Tag: Irvine

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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:

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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.

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A puffy plume of cloud rising out of a smoke layer in the distance. Up close, a suburban park with trees and grass and blue sky.

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.

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Sometimes when walking to lunch I pass this pipe sticking out of the ground. I have no idea how deep it goes, or whether it connects to something or just stops. I also have no idea what it’s for, unless as a vent or a placeholder. It just pokes out a couple of feet next to the hedge bordering a vacant lot.

I wonder how much litter collects at the bottoms of things like this. People tossing garbage, leaves falling in, people dropping rocks to gauge depth, people accidentally dropping things like flashlights or keys. If I dropped something important, would it be retrievable? If I couldn’t fish it out with a hook or gum on the end of a string, who would I call? Or would I just have to write it off as lost?