I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but this month has been crazy as the holidays wrapped up and I headed off the the Far East. In fact, I’m in Singapore as I write this.

But that’s not the point of the post. We’ve taken the plunge and hired an architect to design changes to the drainage at Osage and complete plans for a roll-off roof observatory. We hired Tom Jungbluth. He has shared many good ideas and we are looking forward to seeing the plans.

We had some dirt/mud come down into the driveway in the last storms. I don’t know what this week has done and there is heavy rain forecast for this weekend. We are as prepared as we can be.

I’ve been very paranoid about freezing. Over the MLK Weekend, I turned off the water, drained some of the pipes and shut off the well. It hasn’t been very cold since then, but the tail end of this storm might get cold. Part of the plan for the observatory is to get the trapped air tanks and other well-related items inside, so less chance of freezing.

There, I’ve done it. Maintained the current almost-once-a-month pace of blogging.

It’s been a hectic November and December. It seems as if yesterday it was the beginning of November, but now Christmas is just a few days away. We’ve traveled to Upper Michigan, spent a week in a class in Berkeley, baptized the baby, completed the capital budget, and now are almost at the end of the year.

I haven’t had a chance to do much astronomy, I haven’t had the chance to get the observatory up or put the new drive motors on the C-8 out here in Lake Riverside. Sigh.

But today has been productive. I washed all the windows, finally getting the grime from the wind storm in October off. Washing windows can be very satisfying. I use an Ettore washer and squeegee with a strong ammonia and hot water solution. I believe the key is the scrubbing action of the washer to loosen the dirt, then the squeegee takes it all away. And nice clean windows look very good. The whole view outside looks much sharper.

I learned my technique at the Grand Carnot, on Avenue Carnot in Paris. John Stubbs and I would have breakfast their each day on our way out to EuroDisney. Once every couple of weeks the owner would have the glass in the cafe cleaned. The cleaners would SOAP up the window and squeegee it off in a continuous sweep. I’m not that good, but I try.

I also took the first attack at the gophers who have returned to the yard. They filled the sprinkler cut-off valve area again, and started a mound next to the house. The valve area is clear again, and full of gopher pellets. The area near the house has been gassed. I’ll make another attack tomorrow. We’ll also pick up some hay to put over the pipes near the pump. Hopefully prevent freezing. Although the thermometer didn’t show below freezing last night, standing water outside did freeze, and it will be colder tonight.

After installing Autodesk Quick CAD on my new Lenovo R61 laptop, I started getting a weird error when booting up the machine. It reported:

br_funcs.exe -- Ordinal not found
The ordinal 39 could not be located in the dynamic link library zlb.dll

I Googled the message and the closest thing to a relevant link was something at Experts-Exchange. I signed up for the trial membership, and the solution offered (actually, the solution promised, since Experts-Exchange is a for-pay service) did not address the problem. This is my second bad experience with Experts-Exchange, it is a useless service, never go there.

The solution was fairly simple. Autodesk put an old version of zlib.dll (used for zipping and unzipping) into the /Windows/System directory. Shame on them. I searched the root disk for zlib, found a later version in a Lenovo directory, and replaced the file in /Windows/System. Problem solved.

Hopefully this solution documented here will prevent people from losing time (and money) going after the useless information at Experts-Exchange.

We arrived at Osage (this is, I think, the name of the place, to go with “Camp” as a unique identifier) this afternoon. My older daughter had a half day and I was able to get away from work early so it was a 3:45 or so arrival.

We noted that most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Three weeks ago, they were just beginning to turn yellow, now they are gone. The high winds that drove the destructive fires of the past weeks made a mark here too, although one hardly worth mentioning. We would soon see how windy it actually was.

When my wife went into the house, she commented on the condition of the kitchen. There is normally some dust on the counter when we make it out here, and I usually take part of the first evening to clean up the dust. This was an entirely different situation (altogether :-)). There was a visible layer of dust across the entire counter. My older daughter found the back bathroom covered in red dust. The Sun porch was inundated — every surface covered with dust. This is what 5 days of 35+ mile an hour wind can do when laden with dust.

There are other problems. The sprinkler valves in the yard have been leaking for a long time. So long you squish as you walk across the yard. The tree in the northeast corner fell down because the ground was so soggy. I used the truck to right it and a board to hold it up. The cover for the lawn mower, a gift from my father-in-law, is currently AWOL, taken away by the wind. The cover on the spa was pulled open (no water in the spa, so no drowning risk) and the lattice around the spa is broken.

I feel lucky. When we were here last I washed the kitchen floor, so the dust did not have grease to bind with. We just bought a new vacuum cleaner (a Dyson, we are very happy) and it has done a great job capturing the dust. We were able to knock out the worst of the problem on Friday night, leaving the weekend open. The tree is upright. No one has been hurt.

We are very lucky here.

The recovery activities did prevent me from getting the CG-5 set up. I have a new motor controller, and a new DMK firewire camera. I go to OPT tomorrow to get the final parts.

Finally the comet. Comet Holmes is easily visible to the naked eye. In Perseus, just below Casseopoiea, it is almost a star, but slightly fuzzy. With binoculars, it is a nice, slightly green, ball. As I always tell people when I am trying to get them to find a comet, it looks like nothing else in the sky.

This has been two days of terrible fires in Southern California. We have personally been very lucky, with no loss of property or life in the immediate family. So far, the closest scrape has been the Roca fire in Aguanga. But the extended family was not so lucky.

There has been major damage to Lindemann house in Malibu. I was watching TV as the fire was burning, and was quite worried when I saw houses burst into flames at the ocean’s edge. The main fire was burning inland, but embers were blowing out over the Malibu Colony. The LA Times story on the fire has the following quote:

Among the other structures gutted was a home along Malibu Road. Its owner, Barbara T. Lindemann, said the house, built in 1927, was once inhabited by workers who built the railroad down the California coast. She said she has owned the home for 45 years.

Andy Lyon, a Realtor who helps rent the home for Lindemann, said it was worth $12 million to $13 million, and had burned once before, when singer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas lived there.

“I believe that it was the last standing one of the original Malibu cottages,” said Lindemann, an attorney and expert in employment discrimination law. “It’s a piece of Malibu history.”

I remember the fire when John Phillips lived there. He left many of his belongings, including a large, psychedelic statue of a man with his arms raised.

Here are some pictures of the fire burning. We had hoped that it was OK because the roof was intact, but there was damage in the house from the heat of the fire next door. In the first picture, the Lindemann house is on the right.

In this second shot, the house is in the foreground.

Prayers to all who have suffered loss in these wildfires.

UPDATE: I found another photo. This is looking in from the beach to the house.

On June 2, 2007 at 12:23pm PDT, our daughter was born in St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was a bit early, 3lbs 10oz, 18 inches. Mother and daughter have done well over the last three weeks.

I’ve been short on sleep as you might imagine. I’ve had some ideas for posts, but no energy. Perhaps over the next week…