Tag: Orange County

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We went to Wayzgoose* at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

*Update 2019: Since the link seems to be dead, some context: Wayzgoose was part of Celebrate UCI, a combination festival, open house (for prospective sutdents and parents), and club fair. It started with a medieval theme in the 1970s, though by the 1990s that was already fading. Once that was gone, there was a slow shift of emphasis away from Wayzgoose and toward Celebrate UCI as far as branding went, presumably because nobody knows what a Wayzgoose is, but everyone knows what a celebration is.

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Back in October, shortly before the Santiago Fire, I went sightseeing in the Tustin Foothills and snapped a picture of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. A month later, I took a picture of the same view after the fire and posted the two as a before and after comparison.

Well, we’ve had several months of normal (for SoCal) rain, and the hills have turned green. Mostly. It’s clear that the scars from the fire are going to take at least another season to heal. The last couple of days have been very clear, so I went back to the same spot to take a “four months later” photo.

Mt. Saddleback seen from Tustin foothills, March 2008
March 10, 2008. Click for a larger version

Now compare it to the November (post-fire) and October (pre-fire) photos: Continue reading →

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A press release from The Hero Initiative arrived today, describing their plans for MegaCon. The dateline said Los Angeles, which I found funny, because I knew MegaCon was somewhere on the east coast, but I couldn’t remember exactly where (and the press release didn’t say).

So I looked up the convention website. The first location I saw was Orange County, which was a bit confusing because I live in Orange County, California, which is right next to LA. Then I remembered there was an Orange County in Florida as well. Scrolling further down the page I confirmed that the con was in Orlando.

The cognitive dissonance lasted all of a second or two, but it makes me want to go back and look at anything I’ve posted about WonderCon in the past week and make sure I mentioned it was in San Francisco.

(The post title is not to be *ahem* confused with ConFusion, a convention in Michigan for which I’ve occasionally seen flyers.)

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We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

San Gabriels (mid-range) covered with snow

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

San Gabriel Snow Panorama
Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Update December 18, 2008: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from last winter. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow, check out Misty Mountains: Another San Gabriel Snow Panorama from the same spot on Tuesday, December 16, and my Snowline photoset on Flickr, for those pictures and several of Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains today.

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While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds had rolled in and turned everything gray. I kept checking back every so often, but the closest I got was this:

Green patchy hills

It’s been great to have a more normal amount of rain this year. The coastal hills all turned green after the second rainstorm, early in December. The hills up by the mountains took longer, since most of the area had burned off in the Santiago fire. Faint patches of green started to appear around Christmas, and now, the lower hills at least are more green than brown.

The scenery still looks odd, though. There’s a third peak (Flores?) near Saddleback, about 1,000 feet lower, that normally blends in with the mountain behind it. Well, the entire north face of the hillside burned. Then high winds blew the ashes away. People coated it with a green-gray material that I suspect was intended to prevent mudslides (it looked like the stuff they spray on dirt embankments in construction projects before the landscaping kicks in). It rained, repeatedly. Then we had high winds again, clearing all the gunk out of the air…and now it’s got the light brown color normally seen on the lower, closer hills during the dry season, instead of the darker brown of the mountains. It doesn’t blend at all, even from as far away as Tustin.

Saddleback with a large hill in front of it

This was taken from in front of the Ralphs on Jamboree on January 13. You can see the line of hills in front is still a green/brown mix, and then there’s this light brown lump rising up behind them. On the left side you can see some remnants of the anti-erosion substance.

The following day, on my way to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum (7 miles away, and perhaps a 30-degree difference in angle), I went over a bridge and saw Saddleback next to the Ferris wheel. I knew I had to get that shot.

I parked in the west parking structure, then went running around the top floor looking for a spot where I could frame the wheel and the mountains together, and avoid too many light poles, and get above the few cars, and not have to worry that losing my balance would cause me to fall 3 stories to my death. I finally climbed onto one of the support pillars for the light poles in the middle of the deck, where if I fell I’d only fall a few feet.

Saddleback and Ferris Wheel

Here, you can really see the difference between the areas that burned and those that didn’t. Compare this to the third picture in Saddleback Snow, or the second in Ashen Mountains.

Sadly, the best places to take photos from seem to be the middles of freeway bridges and tops of private buildings — in other words, inaccessible.