idyllwild – Page 3 – A Jaunty Little Blog

February 8, 2009June 13, 2018

Precipitation Sequestering – Day Two

Friends,

Well, well, well. I told people that the temperatures should surely rise today. Certainly the weather sites must be correct (why’s that? what has changed? -ed). But no.

We received another four or five inches of snow overnight and throughout the day today. It’s pretty, and also pretty chilly. Do we need this? Absolutely!

At least we’ll have water all Summer.

– bob

P.S. Fog has plopped down in the twenty minutes since these pictures were shot. The local snow plow has also been by, trying to build an icy wall at the end of my driveway. I and the Jeepster disagree with this idea. To relax, I chant “4-low, 4-low, 4-low, 4-low…”.

December 19, 2008June 13, 2018

50-Year Storm Alert! – Icicle Update

Friends,

I’m just gonna post the pictures. With temperatures in the teens overnight and the insulation in my roof ranging from poor to none, there’s enough runoff to build some monstrous icicles. Take that crappy Chinese Christmas ornament companies!

More this afternoon (if I don’t kill myself putting tire chains on the Jeep first)…

– bob

December 18, 2008June 13, 2018

50-Year Storm Alert! – Command Performance Edition

Friends,

Our most frequent commenter, Mrs. Anonymous, wants more pictures and that’s what she’ll get! I hope she was talking about snow pictures…

This is to the left of the frame you see in the webcam. That pile of snow in the foreground was pushed there by the local snowplow operators. It looks to be almost four feet high right now. Thanks CalTrans!

I see this view out my living room window and the icicles sprung up (down) overnight. Charming!

This view is a little to the left of the one above it. If you could remove all of that pesky snow from the tree, you’d see Lily Rock along the ridge.

And this is the rest of the oak tree you see in the upper right of the webcam frame.

The roads out of here are shut down today, so I’m trying to get some work done with the power going off periodically and a dead or dying phone line. Even the wireless router has decided to stop working! It’s like living out on the frontier!

Yeah, right.

– bob

December 17, 2008June 13, 2018

50-Year Storm Alert! – The Snowplow Diaries

Friends,

The storm of the half-century has certainly delivered. There should be almost two feet of snow accumulation by the time this front has moved through. I’m staying put at my Secret Alpine Laboratory™, though. I don’t need the grief of, you know, crashing while trying to get off the hill.

It was pretty nice up here yesterday, blue skies and pretty crisp.

It’s snowing right now and the puppy dog is not at all happy.

Not as happy as she was dining on yellow snow yesterday. Geez.

– bob

December 15, 2008June 13, 2018

50-Year Storm Alert! – Upside Edition

Friends,

This shot is courtesy of our pals at the James Reserve just up the street from the Lodge and their robotic webcam observatory…

If you click on the picture, you can go there and fiddle with the camera yourself. It does require Java on your machine, but you can handle that, right?

What’s a little ice on the roads and blizzard conditions? You can’t make a landscape like that without cracking a few plastic bumpers, so to speak.

– bob

December 12, 2008June 13, 2018

The 50-Year Storm Is Coming!

Friends,

We’re doomed. The 50-year storm is coming and is expected to drop upwards of six inches of snow on the Lodge next week. Six inches, people!

I know!

– bob

UPDATE: It’s Sunday the 14th and we’ve received a crippling quarter-inch of snow. Five and three quarters to go!

December 2, 2008June 13, 2018

Quaint Tree Lighting Ceremony

Friends,

Come with me to a place that time forgot, before the propane blew up. Come to my little burg where townfolk gather in the square…

…to await the arrival of Santa and his missus on the back of a fire truck (shouldn’t that fire truck been waiting over by the splodey fields? – ed That was later. Check your history.).

But what we were all waiting for, of course was the lighting of the 80-foot Christmas Tree in the center of town accompanied by clapping and cheers!

Then the power went out.

Not kidding.

Your pal,

bob

December 1, 2008June 13, 2018

Boom.

Friends,

For a sleepy little town, Idyllwild has its exciting moments. Space Shuttle Endeavor had to land at Edwards Air Force Base yesterday, ~~flying~~ ~~gliding~~ plummeting to Earth over the Lodge and leaving sonic booms in its wake.

This makes it difficult to take a nap after the family has departed after the long Thanksgiving weekend. I sure enjoyed the visit, but you know, naps…

…and this morning, another hum-drum Monday in the mountains, the Suburban Propane yard blew up:

An explosion at a propane storage facility in Idyllwild shot flames 40 feet into the air Sunday morning, scorching a nearby mobile home and burning off the end of a worker’s moustache, firefighters said.

His moustache, people! Part of it was burned completely off! This is serious stuff. Thank goodness the Idyllwild Fire Department is on the case (across the street):

Idyllwild firefighters were sipping coffee at the town fire station a few hundred yards away when they saw the blaze through the kitchen window, said Capt. James Manietta.

“It’s hard to miss a fireball that big,” Manietta said, adding that some residents said they felt the ground shake.

I’ll bet he didn’t even put down his coffee cup.

– bob

November 20, 2008June 13, 2018

Great American Remodel – Door To Nowhere

Friends,

You remember this, don’t you?

Now it looks like this…

More paneling. You’ve gotta love that, don’t you? Maybe not. I had a big pile of shiplap style, so I used that. What’s shiplap? This.

Naturally, I ran out well before I was done and it wouldn’t be easy to get more. Not from the locals anyway. I went to the hardware store and the proprietor said this:

“Shiplap? We don’t carry that. That’s flatlander wood. We only have tongue and groove. That’s what we use up here.

I can think of other things to be a bigot about. Superman vs. Batman. Regular Oreos vs. Double-Stuf. But millwork? Hill people versus those “down below?” What else might they do down there? Who can say!

I’ve gotta look into this. I think I’ve hit a nerve…

– bob

November 19, 2008June 13, 2018

Images From The Life Magazine Archives

Now this is pretty swell. Google is hosting the Life Magazine photo archives for all to see. Do a search for Idyllwild and you get a series of Alfred Eisenstaedt (!) shots from 1959 (!!) taken in and around the former Isomata (which you may know as Idyllwild Arts) including this one of Ansel Adams (!!!).

I have two favorites though. First this one that must be shot on the shores of Lake Hemet (does anybody know for sure?).

But this one may be the best of the bunch (as far as I’m concerned). After all, it’s what we do in the mountains, isn’t it? We drag out the typewriter, and have a smoke while reading a book in the weed patch surrounding the cabin. What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?
Oh, right…

But anyway, click on either of the photos here to go back to the archive. Do it when you have a lot of time to spare though. It’s real easy to lose a day spelunking around in there.

– bob

(Thanks, Daring Fireball!)

November 10, 2008June 13, 2018

An Open Letter To The Idyllwild Weather Clam

Madam,

Boy, were you wrong. Very, not kidding wrong. Let’s look at today’s prognostication:

Sure, I knew it was going to be cold today. I’d started working on replacing the Door To Nowhere™ with a solid, insulated wall. The job yesterday started slowly…

I stripped the panelling and pulled out the insulation to bear witness to the horrors that lie underneath. Essentially, the kooks who put that room together couldn’t afford a whole lot of boards over eight feet long.

No big deal, they just hold up the roof. Then there’s this box that had no purpose that I could discern.

What’s it for? Ah, it’s used in lieu of a post to hold up those short boards above it. Very clever.

So things were going okay. The outside bits of panelling came off to reveal more hijinks, so I knocked off for the night. Lola seemed pleased with the quiet…

So I took the rest of the day off to let my back heal. Sunday should be just fine, I’ve been assured of the by the illustrious, fabled, and nearly perfect Idyllwild Weather Clam I thought. This is what I get for thinking.

It was damp overnight, but nothing to worry about. Foggy and cold I can deal with, so I did. The crazy wall came out leaving a giant hole in the house…

Then the hail came. A big sack of not good. This is gonna put a crimp in my plans.

– bob

October 24, 2008June 13, 2018

Fire, L.A. Times Chestnut

Friends,

I suspect somebody at the L.A. Times is working for the Big Bear Tourism Board. Why? Because they’ve just come out with yet another story about how my little town of Idyllwild is set to burn to the ground.

A little like the story they did in 2007 about how we couldn’t plan for evacuation routes without some contention. Or perhaps the big David Kelly piece in 2006 about how it was a miracle that we’re even alive.

I’m just thankful that we don’t have a slow economy to deal with, otherwise we’d have a hard time dealing with the negative publicity…

– bob

August 5, 2008June 13, 2018

Separated At Birth

Friends,

Yesterday’s monsoonal downpour highlighted (grim, gray, cloud-covered light. – ed Nice flourish.) a couple observations that should’ve been obvious.

The first was that if it rains hard enough, there will be rain inside the car as well as out. I turned on the windshield wipers as high as they would go until I realized that rain was coming in nearly horizontally from the side window. The second is that my daily commute is profoundly dangerous and was made more so by the mudslides and the grapefruit-sized rocks in the roadway. My traveling companions and I beat the CalTrans workers and their front-end loaders to the worst spots yesterday. Their trucks rolled over the mud floes like just another ’73 Matador in the Monster Truck Jam of life. My Miniature Racecar™ flew over the jump (!) in a terrible Japanese translation of The Dukes of Hazard.

A little polishing compound and that front spoiler will be good as new…

– bob

July 11, 2008June 13, 2018

No iPhone 3G Activation Problems Reported In Idyllwild

Makes sense, really.

The nearest Apple store is 100 miles away. AT&T stores are requiring in-store activation that isn’t working this morning for the new iPhone. Meanwhile, our piney paradise remains tranquil and serene with just a hint of damp from last night’s rain showers. Not even a whisper of trouble or technical issues, though.

Now that’s something I can get excited about.

Your pal,

bob

UPDATE: No reports of iPhone problems, but updating the iPod Touch to version 2.0 was a pain in the tush. For those of you who don’t care, there are reasons why you might. For one, Apple’s servers simply collapsed. I read a rumor yesterday that iPhone activation lived on the same servers as the update. Neat theory, but dotMac switched over to MobleMe at the same time. More servers down.

By the way, the killer app for iPhone and iPod Touch is Remote. You can use the thing to control iTunes on a Mac anywhere on your local network. Change albums! Change volume! Control remote speakers! It’s really worth the installation headaches. I love it.

July 8, 2008June 13, 2018