Renovation Boom

If you live in the greater LA region (or maybe anywhere in the country for that matter), you would have to be particularly un-observant to have missed the hot real estate market. A look at the LA County Assessor web site can be quite astounding. I created the composite image at right by overlaying one of their maps on a satellite image of our neighborhood. The tinted tracts are ones that recently sold.

All this activity seems to be fueling an equally hot home renovation boom, no doubt spurred by the ironic fact that homes are "worth" so much, people who already own can't afford to trade up. Home equity loans, on the other hand, are a fairly painless way for home owners to tap into the real estate bonanza, without having to move out of state. Surely home equity is behind this flurry of additions and remodels. In our little part of the world, it is particularly obvious. I snapped these pics this morning in less than a one block radius.

"1 wall standing" remodel. Almost a new house.

Gutting interior. Enclosing back porch.

Nice addition on the front (living in rest of house).

Stolen car and burgled house?

A couple worrisome things our neighbor Isaac heard recently:

1. Right before Christmas a house was broken into on Windfall. It happened during the day. Not sure of what was taken or what happened.

2. Another neighbor on Loma Alta (between Noyes and the Rubio Basin) had their Cadillac Escalade stolen right out of their drive way. The thief must have had a key since the alarm didn't go off and there was no sign of entry (no glass etc). My wife's parents live down on La Paz Road (a mile south of here) and their neighbor also had their Escalade stolen out of their drive way the same way. The cops say that 4 were stolen in the area within a few days. They were found stripped out in San Bernadino somewhere. Cops think it might be an inside job with a dealership or a body shop.

Thanks for the heads up, Isaac. If anyone knows more details (without posting private details please) about these stories, we'd love to know. Stay vigilant, everyone. Sometimes it's hard to remember to treat security like we live in a major metro area, even up here in our little town.

Critter Talk

Doris Finch dropped by today to report on her sightings of bear, coyote, coy-dog (maybe) and fox (past tense). Thanks Doris. We haven't seen anything with claws over here lately, but we do have a small family group of deer that graze our hillside. They are quite tame, so Norah was able to walk quite close to them and snap a few pics. Unfortunately the light was a bit low for our digicam so they mostly came out blurry. You can check out the ones that more or less came out here. (There are also some interesting recent insect pics to see at that link.)

I have been wondering if we should try to frighten the deer so they don't become too used to people. I remember in the story of Gentle Ben (a grizzly), when it was time to send him off into the wild, the boy tossed fire-crackers and things to make him shy of people. I must admit, I worry about tame deer attracting mountain lions further down. Our new kitties are strictly indoor cats. We lost our two previous cats recently, suspecting coyotes, but as Isaac pointed out, it could just as well have been the mountain lions.

Weather Underground

It looks like Altadena has become a hotbed for personal weather stations. As of today Weather Underground is displaying data from four stations in Altadena. I note that the station IDs skip a number so chances are we will see KCAALTAD4 come online soon, if they can figure out how to get hooked up.

Weather Underground Tips & Tricks:

1. Check out the new feature that allows you to view Personal Weather Stations using Google Maps.

2. Using a tabbed browser, open up each of the four stations in tabs.

• KCAALTAD1
• KCAALTAD2
• KCAALTAD3
• KCAALTAD5

Carefully scroll each page down so the graphs are showing and all aligned with each other. Click from tab to tab and observe the similarities and differences in the Altadena foothills micro (nano?) climates. Note: If you have trouble with one of the pages being a tiny bit off alignment from the others, try reloading it. Some of the banner ads are shorter than normal.

Hail all hail!

My buddy emailed me this video (3MB), and this video (2MB) of the hailstorm. At Stonehill News we have now heard reports of similarly large hail ranging from Old Town Pasadena, to JPL, and to Hastings Ranch. If anyone has a report farther flung than that, please let us know.

Most old-timers seem to agree that these were the largest hailstones seen in this area for as much as 60 to 90 years. One ornery, senile old-timer says no way man, he's seen hail almost the size of golf balls, big enough to dent a car. But he lives out of state now, so I guess we can give him his fish story for old times' sake.

Hail stones

We just had a fierce downpour with 3/8" to 5/8" dia. hailstones. It only lasted a few minutes in total and I was so stunned by the intensity, it took me a few extra moments to even think about the camera, much less to get it out. By the time I made this video (3.5MB), it had started to taper off a bit. Take a look at the pictures too

As of this minute we've had over two inches of precipitation since midnight. The season total so far is 2.87" at 1552 feet.

Rain begins in earnest

Saturday night and last night we had our first real rains. We already had a third of an inch on Sept. 20, but this system has delivered five times that already. Sunday it didn't rain much during the day, but it was consistently overcast with intermittent thunder storms.