Riding in the Backyard

where my pedal hits

I really don't like to load my bike into my Nissan to go bike riding. Because of the fences and property owners trail heads are two or three miles away so if I feel like riding I ride around the house. Usually my German Shepherd will follow along.

down the path

If I do a figure 8 around the house and out to the mailbox and back my Garmin shows a half mile trip.

I stopped recording the Garmin watch data and the Map My Ride junk as just too much clutter. My old lap time around the Rose Bowl course got flushed.

up the path

The house is on a flat plot but when viewed it appears somewhat crooked. There is a fenced garden below the house and riding off the slope is not a problem but riding back up is so I dug a path on the slope. It is off camber which makes it more fun and not wide enough to stop the pedal from striking the bank. The Shepherd goes crazy when ever I try to shovel. He barks and attacks the shovel blade. So to do any digging he must be put back in the house. 

turning the corner

The ride around the garden fence requires some braking and balance and my balance is pretty shitty.

29 inch resting

Some of these pictures were taken by a Nikon and some from the handlebars with a CamPak Xtreme UHD4K. I bought that on Amazon for less that $50.00 and it actually works but using the MP4 requires reformating to load the video onto my Samsung. Reformating, resizing, reediting, retying a world of "re".

Court House Butte as seen from my
 trail

We go hiking (me and the two dogs) and we use the Nissan because the little Yorkie can walk that far without quitting and refusing to continue. The Yorkie is still a violent sort around other dogs but gets along well with my daughter's dog. 

Happy in the driveway

My cell phone is a total piece of shit and the screen is cracked but it is free. Not sure how long that will last as it was free in California and I ain't there.

in the creek

The POS phone only works if you are close to a tower and although I can see a cell tower in the distance my reception is pretty poor unless you wander around outside.

above creek

My son Dylan is on YouTube and has 60,000 subscribers and needs more cause his car just broke. If you believe in charity around Christmas time send him some money.

In the creek bed

How we communicate has changed as I learn things about my son Dylan from what it see on the tube or Gram. He once crashed at the Orange County Fair during a big jump contest and since he was in the hospital and they took his phone I learned about the crash by watching it on YouTube. Since I was on my sailboat in San Pedro I needed to find out what hospital he was in and started calling all the hospitals in OC.

Up hill towards mountain

For the record this has happened more than once (hospitals and crashing).

I keep my phone turned off as it does not work and the incoming call may not be good news.

Horse trail I ride

Trying to Forget What I Saw

My reading list lately has been non-fiction. Lots of books about the ocean. The last ten on my GoodReads list shows three Rachel Carson books. Several Orca or Dolphin books too.

Great Blue Heron landing at nest

I have seen whales from above while flying a Cessna when I had a ticket (pilot licence) . There was a very small airport next to the 5 Freeway in San Juan next to the riverbed. I learned to fly there. (not in the riverbed). I have seen whales from the cliffs here in San Pedro and a few from my sailboat while out sailing. I have encountered large pods of Dolphins several miles out past the Light House. One day maybe four years ago (I forget) I was out walking my dog DeDe and when we came back to the boat and our "Local Preacher Lady" asked me if I had seen the whale. Elizabeth is as sober (sober in San Pedro is rare) as they can get and has a Episcopalian Church in Laguna Beach. I said what whale and she said there was a small whale swimming between the docks here. So the dog and i got out our rowing sabot and started the search and it didn't take long before the whale surfaced right in front of us. His or her snout was covered with barnacles.

Two nestlings Blue Herons

One year we sailed to San Francisco and during the hours before sunrise I could see the whales blowing their exhaust into the air as we went past Point Conception.

Protecting the nest

As a kid in Santa Monica we spend many a day on the pier above and below it fishing. There was a tackle shop on the pier and in the windows there were all these shiny Penn Reels priced far above the nickel a dime menu little kids have.

Osprey at Night

My mother always like to go fishing with my Uncle Carl when we would visit in Arkansas. I didn't fish much there but loved to snorkel in the lakes and around the fishing docks that were loaded with fish waiting for handouts.

Dueling Egrets

While working at Telemetrics in Gardena the guys at work chartered several fishing boats and I went out on three of fishing trips. That is the only time I ever caught any sizable fish.

Trying to get along is not their idea

So recently my reading lead me to three movies that can be seen on YouTube or Amazon. One was
The Whale about Luna an Orca that becomes friends with locals, The other is Blackfish and the disasters at Sea World and the third is The Cove which deals with the killing of Dolphins in Taiji Japan.

On my sailboat there is a Television that gets over the air signals and I watch PBS and the 23.3 Channel here which is a Japanese Channel that shows news and promotes travel to Japan.

The producers are always showing the fine delicate features of the Japanese arts especially the cooking. The wood carving of the Buddhist Temples, the bright colors of weaving and so many other fine items. But they don't show the mercury levels of the whale and dolphins meats that are sold everyday to the Japanese.

So why is it that a Culture has such contradictions?

Now Where Did We Leave Off I Forgot

I just had a brilliant idea and before I could get settled in front of the keyboard it vanished. Not the laptop keyboard, the idea. This happens quite frequently. It is hard to keep track of keyboards, not the screens on the phone or tablet but the ones with hard keys. Not sure how many laptops I have gone through, or for that manner computers. Now I have two laptops: a Toshiba and a HP. The Toshiba was getting old and I ran across this deal on E-Bay and bought a HP. The thing runs Windows 10 but there isn't enough disc space for the OS. That is why it was so cheap. So for upgrades I plug in a 500 G external.

Monarch 

The HP is faster than the older Toshiba and this allows uploading from my Nikon's (Have 3 that work and another one that hates me). Not sure how many camera lenses I have and I have forgot where some of those lenses caps are.

Happy loves the park

It is easy to take too many pictures with the newer cameras and since I don't have a super fancy phone I must upload the camera data to a laptop then edit them and if I want to post any on Instagram I must transfer the files to my tablet since Instagram will only allow my laptop to view the app (no down loading) unless I buy a Window 10 laptop with a touch screen.

I tried connecting the two laptop using a USB cable but that doesn't work but I found several special USB cables made just for file transferring. Got a device on Amazon that will transfer files between PCs or Macs  Amazon Prime gave me a $20.00 credit with free shipping so the $18.95 cable cost be a minus $1.15. The cable (UGreen Data Link Cable) looks like a Blue Heron that tried to swallow a fish too big but it allows the connected laptops to share mouses and files. I can drag a file from one device across the edge of the screen onto the other screen. Pretty Cool.

Then another miracle happened: All of these bird watchers have these funny jackets with lots of pockets, weird hats and three thousand spotting scopes. Well three thousand dollars was just a little out of price range so I looked on EBay for some binoculars  At first I was not sure what I needed so after reading several bird watching guides from the Los Angeles Public Library I started Ebay searching again and found a vintage Bell & Howell for under $40.00. It is hard to tell from the pictures shown on the web but when they arrived I was dumbfounded (big word for me). Leather case, the warranty card enclosed and the two straps had never been used even the lens caps had apparently never been taken off. I now be an official bird geek.

As I probably mentioned earlier I read books using the Kindle application and they are free when I use my Los Angeles County Library Card. I have been trying for quite a while to find a copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring but can never locate a copy. Then it happen after being on the hold waiting list forever I got one. 

Happy on dock patrol

Her works are always  mentioned but I had never read it. I thought the thought the title was about a "Spring" in the woods (Walden Pond) where the waters killed everything but as I understand Spring is Silent because the birds no longer sing after Winter. So after three days of reading the book during today's early morning dog walk I saw the Rachel Carson Research Vessel heading South in the middle of the West Channel which is East of my boat. South, East, West (do pigeons have GPS) don't forget the Cardinal Points or the Cardinals flying.

Happy loves his blue rope

Yes I know the pictures shown here have nothing to do with the babbling in the blog but if I don't post dog pictures here I might not wake up in the morning after being eaten my two wild furry dogs. Dogs are sensitive and can get aggressive. In fact today when we got back to to our dock from walking to the beach about 9 AM the two shit heads caught a small crab poking out of a hole and could not figure out how to eat it. The crab fought the Yorkie with his claws extended and then hid under a gas can (some one had left out) Lucky the Yorkie hen knocked over the gas can (plastic) and chased the crab some more. Finally the crab jumped back in the water and left the two dogs  without seafood. 

Hating Face Book Again

Several years ago I started a Facebook account. It seemed a valid reason for connecting to friends and family. I started blogging before FB. I was racing speedway motorcycles and began reporting my races on my blog and posting each new blog on FB.

Then my FB friends started getting hacked and my Yahoo Email contacts started getting spam.

Early on when the ads on FB became a pain in the ass you could block them and of course FB figured out how to stop that.

The ads got me madder as they kept pointing to Dating Russian women or similar scams. So I changed my birthday to a teenager.

Then ads were aimed at selling me something in my living area. So I changed my location to a remote island.

One day while riding around the Rose Bowl on my road bike I saw all these tailgaters before a football game. Several had portable outhouses aside their RVs. When I gone back I did a search on Google about these portables then  saw the product on Amazon and clicked that. The next day my FB sidebar is full of portables.

FB kept changing the rules and procedures and the hackers kept on hacking.


I had two parakeets and got them a Facebook account. It was a great way to see pictures of other pet owners. Then FB closed the account because my birds were not potential buyers.

So I deactivate the account. I waited a while then deleted everything.

My blogging slowed when I moved on to my sailboat to live full time because the WIFI connection was a total waste. It worked some days but most often not.

For a time I lived with my daughter on shore and she had DSL so I blogged a little but not motorcycles. I had been using Goodreads for several years then one day it required my FB account to login. So without a FB account my Goodreads account was blocked. So I emailed them and two weeks later they allowed me to sign on without the FB bullshit.

By accident I discovered N.Y. Bike Snob and his blog. Here was a bicycle guy making money off of his blog.

Then just before Christmas my daughter got me a German Shepard puppy. It is hard not to take pictures of him.

 I use Instagram

 but several of my old FB friends don't so I thought about trying FB again to show my puppy to old friends and republish my old speedway blogs.

I created a new Gmail address and login to FB as a new user. Then the notifications started (more BS).

Then the find a friend (more BS). I added a few old friends and family and posted each new blog on FB. The FB app was deleted on my Samsung Phone right after I bought it. Three days ago I restarted the app so I could post my puppy pictures directly on to FB.

This morning FB will not allow me to sign on without posting detail personal information (more total BS).

So much for this crap so I try to delete account but I can't sign in because they are blocking me until I give them personal info (so Fuck them)

Catch 22 (I read the book) places me in FB Purgatory whereas I am unable to sign in to delete.

Many others have faced this problem and the web offers many solutions but most point you to the three dots on the FB page to delete the account. After many years I can't fight back because I don't have a 3 dot rating.