Pages Tagged “Irvine”
Reviews
- Remembering Diedrich Coffee
Blog Posts
- California Drought Sim, Water Use, and Preserving Open Space
According to simulations, California could adapt to long-term drought. We just have to actually do it. Meanwhile, the Irvine Co. sets some limits on sprawl.
- Open Space. Good!
Final pieces of Irvine Ranch complete ‘open-space puzzle’ in O.C. – LA Times This spot in eastern Orange is now part of a proposed 2,500-acre gift from the Irvine Co. to Orange County — 1,400 acres here and an additional 1,100 in Anaheim Hills. Well, good. I’ve lamented the loss of both open space and […]
- Old Town Irvine After the Storm
Well, technically, during a lull in the storm. The clouds were moving very fast, with light and shadow moving over the empty fields and office parks, and I waited several minutes for the sun to play over this scene. I particularly liked the contrast of the dead brown tumbleweeds scattered around the bright green meadow. […]
- Landscape Under Renovation
Irvine is dreadfully afraid you might think the dead grass is the result of poor maintenance. Apparently, they’re also concerned that the old Grass Under Renovation signs might not be inclusive enough.
- Return to Temporary Wetlands
Photos: The rains have been tapering off, and the ponds that filled the empty lot have been shrinking, giving way to grasses and wildflowers.
- Putting the Post in Post Office
A few weeks ago, I stopped at the post office on the way to work. As I walked to the door, my eye was immediately drawn to the big hole in the wall where, apparently, a car had crashed into the building while trying to park. Whatever vehicle had done the damage was long gone, […]
- Cryptic Store
A mall mystery has been solved…or has it? Thoughts on brand recognition, target audience and the use of icons instead of words in signage.
- Office Park Ponds
Photos: Rain has turned the empty lots in the Irvine Spectrum green…and for the first time I remember, filled hollows with water to create temporary ponds.
- Midday Thunderstorm & Rainbow
Going to lunch in a thunderstorm, plus a photo of the rainbow at the end…at (appropriately enough), the Irvine Spectrum.
- Errand Observations
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!
- Great Park, Great Pumpkin
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 […]
- Irvine Postcard
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?
- Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI
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 […]
- Station Fire Smoke Plume from Irvine
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. […]
- Pipeline to the Underworld
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 […]
- Coyote in the Office Park
Walking across an empty lot, listening to “Gold Dust,” just saw a coyote sauntering across the lot.
- Walking
Trying to get back into habit of walking to lunch once a week. Of course, the weather picks today to heat up. I’m thinking maybe Jamba Juice. Breeze really helps – when it’s not blowing past fields of mulch.
- Snowy San Gabriels above Irvine
Irvine in the foreground, Peter’s Canyon in the middle distance, and far in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains covered in snow.
- Not In New York
We went out to the “Great Park” yesterday to see if we could go up in the balloon. It turned out to be completely booked for the day (there was some big ice skating event going on) but we got in some photos on the ground, including a couple of pics with our copy of […]
- Green Lots & Venus
Walking to lunch. Vacant lots are actually green! Spotted Venus at 1 in the afternoon! Thanks, Sky Map app!
- Saddleback Snow – Two Days Later
Photos of the unusually heavy 2008 snowfall in the Santa Ana Mountains as seen from Irvine, California.
- Woodbridge Snow View
Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos.
- Seeing LA From Irvine?
It’s an amazingly clear day morning today. So clear that I suspect I saw part of the outline of Catalina Island off in the distance, between trees and buildings, on the drive to work. So clear that I decided to drive up to the park at Quail Hill in Irvine where I once spotted what […]
- Starbucks Overreaching
A couple of years ago, Starbucks bought all 30 or so company-owned Diedrich Coffee stores. There were a couple of franchise locations left (well, kiosks, really) in Orange County, and one of the Texas stores, but that was it. Most of them were converted or shut down, with only two keeping the Diedrich name and […]
- iPhone iLine
I went by the Spectrum for lunch, and the line to get into the Apple Store for the new iPhone was still stretched past several storefronts into the nearest courtyard, right up to the fountain by the carousel — even though they’d launched that morning. Actually, I had several co-workers who were late today because […]
- Under Construction Indefinitely
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 […]
- Affluent Flowers
When I first spotted this sign, I just couldn’t believe the name of the florist at the bottom. Okay, I’m sure people with more money send more flowers, but it seems a little tactless to point it out in the shop’s name. Of course, it is Irvine…
- Wild Things of Irvine
The Village, a disturbingly-named apartment complex across from the Irvine Spectrum shopping center, has been advertising in the nearby area for a couple of years using the slogan, “A new meaning for…” with various images and phrases. For a while, the following photo and caption seemed to be everywhere: A New Meaning For Heated Pool […]
- Full-Spectrum Coffee
Between cash, lunch and an errand, I walked the full length of the Irvine Spectrum today, and realized there will soon be 7 coffee shops in or near the shopping center—and 4 of them are Starbucks. It opened with just one: a Diedrich Coffee, attached to Barnes & Noble. Phase 2 (from the movie theaters […]
- Ashen Mountains
Things are starting to get back to normal, at least for those of us not directly affected by the Santiago Fire. There was a layer of haze coating the mountains Monday morning, but the air smelled normal, and the sky, when the clouds broke up, was blue. My co-worker who stayed behind in Silverado came […]
- Clouds Replace Smoke
The change in the weather has brought in clouds today (Saturday), and even the occasional sprinkle of rain. It apparently helped slow the Santiago Fire considerably. I went into work this morning to deal with some network problems (you may have noticed that this site was down for a while), then went over to the […]
- Shift
Winds have shifted northward. The good news: my workplace is no longer drenched in smoke from the Santiago Fire. I can see blue sky and wispy clouds, terrain back to the nearby hills, and the twin peaks of Saddleback rising above the smoke. Reportedly the northern peak (the one without all the radio transmission towers) […]
- A Breath of Fresh Air. Please.
The Santiago Fire has moved up into the mountains, raging through the Cleveland National Forest. The canyons are still under evacuation, but out here in the Saddleback Valley, it just looks like a really smoggy day. With yellower-than normal sunlight. It was actually cold this morning, for the first time in well over a week. […]
- Fire by Night
With the winds dying down, the smoke from the Santiago Fire clung loosely to the mountains most of the day. Unfortunately, smoke from the new fires down on Camp Pendleton drifted up the coast to take its place, bringing back the yellowish sunlight. Also, without the wind to clear them away, ashes left a thorough […]
- Watching the Santiago Fire
Now that the wind and smoke have shifted, watching the progress of the fire has become a nervous office pastime. It’s far enough not to threaten us here, but from the windows along one side of the building, we can see the blackened hills through the haze. And we’ve got people who live in the […]
- More Fire
The wind shifted during the day, and by mid-afternoon the sky near where I work was considerably clearer—even though the fire seemed to be getting closer. Some geography: The Santa Ana Mountains run parallel to the coast, and form the northeast border between Orange County and Riverside County. Here are a couple of photos from […]
- City of Smoke
No 3AM evacuations, though we’re several miles away from the danger zone anyway. The Santiago fire we spotted yesterday was stopped before it crossed into suburbia, but judging by the OCFA map it was a near thing. Now it’s burning southeast, into the hills and toward the canyons. Some of which are inhabited. (Yes, there […]
- UCI Student Center: Then and Now
I drove out to UCI on my lunch hour, and got my first view of the newly-completed Student Center. There are actually some parts of the building left over from the previous one, but the whole exterior is new. Then I remembered a photo I’d taken of the old Student Center, back when I was […]
- Not a problem
Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be anything odd about this sign. But look at the placement. Why do they need a No Parking sign in the middle of the lawn? It’s a new sign, too—they just redid the entire lawn last year. Seriously, I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with people parking […]
- Invasion of the Lenticular Clouds!
I wasn’t expecting to see more after my last post on lenticular clouds. As I said, they’re (usually) rare in this area. But as I left the office Friday evening, I pulled onto the freeway and nearly freaked out at what I saw: A line of three smooth, layered clouds running above the ridge of […]
- Web Contest: 11 Years Later
While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online. I looked at the earliest archived copy […]
- Butterfly
Experimenting with the macro setting on my camera: I cut across a vacant lot on my way to lunch last Friday. Most of it is just dirt and flattened stalks of of dry grass, but there are some plants that have sprung up since it was last mowed (probably sometime in spring) or have managed […]
- Big Orange Balloon
Today I went with a group from work to ride the Great Park Balloon, a.k.a. that big orange thing that’s been floating over Irvine for the last month. After about a decade of wrangling, the city of Irvine has started converting the former El Toro Marine Base into, well, a park. It looks like it’s […]
- Maybe they cancel each other out
Found in a new area next to the foothills outside of Irvine that’s clearly being set up for a new housing development. I think the street was Portola Parkway, somewhere around Sand Canyon.
- Dry spell
It’s been a dry year for California. Water districts all over the state are geared up for drought conditions. The hills in the Orange County area are still golden-brown in mid-April. Last year at this time, they had finally turned green for spring. Here’s a shot from the Irvine Spectrum area from April 6, 2006: […]
- Spring Haze
On Sunday, March 11, a brush fire struck in the Anaheim Hills area. It was controlled relatively quickly, and by the next morning, the smoke had settled into a blanket of haze over Orange County. For contrast, here’s a shot from a few weeks earlier (February 23), when it was unusually clear. This was taken […]
- Pick a city, please!
A few days ago I was remarking on the signs by the side of the 405 indicating where to find the Cal State Fullerton El Toro Campus. This is odd for several reasons, namely: The signs went up years after the city of El Toro changed its name to Lake Forest. Having the two cities […]
- Finding an Inn
How often do you get to revisit an old in-joke? Six years ago, Katie and I were driving past the Inn-N-Out by UCI and noticed the sign was only half-lit. Katie exclaimed: It’s an inn! The out is out on In-N-Out! Last Friday we went back to UCI for a play and had dinner at […]
- Feathered Sunset
Here’s a picture of last Wednesday’s sunset (September 14) as seen from the 405 in Irvine. The photo links to a larger copy. And no, I wasn’t trying to get the “monolith” in there. I don’t remember exactly where this was, so I’m not even sure what the sign is for.
- Renovated Grass
Yes, they’ve actually replaced some of the grass with more grass, instead of astroturf. Here’s the same median where I took the original Grass Under Renovation picture. I still have no idea why they bothered letting it die, putting up signs to warn people, and seeding all new grass. Not that I paid much attention […]
- Natural Turf
It turns out not all of the medians with Grass Under Renovation signs are being replaced with Astroturf. I drove past one at lunch today where the sprinklers were running. Not that an August afternoon is the best time to run sprinklers, but it seems clear that they’re expecting something to grow there. Maybe they […]
- Plastic Revolution
Well, I finally found out the reason for the Grass Under Renovation signs. I passed a median where a road crew was setting out what I first thought was sod, but then realized was Astroturf. Nice one. I suppose it’ll save money on water and maintenance, but then so would painting the concrete green. Couldn’t […]
- Grass Under Renovation
Oh no, there’s dry grass on the median! Oh, wait, it’s OK: There’s a sign saying it’s under renovation. *whew!* … Irvine is a strange town.
- Bunny Xing
Across the street from the Irvine Civic Center: This brings back memories of days in UCI’s student housing. There were rabbits everywhere. The complex was right next to a big empty field, and rabbits would hop through all the time. “Oh, look, a rabbit!” “Yeah, yeah, same old, same old.” But this is the first […]
- Of course they’re ready!
Who needs pesky things like walls, anyway? This is California! We don’t have weather! And the scaffolding just makes it easier to get in and out of the place! (Of course, once the new tenants realize they’re next to a swamp – OK, a marsh – maybe they’ll want those walls!) (Edited August 12: replaced […]