#FlowerReport, March 12, 2023

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Centuries ago, in internet time, my friend Alyssa started the Sunday Flower Report on twitter. It was and is a celebration of “the persistence of beauty and the beauty of persistence”; folks tweet pictures of whatever is blooming in their neck of the woods with the hashtag #FlowerReport and A retweets to all followers. I locked my twitter account last year at about this time in anticipation of Leon Skum’s purchase of the bird site and with that, my contributions came to an end. Alyssa can see my tweets, but RTing is right out. So I thought this Sunday I’d do a long overdue post on a day trip I took a month ago – a blog based #FlowerReport.

Way back when I was building naturalistic vivaria and keeping poison dart frogs, my go-to for orchids was Andy’s Orchids in Encenitas. It and the La Mesa RR layout were my 2 primary reasons for visiting the San Diego area and my gosh, it was worth it. It’d take thousands of photos to do the place justice – I only took a few. Here’s a slideshow, with orchid species names in the caption, where possible.

Andy's Orchids, Feb 2023

The San Diego Model RR Museum

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My post Clovis-flyabout time in Arizona was uneventful: some time boondocking near a ghost town and a week and a half at Kartchner Caverns SP. I’ve driven by signs pointing the way to KCSP for years and never bothered to look into it – turned off by eastern tourist trap caves I guess. This time round, I was looking for a campground near the southern AZ grasslands and gave KCSP a whirl. The campground in nice, but OMG the caves! Discovered in 1974, kept secret for 14 years, and developed prioritizing the cave environment; just incredible. If you visit when the bats are elsewhere (they close part of the cave during bat season), the Big Room tour is my recco.

From S AZ, it was off to San Diego. I had 2 spots on my high priority list. The San Diego Model Railroad museum was the first. They have multiple layouts: O, HO and N – I was there for the La Mesa Model RR Club’s HO scale Tehachapi layout. So, early on a Tuesday morning, I hopped on my bike and pedaled to Balboa Park. My plan was to be there when they opened and get some more-or-less quiet time before it got crowded. Ha! By the time they opened, I was one of a couple dozen people at the front door. It got crowded quickly and I’m still crowd-averse so I only spent and hour and a half or so inside, but it was time well spent.

The Tehachapi Loop is a famous track spiral in south central California. By spiraling, the railroad gains horizontal distance so that it can keep the vertical grade manageable, but the v cool visual benefit is that any reasonably long train ends up passing over/under itself. The La Mesa folks have modeled it, and modeled it  well. I read somewhere that this layout is the largest model RR representation of a prototype in the world.

Headed west to the loop.

A westbound freight headed by 2 SP SD40T-2 tunnel snoots bracketing a UP U30C with an SP SD39 bringing up the rear.

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Through the loop!

The same train running downhill through the loop.

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CTC panel

And just for grins, a shot of one of the CTC panel displays.

Between the museum, Balboa Park and a very interesting waterfront bike ride, an A+ day.

 

A few remarks on “The Last of Us”

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Fungus among us!

First, a general strong thumbs up. I’m currently in L.A. with the west coast branch of the family and they’ve been watching, so I caught up (eps 1 – 3) before the post Super Bowl group viewing brought me current last night. Good characters, good story-line(s), good monsters. Yay!

Second, I’m glad that I watched episode 3 alone. No spoilers, but it really moved me. There was uglycrying.

Third, and finally, y’all will want to get busy schmoozing me, because as soon as I figure out the connection between this blog post and the THoU video game and then win $$$$ in my intellectual property suit I’m gonna be rolling in dough. Fabulously wealthy, I tell you! The key passage:

Blog post went up July 14, 2008 & The Last of Us video game began development in 2009. My simple country lawyer will make mincemeat of them,

Significant explanatory power

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I’ve been trying to understand why Clovis took off a week ago. This morning I found a dropped primary under her perch:

First dropped primary.

Things just got clearer! I don’t fly during the moult for a couple of reasons. First, managing the bird’s weight is tricky. If you go too low while the falcon is making new feathers, you risk fretmarks – lines of weakness on the feather that mark moments of stress, especially nutritional stress. Second, and germane to the question at hand, moulting is part of a bunch of hormonal changes kicked off by longer days. One of the other effects is readiness for bonding/mating/nesting. My current best guess is that Clovis took off because it’s time to fly around, establish a territory and find a mate. It hasn’t been any kind of season anyway, so packing up the telemetry and the vest is NBD but still, dang, I was hoping for some more flights!