A River Runs Through Us – Sometimes


Late this morning, we had another intense monsoon here in town. It was not as bad as the July 18th storm, but the road in front of the house flowed for about fifteen minutes with runoff from higher terrain to the west and north. These Arizona monsoon thunderstorms sure do dump a lot of rain in a short period.

The retention walls we had built continue to do the jobs we intended for them. The wall in the back wash diverted runoff to the west side of the property and the wall around the RV drive kept runoff from the hill behind us from coming onto the driveway (mostly). The front wall, seen in the twelve second video above directs the flow downstream on the road rather than eroding the frontage any further.

I panned the camera from west through south to eastward down the road. It was still raining as I made the video, albeit not as hard as during the peak intensity ten minutes prior to this. After these last two episodes of rain, we can know that our money building walls and paving the RV drive was well spent.

Butterfly Getting Nectar From Red Bird

Butterfly Getting Nectar

I saw a yellow butterfly browsing the Red Birds of Paradise in the courtyard this afternoon. I went inside to get my camera and the butterfly was still browsing when I came back out.

I took several photos of the butterfly as it browsed. In this particular shot, you can see the butterfly’s proboscis reaching into the flower for the nectar. Click on the image to enlarge.

Meet Baby G

Sweet Baby G and Grandma

This is the reason we came the two-hundred plus miles to the California Desert: our new grandson!

His Mama is staying at the home of the baby’s other grandparents while his Daddy is back in town (the Pasadena, CA area) completing the room addition to accommodate the baby. This is good for us that he is in the Palm Springs area, since making the trip this far cuts off 120 miles of pretty aggravating driving if we were to go to the baby’s parents home.

He is only just over a week old and is the cutest little thing! I held him and fed him about two ounces of milk. While we were there, he was very alert for a newborn and was quite actively stretching and moving about. He didn’t cry or fuss at all.

He is small, still just over five pounds, but perfect in every way. He has a nice round head, long fingers and toes, is gaining weight and, of course, pooping and peeing his fair share. I hated to say goodbye for now when we headed back to our campsite.

The other set of Grandparents told us that the new little guy will be visiting them often and said we’re welcome to come here whenever he’s in town. We will probably be back in September when we are planning to take our next California trip.

Desert Camping

Desert Camping

Tonight, we’re in Palm Desert, CA., anticipating meeting our new grandson, Baby G., in the morning. We had sort of a late start today and, after Bob getting us lost a couple of times, finally in camp after five PM PDT.

Once here, we note that this is a very lovely RV park with all the creature comfort for us and our little dogs. There are two or three swimming pools, a very nice dog run with shade trees which are a big plus in the desert heat.

We are relaxing this evening after a tedious desert crossing and plan to get up in the morning to go the couple of miles over to where the baby is staying. We will post photos of the new baby shortly after we get them.

The Obama Clean Power Plan is Built Upon a Pack of Lies

Like just about everything this administration and Democrats in general say or do is based on fabrication of data (read LIARS). The whole premise of the so-called Clean Power Plan is based on the false presumption that carbon dioxide (CO2) is harmful to the planet. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Worse, the media (whether gullible or complicit) fan the falsehood fires until the misinformed public buys into the bovine feces which is most of the anthropogenic climate change argument. Popular support of the AGW theory runs rampant among media believers to the point where they buy electric cars or hybrids thinking they are helping. They even tolerate the wind farm eyesores while shunning real clean power like nuclear.

The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change posted an article refuting the administration’s claims of impending CO2 DOOM an excerpt of which is posted here:

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is built upon a pack of lies. This I know because for the past two decades I have read and published reviews of literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that show rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have little impact on global climate. These reviews, along with some of my own original research, are archived on the CO2 Science website, www.co2science.org, as well as in the 2013 publication Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. This massive collection of papers definitively refutes the narrative President Obama is attempting to sell America and the rest of the world; for there is nothing unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about the planet’s current level of warmth, extreme weather events are not increasing, and the net impact of rising temperatures is to actually save human lives.

Furthermore, it is equally disingenuous of the President and his Administration to characterize CO2 as a “pollutant.” Carbon dioxide is a well-known aerial fertilizer, and many thousands of studies have proven the growth-enhancing, water-saving and stress-alleviating benefits it provides for the biosphere, which benefits were recently summarized in the 2014 publication Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts.

The reality is that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations are stimulating the productivity of the entire biosphere, where despite all of the many real and imagined assaults on Earth’s vegetation that have occurred over the past several decades, including wildfires, disease, pest outbreaks, deforestation, and climatic changes in temperature and precipitation, as shown in the figure below, the terrestrial biosphere has become, in the mean, an increasingly greater sink for CO2-carbon, more than compensating for any of the negative effects these phenomena may have had on the global biosphere. Additionally, the direct monetary benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on global crop production have been estimated to have been a staggering $3.2 trillion over the period 1961-2011.

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Announcing New Grandson Baby “G”

GLG III

Late last night, the newest member of our family arrived to the outside world. “Baby G,” is the firstborn to our son and his wife. He was born at 11:02 PM last night in California, weighed in at a petite 5Lb 2oz and is healthy, cute as the dickens and already developing his personality. We can’t wait to meet him.

We are planning to visit with the family out there in September, with other stops planned in order to see the rest of the extended clan. We can hardly wait!

Update: We decided we couldn’t wait to see the new little guy since if we go this weekend we can see him while he is at his other grandparents place in the Coachella Valley, i.e. we don’t have to go into the LA Area swamp.