Mustang!

I heard a big old airplane engine flying over, and used Flight Radar 24 to identify a Navion overflying my house. That was fun. Then I noticed an unusual icon on the real-time map, tapped on it to get info, and saw that a classic old P-51 Mustang had just taken off from Centennial airport and was heading in my direction. Those are the coolest old warbirds ever, and I love to see and hear them, so I went out on the deck, to see if I could watch it go by, and caught a great view of it against a towering cumulus backdrop. Fun way to finish up our late breakfast!

Cooler Tuesday ride

Pleasant, much cooler Tuesday bike ride.

When I first got moving, the chill in the air surprised me, and I was actually considering going back for a jacket... but after a few miles, I forgot about it...

...then later, I noticed I was passing through warm pockets of air, which felt good. I guess not that strange for a June day.

Reminded of WALL-E

Haha… seeing this pile of eggshells in our kitchen, waiting to be ground up to feed plants, reminded me of the tall stacks of garbage that WALL-E constructed, while doing his job. It just hit my funny bone, I guess… I loved that movie! So many interesting concepts addressed, in humorous ways...

Back from my big "Flying" Trip

Wow! I just finished a "marathon" (long and exhausting) series of flights in the X-Plane 11 flight simulator. I left from Denver, thinking I'd head somewhere warm, and that led me all over the southern hemisphere, including Cancun, New Zealand, Tasmania, Australia, Papua New Guinea. Then I pointed the nose north and visited Indonesia, Borneo, Palau, Philippines, and Malaysia, to Thailand. From there, I did some quick exploring of China, Taiwan, Japan, and northern Russia. Getting homesick, I decided to head home the "short way", over the North Pole to Greenland, then down through Canada to Colorado. I have a separate blog chronicling those flights. It's a little sparse right now, but I plan to go back and add more photos and text, describing some of the more interesting individual flight legs.

Thursday ride

Fun Thursday afternoon bike ride around Chatfield Lake.

The South Platte River has been quite full lately, as they carefully meter the outflow from the lake.

The prairie dogs were ready and waiting to greet me, on my usual hydration stop.

I scooted around my favorite course, with just a little threatening weather to remind me to keep moving.

I spotted a Great Blue Heron, and managed to catch a pic of it, lined up with the pod of Pelicans in the lake.

There a freight train on the tracks I had to cross, but this one was paused just a short distance away from where I portage over the tracks, so of course I *had* to snap a pic of the engine facing me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near the end of my ride, I ran up against yet another Highline Canal Trail closure… hooray for our trail maintainers! I didn't see any signs suggesting a detour path, so I just headed down the Lee Gulch Trail, which took me straight to my neighborhood, so…not too bad.

Saturday Bird Walk

We had a fun 40°F Saturday morning, participating in a guided bird watching walk through Tucker Gulch in Golden. 

The secluded creekside path allowed us to view several different birds that were attracted to the dense foliage. 

According to our guide, we saw or heard a Black Throated Blue Warbler, Say’s Phoebe, Lazuli Bunting, Yellow Rumped Warblers (Audubon’s and Myrtle), and Northern Parula, along with House Finches, Chickadees, Towhees, Flickers, American Robins, and Lesser Goldfinches. And yes, we heard a chicken in someone’s backyard. We were even flashed by a Cooper’s Hawk working their way through the trees barely above our heads. 

Our new spotting scope and tripod saw their second outing, and I viewed several of the new birds up close, but I caught only one useable picture, of an American Robin, as all the other birds were moving around too quickly for me to get setup. 

I practiced on stationary objects, which were very cooperative in waiting for me get setup to view them through the scope. I guess I’ve got a steep learning curve for this type of outing - lugging equipment around that conceivably could produce some fun pics, and learning how to get it set up quickly enough to be useful… 🤷‍♂️ I’m starting to think that a camera with a zoom telephoto might be a much better accessory for these outings. Back in the day, I had an Olympus OM-1 film camera with a zoom lens attachment, that I just loved, but I got disenchanted, when it quickly became contaminated with sand or something else gritty inside the mechanism, that prevented the zoom from working.  

Fun day overall!

Wednesday Ride

I haven’t tired of this view of the trail and foothills, shortly after I’ve climbed the shallow side of the Chatfield Dam. It feels like a little reward for this wimpy biker. 

I wandered out onto a long thin peninsula trail, and enjoyed the look of the lake from out there. 

My regular hydration stop includes Prairie Dog spectators. 

I love the look of the railroad tracks, with the mountains behind them, as I’m carrying my bike across. 

I enjoy seeing other riders on the trails. In fact, I even make an effort to count all the riders I see, just to get a sense of who’s out there on any given day. And of course, it gives me something fun to do, while I’m huffing and puffing along. 

Coal train climbing the hill heading south out of the Denver area. I never tire of watching freight trains, and I relish the opportunity to be near them during this route. 

I love the view of this foreboding weather, but it did remind me to keep going, as at this point, I’m only a little more than halfway around my loop. 

Storm and Outage

There was a lot of storm activity here Friday afternoon.  I used iLightning to catch this pic of a lightning strike in the nearby foothills. 

Oops, and there went our power… and it came back on 90 minutes later, for 5 seconds… then went off again… here we are sitting on the couch playing word games to candlelight, and that was kind of fun…

The power came on and went back off twice more during the night. This morning, I was dealing with an angry beeping carbon monoxide detector in the basement, even after the power had been on for awhile. I replaced the battery and it was still beeping every 30 seconds. Turns out that several basement circuits were dead. I discovered, after tromping outside in the cold rain, and manhandling the dumb breaker panel doors, that multiple GFCI breakers in the newer power panel had tripped, probably when the power surged during one of the outages, or maybe when lightning struck nearby. Fixed! Then later this morning, we realized the house WiFi wasn’t working, as its backup battery had run down overnight. I hit the power button on the UPS, and we had internet! For about 5 minutes… then the UPS started beeping every few seconds, and shut down again. After downloading the user manual, I realized it was beeping because the outlet it was plugged into was dead. That lead me to yet another GFCI that had tripped, on the wall in another room, hiding behind my skis. After resetting that, everything seems pretty normal here… other than all that snow coming down out there.

We’re having fun watching the birds frequenting our feeders over the deck. I was going to say “Birds love snow,” since we tend to see more of them when it’s snowing, but of course the real takeaway is “Birds love to eat,” especially on snowy days…

Good article about phishing

We all need to be highly sceptical of unsolicited communications, even from people we know, especially when they contain links to web pages.

I just finished reading this excellent article by Kyle Chin of UpGuard, that describes many of the methods that cyber criminals use to attack their victims. I found it highly informative and well worth reading. 

GPS Jamming Map

Is anyone else interested in a map of GNSS (GPS) jamming areas? Well here you go:

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming

I've been seeing discussions about this in recent years, but I find it interesting, to see where it's happening. Here’s the article about it:

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/gps-jamming-map/

Belmar Park Walk

 

We enjoyed a fun Monday afternoon walk at Belmar Park, with snow still in the ground in some places, and some muddy spots in others. The rookery was well-occupied by Cormorants this time of year.

Dust bunny

Amorphous Bean kitty, helping to clean my blinds from the backside…

Post-Snow Friday

 

It's a beautiful 23-44° partly sunny Friday in Littleton! 

 

The snow remaining on my deck looks nice, but the depth is laughable, in comparison to the photos my friend in Highland Ranch has been posting. 

 

The birds are happy that all the snow has melted off their feeders. The Bird Buddy’s solar cell roof has continued to keep its battery fully charged all year. 

 

It’s pretty breezy out there, but my weather station is still clogged with snow, so the anemometer is currently useless. 

 

The kitties are happily entangled while snoozing as we enjoy our breakfast.

Snowy PI(e) Day!

Happy snowy 30-36° Thursday morning! 

It's PI Day - 3.14! That's a pretty rough approximation of PI, which being irrational, has an infinite non-repeating number of digits in the mantissa. Many years ago, I memorized the first 10 of them: 3.1415926535, but the reality is, going through engineering school, 3.14 was about all we could read on the slide rule anyway. 

 

So… we DID get our snow accumulation after all! The weather app on my phone has been refusing to admit there may be a snowflake in the future… until today, faced with inches of snow on the ground, and still falling, they finally begrudgingly added a few snowflakes to today’s forecast.

 

We were awake at 4:19 a.m. this morning, because the power went out for about a minute. The only clue when we’re sleeping, and the power goes out, is that the smoke alarms chirp for a second, so I woke up long enough to realize what had happened and note the time, then started to back asleep... when the power came back, the alarms went off again, this time for much longer, a definite wake up call… but we still managed to fall back asleep for a little while. Then later, while we were up and getting ready for the day, the power went out again, this time for an extended period. We forewent our usual hot meal, with my traditional delicious homemade latte, and settled on cereal and milk for breakfast. We were going to bake a pie for PI Day, but with the power still out here, maybe a trip to the local bakery makes more sense… Oops… they’re closed too, with employees and customers being advised to stay off the roads…

Kitties marveling at the snow. 

 

Update 12:10 - Power’s back on 3 hours later! After seeing my friend posting about his 19 inches of snow in Highlands Ranch, I went outside to measure our snow depth - I found 19.5 inches in a nice undisturbed flat spot out front. 

With the power back on, we ran down to the grocery store, and picked up a pie to bake. I’m trying something new - a Dutch Apple pie from Willamette Valley. It was twice the price of Marie Callendar’s, but I have a special place in my heart for the Oregon coast, especially the Portland area, so… I’m hoping this means I’m spoiling myself. And… it’s in the oven!

Hollywood!

Apparently, the red anti-collision light at the top of the Capital Records building in Los Angeles has been spelling out “Hollywood” in Morse code for the past 70 years. Pretty fun!

https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/1766712590766624778

Bird Watching

We spent a fun Saturday morning out on a bird watching expedition sponsored by a local bird supplies shop. I guess we’ve fully embraced the retirement lifestyle, as we were somewhat challenged to be up and out before 7am, in time to grab breakfast at the coffee shop, then drive 45 minutes to our meet up place. We met my sister and the rest of the group in Lafayette at Waneka Lake, and hiked over to Hecla Lake and back. Nice hike. Not too many birds, but it was still fun to socialize with people that know far more about birds than me.

We started at Waneka Lake, and saw this Cooper’s Hawk right away. My photos of it were pretty much a joke, with the hawk being so small, it was hard to pick it out in the picture. Then I tried holding my phone up to our guide's spotting scope, and after some persistence, I was rewarded with this beautiful image. 

We really like those spotting scopes, OMG they bring the bird images so close! We were flirting with the idea of buying one, but then we saw the price online, and were pretty much dumbfounded at the $5,000++ price for the scope and required accessories, like the eyepiece and tripod.

Then we saw some Mergansers...

Long’s peak looked really spectacular from our close perspective in Lafayette

Three intrepid amateur birdwatcher/hikers

Snowy front range mountains

Nice little trail between lakes

Our guide Sarah and her awesome spotting scope

The second lake we visited was Hecla Lake. There were a few more birds, but in general, it was a pretty quiet day for birding.

These two pelicans were pretty, and they were dipping into the water in a really graceful, synchronized way.

Cute view of the Rocky Mountains through a viewing port in a birdwatching station