There are still a few empty lots in the Irvine Spectrum office park area, and the recent rains have turned them green…and for the first time I remember noticing, filled hollows with water to create temporary ponds. There were even a half-dozen ducks milling about while I took these pictures. Continue reading
WTF?!? CNN reports: Tornado warning in effect for south central Los Angeles.
It turns out there’s a tornado warning in Orange County too. I can believe it.
Drove past Blizzard HQ during a thunderstorm. Saw a really nice lightning strike a few minutes later.
Got soaked walking out of the parking structure. Wouldn’t be so bad if the rain was coming straight down. Ducked into first restaurant I saw.
Oh, NOW the storm lets up while I’m INSIDE. Rain & sky are both lightening up, & I haven’t seen any lightning in at least 10 minutes.
Aaaand we now return you to your regularly scheduled California sunshine!
I glanced out the window while eating lunch at Johnny Rockets and saw this brilliant rainbow. I hastily told the server that I would be right back, and was just going to look at it, and left some of my stuff at the table while I came out and snapped a picture. A passing security guard remarked that he had the same idea, but didn’t have his camera. When I went back in, two of the employees were staring out the window at it.
The Spectrum food court has ripped out the planters. I guess they realized they needed the floor space after they chopped off one end.
It’s Halloween, so Target has the Christmas decorations up!
The Great Park Balloon in Irvine, California, all dressed up as a Jack-o-Lantern for Halloween. I was hoping to get a shot of it aloft, but it landed as I approached the park.
It looks really eerie lit up at night, floating off in the distance. Or just floating above office buildings.
It’s not as good a picture as the one I found on Flickr last week, but you can see the whole face.
More of my own photos of the balloon on Flickr, including this non-zoomed shot, showing the big empty field and Saddleback in the background:
Would you believe I found a postcard for Irvine?
It’s a bunch of office buildings with mountains in the background. I guess it makes sense. I mean, what else would you put in an Irvine postcard?
Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look at Ansel Adams’ photography. I remember when I was in college, prints of Adams’ photos lined the walls of one of the Student Center hallways.
A couple of years ago I did my own then and now project — well, less a project than a spur-of-the moment 2007 re-creation of a 1997 photo I took of the Student Center as seen from what was then the Humanities Office Building (now Murray Krieger Hall). In this case the trees hadn’t changed much in 10 years, but UCI had flattened the Student Center complex and built an entirely new one.
About 2:00 in the afternoon today, in a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine. Roughly 50 miles away from the fire, perpendicular to the wind (thankfully!)
That puffy plume looks a lot whiter than the rest, which is clearly smoke, making me wonder if it’s a cloud that’s formed above the fire somehow. Edit: And literally seconds after I post this I spot the term pyrocumulous in another window. So, yeah, it’s a cloud produced by the air heated by the fire. The Wikipedia article has a picture of a cloud produced by this same fire a few days ago.
