for the next batch of avocados, so I thought I'd waited long enough, and decided to pick them.
The second problem is that it's quite a big tree and I couldn't reach them. So a bought a fruit picker from Amazon and plucked them down. They are still fairly hard, and some of them are small. But avocado feast here we come!
(The tree gets watered by the grey water system, so I expect buckets full next year.)

The Clubhouse

2010-02-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

There's a climbing frame in the yard, with a little playhouse on top - which the boys call The Clubhouse. But the climbing frame is old and decayed, and the boys don't go in the house. I think they don't go in because the house feels wobbly and unsafe - although they say this isn't the reason. I've tried all sorts of things to make them go in - I put some chairs there, I bought some carpet, I've hidden snacks and cans of soda (diet and caffeine free, natch) but they still don't go in. So we thought we'd take the clubhouse off the climbing frame and put it on the ground. The easiest way to do that was to saw through the legs on one side and push it over.

Bees

2010-02-14T15:43:00.001-08:00

I was in the yard this morning (picking up dog poop, if you're interested) when I heard a noise that sounded like a weird car engine in the street. I went to look at what it was, and it was this tree which had zillions of bees on it.

I tried to take some close up photos of them and learned about how the laws of physics make that really hard. And why people buy focus rails.

Hollywood Sign / Save the Peak

2010-02-13T10:26:00.001-08:00

The internet is covered with pictures of the Hollywood sign, which has been temporarily covered with letters saying "Save the Peak". < Full story, which I can't be bothered to repeat.. So I took one as well.

Then I wondered why I wanted to take a picture, when there were lots of better ones around. But hey, this one's mine, so it's somehow better. In my opinion.

Here's what it looked like before, from the same place:

Snow Day

2010-02-12T22:22:00.000-08:00

The boys wait with somewhat inappropriate footwear

An awful lot of America and the UK seems to be covered in snow at the moment, but Southern California (unsurprisingly) isn't. Today the boys were off school, so we decided to go and find some snow. Finding snow near Los Angeles is not much of a challenge - you just need to go and find a mountain. And then get up it, which is more of a challenge. So we decided to go to the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. The cool thing about the PSAT is actually not so cool - it's pretty warm, 'cos it's in Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert, so it's pretty warm, the forecast today was 22 degrees (C).

Like I said, it's very, very high

Then you get on the tramway (of which more in a minute) and that takes you up the mountain into a snowy bit, where it's cold. You play in the snow, say "Blimey, my toes are froze", get back on the tramway and ride down to where it's warm. The problem (as I discovered) is what are you supposed to wear? The first time went there was Summer (well, it was October, but Palm Springs is a desert) and we were passing by, saw a sign and went there. But we were wearing shorts and t-shirts, so by the time we got to the top, we were too cold and came back down.

Those cables look very thin.

This time we were cleverer. So when we arrived, got out of the car with our jackets and our snow hats and our snow boots and our gloves and scarves and sled. (We'd put them on at home and were immediately too hot in the car, and so we took them off again). We were standing around in our arctic kit holding a sled, while other people stood around in shorts. Then we got too hot before we'd even got to the ticket desk and had to take them all off again.

I think that's Dan

But eventually we got to the car. It's called a tram, but trams (at least where I come from) usually approximate horizontalness. This doesn't. It climbs up the side of a mountain that feels a bit like 89 degrees from horizontal, but probably wasn't (someone just told me it only averages 30 degrees, but peaks at 45 degrees. Which shows just how poor our depth perception is at that sort of thing). Whatever it is, it feels very, very steep. I'm pretty good with heights (I worked briefly putting roofs on water treatment plants), and I don't like it much. The woman next to me looked like she was going to puke. I tried making a witticism about how it would be better if we waited until night time, but she just stared ahead and still looked like she was going to puke. The boys made a video and told me not to tell them to hold on. The whole cable car rotates as it rises, so you can't avoid seeing just how far down it really is, which it does by rotating the floor.

I always prioritize photography before rescue.

Dan set off

And kept going

and kept going

(Statistics bit that I've gleaned from the leaflet) The cable car rises about 1.5 miles in 11 minutes - which is high enough to make it pretty cold, and there was an impressive amount of snow at the top, and there are only 5 support towers, which vary in height from 200 feet to 50 feet. But even if you survived the cable snapping and your cable car hitting the ground, it would then tumble about a mile down the mountain anyway. These are things I try not to think about. I'm always surprised it's not more famous, because it is quite an impressive structure, and the logistical problems make me feel weak; the top is completely inaccessible except by cable car, unless you spend a couple of days climbing, so all the materials had to be brought there by helicopter, until they had built the cable cars, and then they could use them to bring stuff. But the cable cars have a 60 ton counterweight to keep the cable taught - how did that get there? Everything comes now by cable car, including things like water to flush the toilets (I thought they'd have waterless urinals, but they don't.)

That's a shot from the window on the way down. The black blob at the bottom is the car park.

The problem with the top was, bizarrely, that it was too warm. The temperature was quite a bit over freezing - I'd guess it was 5-10 degrees, and so the snow wasn't very frozen. This was good in many ways, because it made good snowballs and wasn't icy and hard when you fell off the sled. But it meant that it melted really easily and made everything wet very quickly - you couldn't sit down without getting a wet butt, and our snow boots weren't designed with waterproofness in mind. I spent most of the time in a t-shirt, because I usually had to pull the sled up the hill, then run down to fetch it when one of the boys let go of it too soon, then pull it back up again, then run down to rescue / console whichever boy had just fallen off it and hurt themselves, then pull it back up again.

Alex catches some air

Anyway, the day progressed with only minor injuries, and then we came back home again.

Oh, here's some videos too:

Dan having trouble pressing the buttons when he's recording me:

Dan falling off:

Alex (almost) learns the importance of being aware of one's environment.

Flickr Photo Stats

2010-02-10T22:35:00.001-08:00

One of the cool things about Flickr is you can see where people came from when they looked at your pictures - and if they came from a search engine, you can see what they searched for. Today someone searched for "lightning hitting a building" on Yahoo. Bizarrely, if you do that, Dan's picture of lightning hitting a building (shown on the right) is the considered by Yahoo to be the 6th best picture (at least today).
Possibly even more bizarrely, when they saw the small image, they clicked on it, to see if it was actually the picture they were looking for.
Some else searched (on Google) this time for Gravity well discovery science center. As far as I can tell, this is the only picture of the gravity well at the discovery science center on the entire interwebz. So I was pleased to give them what they wanted.

The picture people find the most is this one.

If you search on Google or Yahoo for very young twins you'll find this picture - it's first on Google even if you search for web pages, and third for Yahoo on web pages, but bizarrely doesn't come near the top for image search on yahoo.

Pool Progress

2010-01-26T21:31:00.000-08:00

We're on about day 90 since pool digging started, so I thought I'd post a progress update. The yard is still in a fairly unpleasant state - but that's pretty much what we expected (although we didn't expect it for quite this long), there have been delays caused by Christmas, permit issues, rain, and other stuff that I don't understand.

Anyway, here's the pool, it's been tiled and had the coping put on - the sticky up bit you can see is the skimmer.

This is the wall that caused all kinds of delays with permits. This will be filled in and then concreted on the top.

Given the rain, the pool is filling up with water. The light has been attached to the wire (on the right) and left in it's box in the middle, for about 2 months now.

These pipes will go to the roof, where the solar panels heat the water.

This is the filter and pump and stuff, with the trenches that have the pipes in them. Hopefully they'll be filled one day.

They've finished building the wall, but there are a lot of bricks and things still lying around. I'm not sure if they're going to serve a purpose, or if they'll take them away.

Here's another shot of the wall.

And some more wall.

Close up of the light.

This is the wall that was demolished to let the digger in,a nd which has now been rebuilt. The new wall is a lot sturdier than the old wall, but it's a tiny bit wider, and so the garage door scrapes on it when it's opened.

The other side of the wall doesn't look so good at the moment.

Lights, action ...!

2010-01-13T14:25:00.000-08:00

Here's a bunch of people filming what was (apparently) an advert for Transitions Lenses outside our house. It seemed to take about twenty people a couple of hours to film someone walking about 6 feet (presumably from shadow into sunlight), and delayed our trip to school for several minutes.

I did a quick search to see if the advert had appeared yet, and it seems that Transitions lenses has a Youtube channel. So if you all keep an eye on that, well, it will be very exciting. Obviously.

Solving the problem of too many pictures

2009-12-20T18:32:00.000-08:00

My camera takes photos really fast. And it's digital, so taking photos is free. So sometimes I take a lot (and then the boys take a lot too). And then going through and deciding which to keep and which to throw away is really hard, and in the end it just gets easier to get bigger hard disks. Today, for example, I took 357 photos. I put 16 on Flickr, and three (I think) in this very blog.

So my solution to this problem was to put lots and lots of photos into a video. Then it only looks like one thing, and not lots of things. Then I'll make the pictures go really fast. And put some headache inducing transitions between them. And that will solve the problem.

At last for some values of solved.

Wile E Coyote(s)

2009-12-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

Grandma is visiting, so we went to the Griffith Observatory, Grandma and the boys went in, and I took the dogs up the Mount Hollywood trail (which I'd failed to get to the top of with Oma and Opa). I went to the top (here's a picture of the dogs at Dante's View- I'm not sure what the structures were for, and why is it Dante's View, not Dante's Peak?).

It turned out that that didn't take long enough, so I headed down the hill, where we saw a coyote casually strolling across the path.

The boys and grandma were finished in the observatory so we went home. On the way we say a coyote (another? the same one?) standing much more photogenically by the side of the road.

And then, because it was still there, I took another.

Actually, because it just stood there, and because taking photos with a digital camera is free, and because I have a camera that can take photos pretty quickly, I took about 50. But they're all basically the same, and you get the gist from two of them.

Daniel wanted to know if we could take it home.

Grey Water

2009-11-25T21:37:00.000-08:00

We got the nice people at Hey! Tanks LA to come and fit a grey water system to our house. The idea being that we have a ridiculously high water bill (higher than our gas and electricity bill), and that we have a lot of water that we throw down the drain (get it? Down the drain? Hahaha), so instead of throwing it away, we'll put it into the garden and turn it into avocados and guavas and oranges and bananas. (Well, sort of indirectly).

You have to be a teeny bit careful with grey water - not all plants like it, as it tends to be a bit salty - handily fruit trees like it a lot. You don't want to spray it around, it should stay under the ground, which means that you can't use it to water grass - because you can't spread it out that wide (well, without some more specialized stuff).

Another slight complication is that you don't always want your grey water to go into the yard - if you've put a load of bleach into the washing machine, for example, or if you've washed the dog in insecticidal shampoo it might be better having those nice people at the Hyperion treatment plant. So you put in a valve, so you can send the water down the regular drain.

The first stage was doing the plumbing under the house, which I attempt to show in these rather unclear photos. (It was dark, which made focusing a challenge). The first picture shows the valve, which is where all the pipes meet. The pipe goes out into the yard to the left when the valve is on, and to the right do the regular drain when the valve is off (it's currently off, 'cos they haven't do the outside part yet). It's not obvious, but the steel pipe at the bottom that appears to go into the valve has actually been cut, so it's not attached.

The second photo is from slightly further back - you can see how the original steel pipe in the foreground (which comes from the downstairs bath and shower) has been cut, and now heads to the valve, and back again. At the back is the pipe that comes from the washing machine, and I forget where the pipe is that comes from the upstairs bathroom. But it's somewhere near there.

The water from the kitchen joins onto the main pipe later - kitchen water (sink and dishwasher) tends to be a bit more unpleasant than other water, so it's not a good idea to use in the yard (or garden - I keep forgetting which word I prefer).

Views

2009-11-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

You probably know that LA is famous for being a bit hazy and possible even polluted. Very, very occasionally, it is clear, and I've been waiting since we moved into the house (in March) to take a photo of the other side of the LA valley. Finally, the stars were in alignment, the air was clear, I had a new lens for my camera (a relatively ancient M42 lens, which cost about $50 from Ebay, and combined with a $10 adaptor gives the magnification [if not quite the quality] of something that would cost somewhere over $1000 if I wanted a new lens that fitted my camera without an adapter.

Here's the first one of the Hollywood sign. (It was slightly too early in the morning, and there's a bit of shadow on the H and the second O). It's cropped a bit.

Here's the second, which is not cropped, of the Griffith Observatory (click to make super dupe rbig:

It's a shame there weren't any people around there - I'm not sure if we'd have been able to see them. Google maps thinks the observatory is just over 8 miles away.

We got a new table

2009-11-11T15:19:00.001-08:00

We bought an Amish table and chairs I don't know if the Amish bit means it was made by people without zippers, or if that was just the style. It did take forever to get made and delivered, and it seemed to come on a truck, not a horse and buggy.

We got it from JMX International - who were very, very patient about sending us samples and answering our questions every week for about 5 months. The chairs and table were made by different workshops, and they had to do an elaborate procedure to get the chairs sent to the table place to make sure the colors matched.

Pool, day 6 (18)

2009-10-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

After the rebar was put in, we had a lull of 10 days, while stuff was ordered. But it duly arrived, and then people came to put the equipment into place, and do the plumbing and wiring.

Here's the pool, with some pipes and stuff in it.

This is what they always call 'the equipment'. Because it's just a filter / chlorinator, there's no heater, and it's much smaller than normal. The pool will be a salt water pool, which I don't really understand. The chlorine is attached to sodium which makes it salty - so it still has chlorine to kill the beasts that you don't want, but it's not all nasty and chloriney. And the water feels different too.

This bit is called the skimmer, it's where the stuff that floats on the top gets trapped and filtered out.

And here's the light. I still don't see how we will change the bulb.

The inspector (from the council) came yesterday to, inspect. He seemed happy with everything, except the fences, which he said weren't high enough, because they had to be five feet high - but they are five feet high, which confused me. The gates need fixing - they need to close and latch automatically - we knew about that.

We need to get pool alarms for the doors from the house fitted. I looked online at Amazon, and a couple of people mentioned in reviews that these alarms were approved by their council. That made me a bit nervous, so I went to a pool supply store, and bought them there, for $80 each. The alarms have to be high enough that a child can't turn them off - when you open the door, you have 7 seconds to press the button, and then 14 more seconds to get through the door and close it (at least, that's my understanding). You should not be able to remove the alarms without using tools - so no tape or velcro to attach them to the door. I had quite a hard time finding all those rules - the LA County website was pretty useless, but eventually I found the Los Angeles Design and Construction of Swimming Pools Regulations.

It's not obligatory, but we're also going to get a pool alarm, which will go off if anything large falls into the pool (like a dog or a child).

I have seen the future of bumper cars ...

2009-10-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

... and I'm not happy.

When I was young (and, let's be frank, still) the purpose of going on bumper cars was to attempt to inflict injuries on people in the other bumper cars, whilst avoiding such injuries yourself.* The best way to do this was to hit people when they weren't expecting it, ideally when they were braced for a different impact. (When someone has just run into someone head on, they are braced for a forward impact - this is the ideal time to hit them on the side or back).'

Today we went to Santa Monica Pier. Bought tickets for the bumper cars, and then went to find them. But they weren't there. There was an empty tent.

Eventually I found them. And they weren't like proper bumper cars.

First, they get their electricity through the floor - no tall masts with exciting sparks on the mesh ceiling any more. (It's quite an elegant solution - I thought about how that might work for a while - it must be AC, not DC, I've decided. And would their be sparks if I were to drop a piece of metal there?)

Second, they are surrounded by inner tubes. When they crash, they just bounce off each other in a gentle, and not even potentially a little bit painful, fashion.

Because they are rubber, they don't slip past each other. Daniel discovered that you can pin someone to the wall, and stop them moving until the ride is over and then they cry.

*Obviously within the legal parameters of bumper cars - you could just get out and hit them if you really wanted to inflict injury.

Old Los Angeles Zoo

2009-10-17T21:09:00.000-07:00

Ever since I first heard about it, I'd been meaning to go to the Old LA Zoo. The original zoo was built in the 1930s, and in the 1960s, it was realized that it wasn't really suitable for the animals, so they closed it, and built a new zoo about 2 miles from it. But the old zoo was just left - it's now an abandoned, derelict zoo. Which is kind of strange.

I'd imagine this was some sort of storage building.

And that these might have contained birds.

Notice how 40+ years of erosion have partially buried this cage.

One cage had a gate that still worked. The boys weren't strong enough to open or close it, which was tempting ...

Random people walking past cages.

This is above the cages. It looks like a chimney - I wonder if there was a heating system.

There was more, but it was getting dark, so we're going to have to make another trip. We also saw two coyotes, which made the dogs very excited.

Dog Tags

2009-10-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

The dogs have a tag on their collar, with their name and our phone number on it. Then they have one from Southern California Golden Retriever Rescue (because they're not really our dogs, they're SCGRR's dogs). They have a tag with their microchip number on it (although I don't see why they need that, 'cos they've got a microchip) and they have a tag which proves they have a dog licence. Which makes a lot of tags.

They sort of jingle when they walk.

Day 5 (8) of the Pool

2009-10-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

We're on day 5, or maybe 9, depending on how you count, of pool building. As in it's been 8 days since they started, and they've done 5 days work. I forgot to put a memory card in the video camera this morning, so we don't have an exciting video of people putting steel reinforcements in a hole in the ground.

But never fear, you can see some pictures.

From one end:

From the other end:

From above:

Day 4

2009-10-16T09:05:00.000-07:00

Day 4 of pool construction. Not much happening today - partly 'cos it's been raining for the last couple of days, and the hole is now full of muddy water, so all they did was empty it. Oh, and they brought some metal bars.

We got a 9 page document from Mr Carlos Pools, telling us what we are supposed to do and not do while they're building the pool. It might have been more helpful if we'd had this when we started, 'cos it says things like "The plans and inspection card willbe placed in a plastic envelope ... DO NOT MOVE, REMOVE or DISTURB ANY OF THE CONTENTS. Leave the envelope and its contents exactly where left." I mean, why would we do that?

"DO NOT ALLOW DOGS TO RUN LOOSE AFTER THE EXCAVATION OF THE POOL ...". Oops. I picked up the poop, so maybe they won't know.

"KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS AWAY FROM THE EXCAVATED POOL, ... PARTICULARLY THE EDGES." Well, as long as they don't watch the video. Anyway, no one fell in, so that's OK.

Today, which is day 5 of work, but day 8 since they started, they're putting the steel reinforcing bars in.