Taking a breather from the city and getting outdoors is almost required in my world. With the glorious weather we’re blessed with, there’s no better time to commune with nature. Lake Cachuma, just north of Santa Barbara is the perfect antidote to the hectic city pace of LA.

A couple of weekends ago, a gang of us met at Lake Cachuma to celebrate a friends birthday…. and it was a blast! We rented a pontoon boat and cruised around the lake, just enjoying the day and each other. It was spectacular! Tons of herons in secret lagoons that fingered off the main lake, thousands of birds bobbing in the water. Although we don’t fish, I hear it’s great fishing.

As we putted around, we found lots of adventures; sandy coves to picnic on, trails, but mostly, we simply drank in the sheer beauty of nature. There’s campsites all around one side of the lake and even yurts you can rent. The boats come in all sizes, easily rented from the marina. Call and check the prices… I know the pontoons are around $150, but split between a couple of people, it’s a deal.  We got a huge one with lots of space and a canvas shade overhead. It was perfect for the day and easily pulled up on the different areas of shore we wanted to explore. Super fun way to spend a fall day!

(UPDATE 10.22): I just have to drop this in at the top how deeply touched I am by the outpouring of kind words and appreciation. I’m still amazed that things played out as they did — and so successfully. As some of you know I fancy myself something of an amateur one-man Random Animal Assistance League (be it at my house, near downtown or in the wilds of South Los Angeles), but never in my craziest dreams did I think it would include such a scenario. Each and every one of you who took the time to comment blew me away and made my day, so from the bottom of my heart: Thank You!

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The first grown-up book I ever read cover to cover was “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” which is about gulls as much as another cherished book of mine, “Watership Down” is about rabbits, but when you’re a snot-nosed 9-year-old kid still moving his lips as he reads Richard Bach’s anthropomorphic allegory was just what a wide-eyed punk needed to ever-romanticize the sea birds. Even to this day as a wide-eyed old dude whenever I see a flock of the feathered fiends I’ll pick one out to be my own personal JLS.

Well one picked me out yesterday while I stopped on my bike ride to work along Ballona Creek at Centinela to feed some old bread destined for the dumpster to the birds there. Except it had a big problem in the form of a nasty three-pronged fishhook embedded in its mouth, which prevented it from enjoing the tasty bread bits, closing its beak… or perhaps even living for much longer:

I go into deathless elaboration on the ensuing rescue mission here, accompanied by some long unedited video clips that I’ve embedded after the jump. But if you’re in need of a little bit of a happyendingness or just want to hear a grown man weep, check ‘em out.

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This is happening in the hills above Calabasas, in the West Valley, so I have a soft spot for this new Halloween attraction. Plus, they incorporate actual real-life ghost storytelling into the event, which is crazy cool.

Looks spooky already: Gillette Ranch from above.

The Haunted Hayride was started by a couple gals who were transplants from the midwest & east coast, and who missed the Halloween hayrides they’d had in their childhoods. In addition to being super spooky ’cause it’s, well, in the woods and all, it has your standard scares and scream-inducing surprises. It also has readings of ghost stories, a carnival sideshow,  cider & candy apples, so I’m sold.

They’re getting well-known names to do the ghost story sessions, and it looks like Amy Smart will be doing this Friday’s reading.

They’ve given me a discount to pass on to you, our loyal Metblogs readers. When you buy your tix online, you’ll have the option to enter a promotional code: type in “Metblogs” for five bucks off! You’re welcome.

As the Station Fire still lingers over these last weeks, only now finally almost fully contained, I’ve pointed many folks to the dramatic images of the pyrocumulus clouds that have come out of it, especially the time-lapse images of these clouds developing.  Like many folks new to having such large fires quite so close, I only learned about the pyrocumulus mechanism with this fire.  One thing that is dramatic in this phenomenon (apart from the sufficiently dramatic itching eyes, headaches, and sore throats that all my friends seem to share) is its striking resemblance to an H-Bomb blast.

I am not the first to note this resemblance, of course.  Not even the first Metblogs author to do so.  Nor the first to think and write about the identity of the thermodynamic mechanism of the formation of an H-Bomb’s mushroom cloud over the course of seconds, and the fire’s formation of one over the course of days or weeks.

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Prompted by an alleged coyote attack in August and another last Wednesday night wherein a man sleeping on the ground near Travel Town reportedly woke up to find a coyote biting his foot, California Department of Fish & Game wasted no time dispatching wildlife trappers who spent Thursday and Sunday in Griffith Park hunting and killing seven of the creatures.

As an unabashed coyote admirer who’s had a number of uneventful close coyote encounters all over Los Angeles, the tragic kicker of it all, as reported by the L.A. Times, is that having not been able to collect the attacking animal’s DNA from the victim’s foot, there’s no way of knowing if the culprit is among the seven carcasses collected.

But Fish & Game officials don’t let such pertinent bits of evidence keep them from raining death on a whole bunch of otherwise innocent coyote flesh, especially since the department can stand stoic and clenched behind a policy of wholesale slaughter if there’s deemed to be a danger to the public (or at least that segment of it that despite all the “Warning: Dangerous Animals” signage posted throughout the park decides it’s entirely fine to lay oneself out on the grass after dark and go night-night).

My point being this wasn’t a rogue coyote rampantly or randomly attacking someone in their Atwater Village driveway. This was a creature in its familiar environment who made the mistake of sampling what it thought was the best buffet ever.

But the state agency in charge doesn’t see any difference.

“Somebody getting bitten is an imminent threat,” said Fish & Game biologist Kevin Brennan to the Times.

If the park’s surviving coyotes could I’m sure they’d yell “No shit! To us!”

For some apparantely unsubtantiated reason, Manhattan Beach city officials are considering clamping down on personal trainers in city parks after they’ve allegedly found gym equipment left behind. NBC Los Angeles, who covered the story, spoke with a number of frequent park visitors, none of whom could recall an issue with gym equipment.

City officials hope to pass a ban on such dangerous equipment as yoga mats and exercise balls, but in the meantime point out existing city code that they believe already prohibits personal trainers from bringing clients to parks:

12.48.070 Commercial activities.
Commercial activities, including, but not limited to vendors, caterers, and peddlers, including vendors, caterers and commercial enterprises associated with permitted, organized groups, shall be prohibited in all City parks unless a permit is obtained from the Director of Parks and Recreation. Nothing in this section shall prohibit the Director of Parks and Recreation from awarding a franchise for special events to a particular caterer or vendor.

I’m not a lawyer, so correct me if I’m wrong, but if they’re going to use this to charge personal trainers with a misdemeanor, wouldn’t this also apply to nannies or babysitters?

A few short hours ago it looked like my gut reaction that the Angeles National Forest fire had been caused by a fiendish rapscallion (I’m no longer using the word “terrorist”) wasn’t far off the mark.

But wait, what’s this? A new report on KNX 1070 says that the U.S. Forest Service has retracted its earlier “human caused” statement about the fire.

What does this mean? It means my two-year-old daughter’s assertion that dragons are behind the blaze may still be a valid theory.

You can run, Puff, but you can’t hide.

Image: A Michael Martchenko illustration from Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess.

The beauty we get to witness created from destruction. There’s been so much smoke in the sky, that I’ve stopped looking up. Thanks to Shayera for giving me the nudge.

Moon on September 1, 2009

You can see a couple of other photos here.

The picture at left is a view of the Station Fire, taken from Marina del Rey yesterday.  According to news reports, the fire is still threatening the communications facilities and the observatory atop Mount Wilson.  It has already burned its way through and past the fabulously scenic Angeles Crest Highway.  Just three months after a major stretch of the Highway was opened after having been closed for over four years, the Highway is closed once again.

I am reminded, however, of the great day I spent on top of Mount Wilson and driving the Angeles Crest Highway last Thanksgiving weekend.  It was the last weekend before a portion of the Highway was to be closed for the winter.  We took a gorgeous drive up the Highway, and took the side trip to the Mount Wilson Observatory for a picnic lunch with dizzying views.
Tour the Highway and Mt. Wilson, after the jump

Certainly the timelapse video footage screencap’d on the left that I caught of the Station Fire late Sunday afternoon from the roof of my Silver Lake house is neither as compelling nor as dramatic as others made much closer to the devastation being wrought.

But it immediately reminded me of the timelapse video screencap’d on the right that I made a couple days shy of two years ago from the exact same location of the exact same landscape, only this time the billowing clouds were strictly meteorological in nature, not pyrological.

Both videos are available after the jump, and it’s interesting to see them play out together from a then-and-now perspective.

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