The office building next door to work is being converted into a hotel, and the lawn has become a staging area for the renovation work. They’ve turned off the sprinklers, leaving the lawn around the building dried into very short straw and producing an interesting gradient in the transition from watered to unwatered.
I kind of hope they’ll put in something less water-intensive than a new lawn when they’re done, but I’m not counting on it.
This year at WonderCon (April 18-20) was the year that I missed a lot of things. It’s not at the SDCC level where you have to assume you won’t get to what you want unless you’re really lucky, or deliberately go for the less popular events. Even if you’re at the very end of a long line, or arriving five minutes before, you might still make it into the room. Mostly, I got there late two days out of three, and spent most of Saturday finding things for a three-year-old to do (more about that later).
WonderCon is settling in at Anaheim. The crowds are coming even on Friday, and parking…well, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the first year, when they sent people out to Anaheim Stadium for overflow, and a lot simpler than San Diego’s collection of dozens of tiny parking lots scattered around downtown. After the first day following signs from lot to lot to lot, I just went straight to the Garden Walk structure for the next two days. It’s a bit of a hike, but not much worse than parking at the far end of the Toy Story lot, and the time you save waiting to get into the lot will probably make up for the extra 5-10 minutes on foot. (But if you leave the con before sunset, make sure you walk out to Katella along the convention center, where there’s shade, and not along Harbor, where there’s a wide street to let the sun reach you and a wall to reflect the heat right at you.) Continue reading
I don’t deal with many paper bills anymore, and even then I usually pay online instead of writing a check if it’s at all recurring…but most of the ones I do get would love to switch me over to electronic billing. It cuts out that pesky paper phase in between the electronic issuing and electronic processing, and of course if you set up auto-pay with a credit card, they don’t have to worry about late (or missing) payments from you anymore.
But this bumper sticker shows that there are some people who would really rather you paid your bills by mail. I wonder why…
In February, a 55-gallon drum of radioactive waste burst at a storage facility in New Mexico. The investigation has pinned it on a surprising culprit: Kitty litter.
It turns out that the clay is perfect for stabilizing volatile compounds, so they use it when storing radioactive waste. But somewhere along the line, someone switched to organic kitty litter, which was plant-based…and chemicals in the litter reacted with the chemicals being stored, causing it to heat up and expand.
The off-the-wall nature of the story appeals to me, but it also nicely illustrates several points:
During Wondercon I discovered that Anaheim Garden Walk is even emptier than I remembered it. This used to be the third-floor food court. There’s nothing there anymore.
The outdoor mall had the misfortune to open just before the recession hit, too close to Disneyland to attract locals and too far to attract tourists. It never completely filled in, and as old stores leave, new ones don’t seem to be taking their places. I’ve only been there a few times, mainly when I happen to be in the area for something else (like a convention) and it’s been odd and kind of sad to watch it slowly empty out.
It’s not completely abandoned like, say, the Hawthorne Mall. From the street, you’d never know there was a problem. The front is packed with chain restaurants like California Pizza Kitchen, P.F. Chang’s and Bubba Gump Shrimp, all of which seem to be doing well, or at least they were busy during Wondercon. Behind them, the main floor of the mall only has a handful of stores. There are a few clothing stores and a tourist welcome center. Almost every storefront is walled off.
Here’s a shot from 2010. Note that there’s only one open restaurant in the photo. It’s not there anymore.
The top floor is just eerie, especially at night. When I grabbed lunch during Wizard World’s 2010 Anaheim Comic Con, they had several mid-range restaurants and a half-full food court. That’s all gone. There’s one bar and grill, which seemed to be doing well enough during the convention, but you really have to know it’s there. And then there’s a Johnny Rockets waaaaay at the back, which I imagine is only hanging on by being next to the movie theater. Otherwise, no one would go back there.
What makes it especially eerie is that the place is so well-maintained. It’s clean, well-lit, even decoratively lit. The walls are the same temporary walls put up when any other mall has an empty storefront or two, they’re just everywhere. It reminds me a little of the southernmost part of Irvine Spectrum when that section first opened, before many stores moved in…except that was part of a larger mall that was actually occupied.
It looks a LOT like the outdoor parts of the Del Amo mall…but if you stand up on the walkway outside the theater and look down, instead of a bustling courtyard with people milling around the fountain and walking in and out of stores, you’ll see an empty courtyard with flat walls.
On the plus side, they did build a parking structure big enough for a full mall, which means that it’s available for event parking. Of course, even the parking structure is unfinished. I took this photo four years ago, and the top floor still looks like this — chain link, sandbags, exposed rebar and all.
Katie decided to go with an Empire Strikes Back Leia hairstyle this year.
I spotted this great halo yesterday while we were out shopping for plants for a vegetable garden. The bright, colorful upper arc just jumped out, and while I searched for something I could use to block the sun for a photo, I also shaded my son’s eyes with my hand so he could look too.
It was still visible 20 minutes later and a few miles away, when I noticed that the upper arc looked like it split to the left, probably a circular 22° halo with a circumscribed halo around it. That would touch the circle at the top, where it’s brightest, then branch off on tangents to the sides — and it does look like that may be going on even in this shot, on both sides, though I didn’t notice it at the time. Halos like this are caused by reflections in ice crystals, but the ice can be in the upper atmosphere. It was plenty warm down here on the ground, around 80°F.
We did make it out to Mysterious Galaxy for California Bookstore Day (though they only had a few of the exclusives left by the time we arrived — apparently there was a massive rush that morning), but ended up missing Free Comic Book Day. It became clear while we were out running around that J wasn’t going to stand for waiting in line in the heat, and I never quite managed to get back out there myself after the rest of our errands were done. It didn’t really seem that urgent, two weeks after WonderCon (I still need to write that up, but you can check out my convention photos now).
