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In addition to the Endeavour, we saw some other spacecraft at the California Science Museum. Exciting to have all this space history in one place so close to us!
Rather than lots of description here, I’ve put short captions of the pictures below, so click through and take a look.
My wife and I went to the California Science Museum in January to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Pictures of that will come soon, but there are other wonderful things to see there, including the aircraft shown below. Next to the parking lot was a Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft, a predecessor to the SR-71.  A-12 Then we see a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter mounted on the side of the one of the buildings.  F-104 In the large hall that led to Endeavour, we see the Northrop T-38 and F-20. As I joined Northrop as an avionics engineer, the F-20 program had just been killed. It was designed to be a cost-effective fighter to compete with the F-16, particularly in overseas sales. It seems that the government used it as leverage against General Dynamics to cut the F-16’s cost and then left Northrop in the cold. Of course, foreign governments backed away as soon as the US government decided against purchasing the F-20. Did I mention that the F-20 project was funded internally by Northrop? Indeed, Northrop felt that the F-20 was such a winner that they self-funded it. Well, it’s still a good looking airplane.
We went out to our favorite Mexican food place (Avila’s El Ranchito) last night, then took a nice walk on the beach. It was supposed to be a lousy, cold, overcast day, but it turned into a delightful evening. Click the pictures to see a full-sized version. All taken with iPhones, so expect noise in the low light images.
And I even got a movie of the sun sinking beneath the waves.
Today quickly switched from a pleasant Sunday to a little too exciting when my wife arrived home from grocery shopping and yelled “Fire!” At almost the same instant, I could smell smoke and there was a helicopter flying over the house. Once my heart started beating again, I saw that the fire was south of us and that the helicopter was fighting it with water drops. We walked to a hillside sort of above the fire as the smoke enveloped us and ash fell. Before long, we returned home in case we needed to evacuate. It turned out that the helicopter was refilling on a ridge near us, so we got some amazing views of the thing roaring over us. A newspaper report details the fire:Â http://www.ocregister.com/articles/fire-371632-beach-brush.html I took a bunch of pictures and here are the best ones:
I also took some movies. This one shows the chopper flying up a canyon on its way to refill.
Here it is on the way back to the fire.
Flying over us on the way to refill:
A close view of it approaching us:
We had an amazing sunset last night – one of the prettiest of the year. Of course, these iPhone photos don’t do it justice, but the battery in my good camera was completely dead. There was a bit of a storm coming through, as you can see by the distant rain and the clouds, but the temperature was perfect on my back deck as we watched the sunset. A bunch of the flowers around us are in bloom, so I took some pictures of the iceplant outside our fence, the kangaroo paws in our side yard, and a few others.
I gave my mother a new iPad yesterday in the hopes that it would get her back to reading email and possibly responding to it. Sometime I will write a rant about how lousy the iPad is for the elderly, but not today. I read all the stories about how the new iPad gets hot, particularly when playing games. Based on my experience yesterday, it gets surprisingly warm when doing pretty much nothing. I set my mother up with email and a few other things and showed her how to browse the web, and before long, the iPad was noticeably warm. Not hot, but unpleasantly warm and uncomfortable. My iPad2 doesn’t do anything like that. So even when not playing Infinity Blade or other graphics-intensive games, the electronics and battery in the new iPad really heat up. I put one of the magnetic covers on, so I am hoping that my mother folds it around back when she’s using the iPad and that will prevent her fingers from becoming too toasty. I am curious if this is going to become a problem for Apple, because the heat is surprisingly excessive. Anyway, I hope my mom uses the iPad and reconnects with her friends and relatives using it. Saturday was another lovely day, so we walked up the hill and along a ridge with a fire road. Lots of plants and birds and many dog-walkers.
The weather today is magnificent in SoCal, so we took a walk around the neighborhood, along the path behind the house up to a ridge, then back down a trail into the valley south of our street.
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The Space Shuttle Endeavour was in a temporary facility when we went to see it in January at the California Science Museum near USC, just south of downtown Los Angeles. It was exciting to see it, and, though it was crowded, we didn’t have to waste too much time getting in to see it. We had tickets with reservation times, but there are lots of exhibits to look at while the crowd moves through to the the shuttle. Those were somewhat interesting, though some of them were very tailored to kids.
