With the family today, we had whole glazed ham with scalloped potatoes (the potatoes are a Kenji López-Alt recipe). The swiss cheese (we used Raclette) makes the dish 😙👌

A spiral of creamy scalloped potatoes in glass bowl with the slices edge up. The top is brown & crisp.

71°F at 06:23 in the North Sacramento Valley. 18°F warmer than yesterday this time. 😬


I neglected to post that our cultivated native California roses (Rosa californica) are blooming. Their flowers are fragile and nearly just by looking at them they go to tatters


3am today: Another quake, another shake alert. M5.2 and I didn’t feel it. #RaspberryShake

A map showing the quake at lake almanor and the seismograph.

Earthquake east of Chico near Susanville! People in Chico felt it but not here in Orland. Very clear signal on my #RaspberryShake

A seismograph of the 5.5 earthquake

Ortho4XP on macOS Ventura

Ortho4XP has some code that’s been deprecated in the latest Python 3 Shapely and Numpy. You’ll need to downgrade Shapely to version 1.8.5. On my Mac after following the Big Sur installation instructions (I’m running Ventura): pip3 install shapely==1.8.5 After that you’ll need to go through the source files and replace numpy.bool to just bool and then numpy.float to just float (I used bbedit). This is probably safer than downgrading numpy.

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Last weekend: just a taste of the views you can have at Pinnacles National Park, California, if you take the the High Peaks Trail. #PinnaclesNationalPark #Fujifilm #GeologyMakesThePhoto

Pinnacles of rock jut out of a hilly landscape, with their northsides in shadow and southern sides completely lit up. Vegetation is quite green with a classic kodachrome blue sky and mountain ranges along the horizon.


Last weekend: in its most happiest habitat, predominantly here are Yellow Monkeyflowers within massive rocks at Pinnacles National Park, California. #MonkeyFlowers #PinnaclesNationalPark

Sandwiched inbewteen massive lichen covered rocks are vertical stems of monkeyflowers showing bunches of yellow flowers. The rocks are kind of forming a small channel.


I’ve learned a bit about repairing hose bibs and turns out it’s pretty easy. I’m kind of looking forward to repacking my front yard hose bib this Friday so it stops leaking at the stem and I can put a new Rachio smart hose timer on it.


Ash-throated flycatcher was also a new bird for us at Pinnacles National Park. Ash-throated flycatcher looking toward the horizon! It is perched on a bare branch against a blue sky. It’s a slender bird with a gray chest and belly and a dark gray head. Its wings are brown with white bars that curve down. Its brown tail is very narrow.


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