Eagle Court of Honor Weekend

• Big weekend started off with Bengt's Eagle Court of Honor
• Jaya's 20th birthday breakfast at Claire's in Solana Beach.
• Open House San Diego - Barrio Logan and East Village

Dixon Lake

Butler Canyon Loop Solo Backpack

The guidebook really had this one wrong!  I started up Butler Canyon and after 4.5 miles started looking for the "saddle-shaped boulder" and the trail up the slope; neither was found.  I scrambled up the cliff and hoped to see the way to the playa but saw more canyons.  Good thing I had my GPS and maps.  I found a strenuous cross-country route to the playa (which I think was a different one than that mentioned in the book).  After going over a low saddle, I found a good spot for camp among the cacti and rocks.  It was really windy at night but I was cozy in my quilt and home-made micro-fleece buff.  Next morning, with rain possible, I got an early start and traced my way down a drainage into Box Canyon.  This lead to Coyote Creek where I filled up on some water.  Unfortunately my Sawyer Squeeze was completely clogged so I had to add some tablets I keep as a backup. A few more miles of walking got me to the turn-off for Alcoholic Pass.  The trail up the pass was steep but nice.  The views of Borrego Springs were great.  After cresting the pass, it was easy going down an alluvial fan to the road and back to my car.

Butler and Rockhouse Canyon Junction

Butler Canyon

Where's that trail?

Camp among the cacti

Coyote Creek flowing strong

Alcoholic Pass register

Blockchain Bubble

Interesting take on the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies.

HALT Specialist Snow Camp

My pulk sled

Showshoeing on barely enough snow

Frozen lake

Winter sky

Ice bridge

AppSec California 2018

Annenberg Beach House

Selfie on Temescal Canyon hike

Registration desk

Cool Netflix business card

San Jacinto Snow Day

The troop was hoping for more snow but we had a great time hiking around and finding enough snow for a snowball fight.

Lunch at Long Valley Station

Not much snow

Biggest snow patch we could find

Desert overlook

Books

• Spying on the Bomb by Jeffrey Richelson
• The Science of Energy: Resources and Power Explained by Michael Wysession
• Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
• Complete Guide to Winter Camping by Kevin Callen
• January Chronicles: Isaac's Legacy by Stu Schreiber
• Masters of War: Histories Greatest Strategic Thinkers by Andrew Wilson

Mike Rowe

I love Mike Rowe.

Sheep Canyon Backpacking

The troop headed out to the desert for a beginning level backpack to Sheep Canyon.  We drove out there Friday night and camped out at the cars a the gauging station along Coyote Creek.  In the morning, we packed up, ate breakfast and headed out.  The air temp was nice but the sun was pretty fierce so it made it a bit hotter than I thought.  But we made good time and was at the campground by lunch.  The scout did great hiking with just a bit of weariness.  But as soon as we got to camp, they had plenty of energy to clamber up the nearby mountains!
There were many more people in the area than in the past.  Mostly off-roaders with their truck tents.  We where the only hikers.  The stream had plenty of water but we had to go farther up the canyon to get to it.
Sunday morning, the scouts made fast work of the trail and we got to the cars and made it to Los Jilberto's in time for lunch!

Christmas Circle

Cowboy Camping

Desert Terrain

Desert Sky

Family Christmas

We spent Christmas in OC with my brother's family and had a great time!  Tons of fun:

• Birthday dinner at Morton's Steakhouse - my mom reserved a banquet room for an awesome evening of steak
• K1Speed - both Anaheim and Irvine tracks
• Griffith Observatory - crazy traffic but we had dinner, then went around a roadblock and made it up there.  Still didn't have enough time to see everything so will have to go back.  Recommend nearby Mexico City restaurant and the Trails Cafe in Ferndell.
• Games, Games Games: Hand in Foot, Yahtzee, Apples to Apples, Things, Say Anything, Ticket to Ride, Dominoes.  Codenames turned out to be a huge hit.  Chameleon was also played alot.
• Worked on the Bradley GT2 - Kevin and I got dad's old Bradley GT2 running after nearly 30 years.  We rebuilt the rear brakes since the parking brake was left on and fused the drums.  Also replaced the master cylinder.  The engine only needed some oil and gas to get it going.  Lots to work left to get it street worthy but we were able to go around the block!

Sophie's stocking

K1 leaderboard

Everyone passing Jyoti

Griffith Observatory from the bottom of the hill

Griffith Observatory at night

New Year's Day In-Ko-Pah Hike

The hiking group headed to In-Ko-Pah for a great hike to border monument 261, Blue Angels Peak, along the border fence and back through the Valley of the Moon.

On the way to Blue Angels Peak

One of many interesting rock formations

Blue Angel Peak

Blue sky, brown dirt

Rock

Backcountry Water Update

Red Hat retired their old version of Openshift and replaced it with the Kubernetes-based version 3.  However, they also took away some features in the free plan that I was using, such as cron jobs.
So I spent the last couple weeks doing the migration.

• Replaced cron jobs with JEE batch jobs.  These are scheduled using JEE schedules.  Pretty cool.
• I still need to add the custom domain forwarding (another feature in the paid plans that used to be free).  I am looking at cloudflare as a proxy.
• The service is having problems deploying my app with storage.  I couldn't figure out the root cause so I made some services to reload the data when I deploy a new version.

Old School Computer Fix

I try to avoid household IT work these days but Bengt's computer had trouble with the latest Microsoft patch Tuesday.  The symptom was that it would start to the the "Automatic Recovery" screen then die (usually beeping incessantly).  The weird thing was that I couldn't get to the BIOS to try to boot to a USB.  I was just about to give up and take it to the local PC repair shop when I read the motherboard manual which reminded of the good ol' CMOS.  The manual displayed the pins required to reset the CMOS and after searching the garage for an jumper, the computer booted up!  Windows was able to finish the update and everything was peachy.

Signal Fires Are Dumb

Carry a mirror folks!  And mix in a map and compass and maybe learn how to use them.

Lots of Books

Lots of stuff read and listened to:

• Fleet at Flood Tide by James D. Hornfischer
• It Happened in the Cimarron Country by Stephen Zimmer and Steve Lewis
• The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah by Ray C. Colton
• Big Pacific by Rebecca Tansley
• Neptune's Inferno: The US Navy at Guadalcanal by James D. Hornfischer
• Mr. Lincoln: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Allen Guelzo
• Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays and Isotopic Murder: A Journey Into the Wild World of Nuclear Science by James Mahaffey
• Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power by James Mahaffey
• Butterfield Overland Mail: Only Through Passenger on the First Westbound Stage by Waterman L. Ormsby

Thanksgiving in New Orleans

Day 1

• Arrived. We stayed at the Marriott Courtyard on St. Charles and Canal St.  It was a great location for getting around.
• Dinner at Luke.

Day 2

• Jackson Square - fairly quiet due to Thanksgiving
• Cafe du Monde for coffee and beneigts - a bit overrated as other places had better coffee and beignets
• Dinner at Cafe Adeliade - good food but they seems a bit understaffed

Day 3

• Walking tour of St. Louis Cemetery
• Lunch at Sweet Grill
• Walking tour of French Quarter
• Dinner at Brigstons - fabulous!

Day 4

• Chalmette Battlefield - great history on the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans
• National WWII Museum - great museum for general WWII history but I sought out the personal artifacts
• Dinner at Commanders Palace - deserves its reputation

Day 5

• Natchez brunch - fun cruise on the river with a cool jazz band, Duke Heitger's Steamboat Stompers
• Literary walking tour
• Flight home

Things for next time

• Cabildo/Presbytere Museums
• 1850 House Museum
• See a jazz show somewhere
• Bayou excursion

Jackson Square

Cafe du Monde

St. Louis Cemetary

St. Louis Cemetary

To Live and Let Die

Chalmette Memorial

Tree with Spanish Moss

Ignatius Reilly

Natchez Engine Room

Joshua Tree Exploring

Instead of rock climbing, the troop went up to Joshua Tree NP for some exploring.  The idea was to do some navigation training and find some cool stuff in the park.  Since all the campgrounds were full, we camped out in the BLM land north of town.  It was pretty flat, dusty and very cold but we made it work.

BLM camp

"High Noon" pictographs

Cross country

Old stamp mill

Long abandoned car

Bighorn sheep (can you spot both?)

Sunset