Saturday, September 25, 2010

Lake Casitas Camping

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:
Susanne at breakfast

And here are the kiddies walking back from the playground:

Kiddies return 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:
Lake Casitas Camping Trip.


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:

Lake Casitas Camping Trip

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:

Lake Casitas Camping Trip

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:



Lake Casitas Camping Trip

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

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Strolling

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.

Solstice Canyon Loop

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).

Solstice Canyon Loop

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)

Solstice Canyon Loop

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.
Solstice Canyon Loop

One imagines this was the kitchen.

Solstice Canyon Loop

And this might have been the living room.

Solstice Canyon Loop

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.

Solstice Canyon Loop
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.

Solstice Canyon Loop

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

Solstice Canyon Loop


Solstice Canyon Loop
But purty flowers too.

Solstice Canyon Loop

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.

Solstice Canyon Loop

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

Darth Vader House

Saturday, April 03, 2010

We've got a swimming pool



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

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Concrete

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:
Sw

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

Pool after concrete

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.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Pool Door Alarms

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.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Our first avocado harvest

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.)

Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Clubhouse

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

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.

p3'

p1

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Hollywood Sign / Save the Peak

Hollywood Sign / Save the Peak

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:
Hollywood sign

Friday, February 12, 2010

Snow Day



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).


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.

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.



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.

Palm Springs Aerial Tramway - Snow trip








(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.)



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.


AirtimeAlex 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.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Flickr Photo Stats

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.






Gravity well 

The picture people find the most is this one.
Very young twins

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.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Pool Progress

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.

Pool Progress
This is the wall that caused all kinds of delays with permits.  This will be filled in and then concreted on the top.
Pool Progress
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.
Pool Progress
These pipes will go to the roof, where the solar panels heat the water.
Pool Progress
This is the filter and pump and stuff, with the trenches that have the pipes in them.  Hopefully they'll be filled one day.
Pool Progress
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.
Pool Progress
Here's another shot of the wall.
Pool Progress
And some more wall.
Pool Progress
Close up of the light.
Pool Progress
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.
Pool Progress
The other side of the wall doesn't look so good at the moment.
Pool Progress