So this blog has become a chronicle of Lake Riverside events.

This past week has been very cold in California. I was worried about the pipes in Aguanga, but we needed the long weekend at home. Then, on Monday morning (Martin Luther King day), I heard a story on the radio about how the DWP was busy helping people who had burst pipes. That’s burst pipes from the cold. In Los Angeles.

So that made me worried about the house in Aguanga. My wife and I spoke about it and agreed that I would sacrifice my afternoon and drive out to check out the house.

As I drove up the to gate, I knew we had a problem. I could see the glint of water between the house and the workshop. The main line into the house had broken. It is a 2″ PVC pipe. Not my choice, I’d prefer copper. But another do-it-yourself work on the house had left this pipe there and it was broken. I turned off the valve by the line. The water to the workshop had no problem.

It was 44° outside and 46° inside. No worries about inside pipes, but I checked. I ran the heat to warm things up. But there was only one problem, the main line. The pump is off. The main line is off – at the pump. We await the plumber.

We were up at our place in Lake Riverside (Aguanga) last weekend. My wife’s sister had a nice Epiphany get together in Murietta. And the 35 miles from Aguanga to Murietta is a lot better than the 85 miles from LA to Murietta. We also had the pleasure of having my in-laws with us.

We were preparing to leave on Sunday. It had been a very windy day, and as I was talking with my father-in-law I noted that there were clouds of dust passing overhead. I looked to the south and noticed another cloud. It took me a moment, but I realized that it was not dust, but smoke. We ran to the edge of the hill to the south and saw a fire that was probably only five minutes old.

The wind was blowing from the east. The fire had started at the edge of the Lakeshore Boulevard and was quickly moving west, about one half mile south of the house. The fire department drove up shortly after we looked down. The fire was racing with the wind, spreading rapidly and seemingly consuming everything in its path. My father-in-law noted that a dark cloud remained at what seemed to be the staring point of the fire. We then saw a flash and heard the bang of an explosion as a car burst into flames at the start of the fire.

The rest of the family joined us watching the fire. It seemed to calm down to white smoke for a few moments, then flash into a burst of black smoke as if found fresh fuel. We were not in danger. The fire had started down wind of us and was moving away. Scary, but not a danger.

We had watched long enough and got in the car and left the house. On our way out, we saw two California Department of Forestry planes come in. We saw them make several water drops on the fire. As we drove out to I-15 in Temecula, at least 10 fire trucks passed us as the headed to the fire. According to the stories below, 186 firefighters responded, and no homes were damaged. Great work firefighters!

I found two articles on the fire thanks to Google News. The first article was from the The Californian, an edition of the North County Times. We are only about 8 miles from the northern edge of San Diego County.

Brush fire burned 30 acres

By: The Californian –

AGUANGA —- A brush fire burned about 30 acres Sunday afternoon in a rural community near Aguanga, about 18 miles east of Temecula along Highway 371, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The department dispatched 22 engines and 186 firefighters to battle the blaze, which was reported at about 2:50 p.m. in a brushy area near Lakeshore Boulevard and Forest Springs Road in the residential hamlet of Lake Riverside, CDF officials said on the department’s Web site. Authorities believe the fire was started by a vehicle crashing into vegetation.

Firefighters prevented flames from damaging about 60 nearby residences in the sparsely populated area, officials said. The crews were still mopping up Sunday evening with plans to continue patrol operations throughout the night as north and northeasterly winds of up to 25 mph persisted, officials said.

Voluntary evacuations in the Lake Riverside area were lifted and no evacuations had been ordered and no injuries were reported, authorities said.

I like that our house is in a “hamlet.”

The second article was from the Riverside Press Enterprise.

Crews contain fire to 30 acres

12:12 AM PST on Monday, January 8, 2007

The Press-Enterprise

A brush fire blackened about 30 acres Sunday in the Anza area before the flames were surrounded by firefighters, authorities said.

The fire, believed to have been started by a spark from a vehicle that drove on dry vegetation, was reported about 2:50 p.m. near the 40000 block of Lakeshore Boulevard in the Lake Riverside area southwest of Anza, said Patrick Chandler spokesman for Riverside County Fire Department. He said 186 firefighters contained the blaze at 8 p.m. and prevented the flames from spreading to about 60 homes in the sparsely populated area.

He said a voluntary evacuation for the area has been lifted and firefighters plan to do mop up activities and patrol operations through the night. Winds of about 20 mph complicated firefighting efforts but did not hinder the crews from getting the blaze under control, he said.

–Herbert Atienza

hatienza@PE.com

Our lot and the lots to the East and South are well cleared, so I am not to worried about our house. But this was a stark reminder that fire can move fast in dry brush, with high winds, and with low humidity. Too close for comfort.

On Friday, January 5th, a wind storm knocked out our power in Los Angeles at about 3am. When we left for Aguanga at Noon, it was still out. This is the 4th time we have had a major outage at our house in the past year.

1. Blown transformer at the end of the block that left a live high-power line dangling in the street,
2. Blown transformer around the block,
3. A transformer fell off a power pole into our neighghbor’s house two doors north when the termite-eaten support collapsed, and
4. This wind-caused outage

I sure am glad we have UPSs on all of the computers. Perhaps I need to set up the wiring so I can plug a generator into the house. Our neighbor has that set-tup. He disconnects himself from the city grid and plugs the generator into a socket at his outdoor power panel. The generator takes the place of the grid, and everything in the house works. It is pretty cool.

We were very impressed with our Bose Wave Radio‘s performance during the outage. Like many clock-radios, it has a 9-volt battery that allows it to keep the time when the power is out. But Bose went one step further — the alarm worked on the battery. So with a power outage it won’t let you oversleep. Great design, if you ask me. In addition, when you modify the settings on one of the two alarms, it turns the alarm on. Good design again.

Update The power did not come on until 5am on Saturday. It went off at 2:49 am Friday. 26 hours of outage. Ouch.

After several weeks of preparation and work, the three Linux computers have been upgraded to Fedora Core 6, the current release of the freely-available version of Red Hat Linux.

I downloaded the CD and DVD images in November, and loaded the installation packages on the main server’s web server. I started with the P3 500. This upgrade (clean install actuall) went without a hitch. The machine booted cleanly off of the rescue disk, and the installation went fine. The main server and the laptop were not so smooth.

I backed up all the data and configuration from the server, a P3 850 2-processor machine. It has been running Fedora Core 3, and I needed to reconfigure the disks, so a clean install was in order. I loaded Fedora on the web server on the P3 500, and booted off of the rescue disk. (One note on installation methods. Keeping the P3 500 around has been very convenient for Linux installs. I have found burning CDs to be problematic at best, so having the full install on a web server both removes the need for burning CDs and having to swap disks during the install.)

When I went to choose HTTP as the install method, I received a message that no drivers were installed for that boot method — Fedora could not talk to the NIC. I tried many things. I bought a new NIC (gigabit ethernet for $20 at CompUSA), tried to create a driver disk. Nothing worked. I posted at Fedoraforum.org, usually very helpful, but no one there was able to help. Some advice on where to look from Fedora-List led me to boot off of a full install DVD, ctrl-alt over to another terminal, and run lspci -v. This showed me that not only was Fedora not seeing the NIC, it wasn’t seeing anything on the PCI bus. This allowed me to make a much more informative post to Fedora-List. The kind people there gave me a number of kernel parameters to try. The one that worked was pci=noacpi.

Once that was figured out, the installation went fine. I had the usual troubles installing the Perl modules for The Gimp, (send me an e-mail if you need to know how) but with my full /etc directory backed up from the old install was pretty clean.

The laptop had some trouble, but that was mostly user error. First, I had trouble getting the machine to boot off of the CD. Cleaning everything solved that one. Then I had a strange error when I went to upgrade. The install said it could not find the install package repodata file. I should have paid more attention the first time through as I would see this error again. I just figured that I should do a clean install instead of an upgrade and proceeded. Half way through the package load, the machine locked up. I cursed and started over. I then kept getting the same error about repodata. No on-line search showed this error. Finally it struck me. I was entering the IP address for the server instead of the P3 500 with the install data on it! Thankfully, once I had that figured out the install completed successfully.

Here are some of the things I have found with FC6:

• Printer support is much improved. You don’t use the HP IP emulation, rather IPP: protocol which works very well with both Windows and OS 10.
• Installing the Java runtime environment (JRE) for Firefox is a pain. You can use an RPM from Sun that puts Java in the correct place, but you need to use this command (as root) to get it to work: ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_09/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so
• There is a new search program that comes with Fedora called Beagle. It is supposed to index everything in all your files so you can find a document with a quick search. I don’t use Google desktop and I don’t need Beagle. It hogs memory and CPU. I uninstalled it yum remove beagle
• I tried running the laptop with SELinux (Red Hat’s Secure Enterprise Linux) enabled. It rebooted half way through the main yum update after install, and then complained about restarting. I disabled it entirely. It has always caused me nothing but problems. Hey, I’m not an enterprise so why do I need secure?
• The NTP daemon on the server did not need any tweaking to get it to accept NTP calls from the other PCs on the net. On past installs it has taken a lot of changes to the ntp.conf file to get it to work.
• I haven’t gotten flash to work yet.

Ugh. Nothing more worth saying.

We had some very interesting weather over the Labor Day weekend. I’d have blogged this sooner, but I was out of the country for a business trip.

We were out in Aguanga for the holiday weekend. The excitment started on Saturday. Quite a bit of moisture had been flowing into the area, and was being backed up by an additional flow from hurricane John. The cumulus clouds started forming by mid-day, and by mid-afternoon, you could see several large thunderstorms in the distance. There was a particularly large storm over the Palm Desert to Pinyon Pines area. The National Weather Service had severe storm and flash flood warnings up. We went into Anza for Mass at 5pm. It was very hot and humid, and it was fairly windy. When we came out of Mass at 5:45, the wind had changed direction and the temperature had fallen by 10-15 degrees.

The real excitment started when we were driving back. As we were driving southwest out of Anza on California Route 79, I looked out the window to the southeast. There was a huge cloud of dust. It looked like the pictures I’ve seen of big dust storms in China and Australia. This one was about 1,500 feet high and extended from Anza off into the distance. I lost no time driving back to the house in Lake Riverside Estates, about 10 miles from Anza. As we were driving, the cloud kept getting closer to us. It must have been moving 30-40 miles per hour, and since we were driving obliquely to its direction, it was catching up to us.

It finally swirled around us when we got back to the house. It was a mass of gritty air and high wind. No damage, but a bit of excitement for sure. But very little excitment compared to what came on Sunday.

We left early Sunday for Julian. Just a quick siteseeing trip to the old mining town in northern San Diego County. A pretty drive down highway 79, through Warner Springs, past Lake Henshaw. My daughter pointed out the many domes on top of Mount Palomar. Julian was fine. A tourist town. We had a nice lunch and bought our apple pie (apple pie is a local specialty). As they had the day before, the cumulus were forming by mid-day. We started back to Aguanga at about 1 pm. We had a little rain on the way back, particularly just after passing Sunshine Summit and Oak Grove. My daughter was quite excited about the rain (I was too). She said she wanted to be right in the middle of a big thunderstorm. Her mother told her to be careful what she asked for. Prophetic words indeed.

We ran into solid rain, desert thunderstorm style as we drove up California Highway 371 to Lake Riverside Estates (LRE). The truck (Did I mention the truck? Probably need to put the truck story in another post.) was bufetted by the wind and large drops hit us with loud smacks. We slowed way down. The rain started about 2 miles from the south gate to LRE. When we got to the gate, someone ahead of us had just swiped the card key but the gate was only partially opened and not moving. We got past. It was a bit tense at this point as the rain was coming down very hard and we still had two miles to go before we got to the house.

Some background information is important here. When we purchased the house, one item revealed in the disclosures was that several years ago a big storm had sent a stream of mud down the hill and into the house. The previous owners had done some extensive grading to prevent a recurrence. But we were worried.

We got back to the house. The major flow of water on the street was going away from the property, exactly as desired. There was a good flow down the hill, but at first glance it looked OK. We parked the truck and went in the house. Flash, bang, crash. Lightning closer than half a mile away. That cool ripping sound that comes when the flash is really close. Rain pounding down on the Sun porch and car port roofs. Water streaming out of the waterspouts. And a steady flow of water down the driveway, creating a growing mud-filled puddle in the car port.

I stomped around, trying to get it to drain until one too many flashes of lightning came close and I decided it wasn’t a good idea to get fried. My wife noticed that the water was not draining away from the Sun porch very well. The major drainage was working fine. The only problem was the drive, which was now filled with muddy water 6 inches deep.

The rain continued for at least 45 minutes. After one too many crashes of thunder, my daughter hid in the closet with her rats. Yes, I think she changed her mind about wanting to be in the middle of a storm!

After the rain stopped, I was able to find the drain and clear the pine needles away from it so it would drain. We were soon left with a lot of Anza mud, the wet version of the ever-present Anza dust. We got out the wheelbarrow and started shovelling. Progress was slow, but we were able to use the sand and mud to block the place where the water was sluicing down the drive. We cut a couple of channels that we hoped would divert much of the mud the next time. Several hours later, we (well my wife primarly as I went into Anza with a load of green stuff for the dump) finished the clean up. The drains had all worked. We now know what needs to be done to the driveway to permanently fix the problem.

And I hope we have seen the worst of the storms for a while.

Yesterday was yet another day of work in the yard in Aguanga. The effort to maintain 2.5 acres is beginning to sink in. The house in LA is virtually maintenance-free since it has all been recently landscaped and we can have a bi-weekly service come by for a very reasonable costs. Not so in Aguanga.

It started with the plumber’s arrival around 10am. When the LP gas company came by to set up our account, they found that the piping system would not hold pressure, so we were cut off. We have hired a plumber (covered by the home warranty we hope) to fix all the leaks. There are many leaks. The plumber estimates that at least half of the former owner’s gas bill was just leakage! Most of the leaks are new installations (since the last owners purchased) and show the signs of being done by amateur plumbers. There are zig-zagging short sections of pipe with many connections (75% of which leak). Our theory is that the installation was do-it-yourself as all the pipe lengths are off-the-shelf. A plumber would cut pipes to length and thread them. Not so the amateur.

After the plumber left, it was on to mowing the lawn. Last weekend we replaced the blade drive belt. The one the prior owner had on it (we bought the tractor-mower from him) was too short. Installed, it ran two of the three blades backwards. So, with it fixed, I was able to mow the lawn area. No problems here. It had been a couple of weeks, so it took two passes to get it done without bogging down the mower. Bagged the grass and I was done.

Next project: The jungle. On the hill in front of the house, an area of popple (or cottonwood) had been growing up like crazy and had become a jungle. Last weekend we fixed leaks in six of nine irrigation lines in the front. One was a broken pipe in the jungle. I bought a machete on Friday and attacked the jungle. An hour or so later, I had cleared a good portion of the jungle. I found another broken irrigation pipe. All that water was letting the plants grow out of control. There is still more clearing to do. If only I had the right motorized tool — a chainsaw perhaps?

I put a fresh tank of gas into the tractor mower, and thought I would clear some of the weeds out in the larger property. No problem until a wad of wire (that came from ?) went under the blades and wrapped around before I could shut them down. OK, run the tractor up on some boards, lie on the ground and slowly cut the wire away. 45 minutes later it was freed. A quick test run showed that it still cut on all three blades. I did have a scare when I heard a clattering noise. Fearing another wire tangle I looked back and saw a piece of re-bar sticking up out of the group. It is in a large piece of concrete near the gate. What other suprises are out there?

Finally, time for a shower and then off to Mass at Sacred Heart church in Anza. Oh, I forgot to mention checking the spa.

Whew. I was looking for a relaxing second home for observing. I’ll never get the observatory built until this backlog of maintenance gets knocked down. But I did get to observe. More on that in another post.

We came out to Aguanga last night, leaving LA around 8:10. We stopped at Home Depot for a few items and made it to the house at about 10:40. The clouds had come down so we arrived in a dense fog that lasted most of the night. Within an hour or so things were cooled off in the house for a nice quiet evening.

Today was a day of work, as a new house often is. I took a trip to the local waste transfer station to drop of a bunch of used boxes, then set about cleaning the floor of the workshop. It was (and still is, for that matter) very dirty. It had flooded during a severe storm and there was a layer of dried mud on the floor.

We wet down the floor, scrubbed it, then vacumed up the water. It made a huge difference. The process literally created mud which was then slurped up into the shop vac. We cleaned 2/3 of the space — exactly what we had planned. I then took a mop and plain water and cleaned a section we had already cleaned. I got up a bunch of mud and dirt. I can’t imagine what I would have gotten up if I had used a cleaner.

At any rate, it looks a lot better. It will be very nice once it has been thoroughly cleaned and painted.

We are here in Aguanga and have internet connectivity!