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Why would they want to fix it?

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 In 1970, my first year in high school (grade 10, though; 7-9 was junior high), I joined Key Club, a national high school service organization. One thing that immediately struck me was that people didn't seem to care about the hungry, the sick, women and child abuse, animal abuse. (Has anything changed?) When we went to a nursing home (now called assisted living facility), I was playing dominoes with one of my friends and two elderly women. We had a great conversation while we were playing, and something one of the women said has stayed with me all these years: People don't care about anything unless it affects either them personally or someone they know. It's generality painted with a huge brush, but I think it's true. In today's world, U.S. President #45, his supporters and enablers, the excessively rich, and the big corporations are the epitome of not caring about anything other than what will make them richer in the short term. When I read The Andromeda Evolutio
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Picture rewards

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If you always have your camera attached to your arm, sometimes you can be rewarded with a nice picture or two:   It hovered just a couple of feet from me for about 15 seconds and let me take a dozen pictures. Judging from its behavior, this is either a female or juvenile Anna’s hummingbird ( Calypte anna ). Considering that it hovered just feet from me for so long, I would guess a juvenile that doesn’t know any better yet. 😃 Anna’s hummingbirds like to hover while they are gathering nectar or catching insects. If your garden is like mine and has lots of spider webs, you can watch them pluck spiders out of the webs. I’m still trying to get that picture. Now that I have a 600mm lens, maybe soon! These two pictures had a shutter speed of 1/640 second. Just how fast a shutter speed do I need to get rid of the motion blur in the wings? I kind of admit, though, that I like the motion blur.
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Out & About San Diego - De Anza Cove

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  I love exploring the world around me, especially if I find historic, abandoned places. One of the most beautiful beach areas here in San Diego, De Anza Cove, has hundreds of properties lining the beaches that have been abandoned for a decade. I went to look at them after I had read about them. The story begins about 60 years ago and is really fascinating, especially for such prime beach properties. Originally, De Anza Cove was supposed to be a mobile home community, and that actually is how it started. However, there was no oversight, and since the location is awesome and the views are magnificent, many people who had moved in sold their mobile homes and built rather nice houses. There was no oversight by anyone, so people pretty much did whatever they wanted to when building their new homes in this prime location. Since no one knew what was going on, many of the homes here were not even paying property taxes. Pretty much free rent in one of San Diego's prime locations. Sudd
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High maintenance items

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Two completely different items yet both named Olivia. Both are high maintenance items. The first one belongs to me while the other does not.
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She's taunting me

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Me: Little Queen Olivia, are you supposed to be on that table? Little Queen Olivia:
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Nature's Geometry: Succulents

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My eighth grade botany teacher in Kingsville, Texas, in 1968 got me interested in cacti and succulents, and there's been no turning back. In 2019 I finally wrote a book about one of my fascinations in cacti and succulents, nature's geometry. With a pretty cool book (if I do say so myself), it was fairly easy to get on the speaking circuit for cactus and succulent clubs throughout the United States. Prior to the pandemic, I had spoken to Palomar Cactus & Succulent Society, Visalia Succulent Club, and San Gabriel Valley Cactus & Succulent Society. I was scheduled to speak to seven more, including Tucson, Arizona, and Atlanta, Georgia. All were canceled as Covid-19 wreaked havoc on the nation. Although not everything has returned to normal, I spoke to the Long Beach Cactus Club (the nation's oldest cactus/succulent club) on July 11, and I will be speaking at the Tucson Cactus & Succulent Society on Thursday, October 7, at 7:00 p.m. I use the Fibonacci sequence of n
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San Diego, the military town

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For some strange reasons, I always have had a fascination with the military. I guess it could have something to do with my dad being in the United States Air Force from December 1950 to December 1954, me being born at Naval Air Station in Kingsville, Texas, in March 1955, and me graduating in December 1978 from Texas A&M University, a historically military university. I have lived in the San Diego, California, metropolis since April 1993. According to a Military Impact Study by the San Diego Military Advisory Council, San Diego, a historic military town, is home to the largest concentration of military personnel in the nation, with over 100,000 active duty military and over 240,000 retired military. San Diego is home to 60% of the ships in the fleet of the U.S. Navy, and one-third of the active duty force of the U.S. Marine Corps. Military spending in the region account for over 25% of the jobs in San Diego. Most of the active duty personnel are based at these five bases: Marine Co
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