I took so many pictures at the seashore over the past couple of beautiful weekends here in SoCal. I keep finding many that I want to share at the peril of looking like “The Seaside Channel.” Anyhow, this one of yet another California Brown Pelican in flight along the cliffs caught the details of the underside of these beautiful birds. Click on the image for the large version.

We have mentioned before on our blog that we try to book the same hotel room when we go to Avalon for our anniversary. This is a photo of the actual room. We spent our wedding night here and several of the anniversaries too. A feature not shown in this view off-camera to the right is a lovely whirlpool Jacuzzi tub-for-two. This year, the room had a face lift from shabby-chic to this modern style.

I threw a little Flash™ code together to get this image to pan back and forth.

Today’s outing was a lot of fun - again. We took our usual assortment of hand guns and our Remington 870 shotguns.

Our range was really busy today. Late in the summer, we noticed a lull in attendance, but the last couple of fall weekends, the shooters are back. It’s a good thing that people keep current with their firearms practice.

We shared a booth and took turns randomly shooting the handguns. We shot close to 200 rounds of .45s and about 100 rounds of 9mm. We also shot a handful of .38s through the revolver (and a couple of 158gr. .357 magnums left over from the last box we bought).

After we finished with the handguns, we got out the shotguns and put 25 rounds of 12 and 20 gauge through them. Damsel’s is a 20 gauge ‘youth model’ that we bought since her reach is a bit shorter than needed for the full-sized 870 - or so I thought - she is now just as comfortable with my full sized 870 as she is with her smaller one. That’s her in the video with her Warthog and my 870. The guns in the Pelican Case are the Glocks on the left (26 and 30), the S&W 686 revolver, S&W 908s and the Warthog.

It was another nice day here today, so we made the trip to the Palos Verdes Peninsula to see what we could see. I picked several of Damsel’s photos and made this little slideshow. Enjoy.

The true context of firearms ownership is in the defense of liberty, defense of country, defense of family and the traditional provisioning of game for the table. There is so much at stake in the coming weeks for these constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Keep this in mind as you look at this nice portrait of my favorite pistol - and be sure to vote with this in mind.

Click image to magnificate.

The second wave of beautiful plumeria flowers continue to open. This is the latest of about a dozen new ones enjoying the Southern California mid October warm spell.

After a horrible three weeks on Wall Street and another demoralizing day today (especially for conservatives), I’m going to just say woooo saaaaah and divert my creativity to these nerdy panoramas. In the top image, on October 11th, I stood at Del Cerro Park near the top of San Pedro Hill on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and snapped eight separate images in sequence from left to right. I used the Canon Zoom Browser Photo Stitch utility to assemble this 180 degree view of the Catalina Channel on a nice clear day.

The second image is an experiment - The normal mode for panoramas is to center the horizon vertically in the image and pan the camera. I wanted to get a panorama of the coastline from Del Cerro and to get the foreground to blend into the picture as well. I am pretty pleased with the results I got. I took the series by trying to keep the horizon ‘horizontal’ in the viewfinder. I took six such images going from left to right. I had to post-process the pictures using a parallel scan setting on the stitch tool to get this ‘fish-eye’ sort of panoramic rendering. Both the foreground and the distance are rendered in perspective - just the effect I wanted to get.

Click on either of these images to view them in the image viewer.

This was such an unusual happening, the local Fox remote Catalina camera got these shots of heavy surf in the normally pond-like Avalon Harbor. I took these shots of the TV yesterday morning as the waves were happening. None of the usual open air putt putt cars seemed to be going up and down Crescent and Via Casino as normally is the case.

Damsel took a lot of photos last Saturday when the air was exceptionally clear here in Southern California. We spent quite a lot of time shooting photos along the coastline, but when it came time to climb back over the hill to our side, we stopped at a scenic overlook and took this panoramic look back towards the coastline and Catalina Island in the distance. Click for the full-size panoramic image in the viewer.

Our trip to the range today was a lot of fun. When we got there, the place started getting really busy. We were glad to see the activity pick up after the usual summertime slowdown. We saw families shooting together, but not as many kids as we have seen in the past.

Firearms Inventory

• Glock 30 .45ACP
• Para Warthog .45ACP
• Glock 26 9×19mm
• Smith & Wesson 908 9×19mm
• Smith & Wesson 686 .357 magnum
• Remington 870 20 gauge
• Remington 870 12 gauge

We generally start out with the handguns and finish with the shotguns. Today, we just mixed it up with the handguns and switched off between the 12 and 20 gauge. I didn’t count the number of rounds we shot, but it was on a par with our usual, I’m sure. For sure there were 100 rounds of .45 ACP through each of the Para Warthog and the Glock 30. We finished with 25 rounds through each of the shotguns.

As an aside, when I dismantled the 20 gauge shotgun for cleaning, I really hacked myself up getting it back together. Damsel did 4 band-aids of first aid on my fingers and hands. My fingers are just a little big for the 20 gauge - I have no problem with the 12 gauge even though the edges on the receiver are just as sharp.