A decade ago, Katie saw a self storage place with the first S missing from the sign. She didn’t get a picture, and has been looking for another sign with the same failing ever since.

Last summer we spotted a sign with the S broken. It turns out that the S eventually did fall off the rest of the way.

When I lived in Lake Forest during 2000, I used to frequent a place called Panda Panda. It was your basic steam table Chinese restaurant, but it was good. I remember the occasional evening on which I’d think, “Do I go to the store, buy ingredients, come home, then spend time cooking just for one person, or do I go out and grab some fast-ish food?” Panda Panda was a frequent winner of these decisions.

It was located at the corner of El Toro and Raymond, near the library. Panda Panda shared a building with a Quizno’s sandwich place and was one driveway away from a Wendy’s.

I don’t know if they were a small chain or a solo restaurant, but they were eventually bought out or otherwise assimilated by Panda Express, which I’ve never particularly liked. (Though Panda Inn, a table-service restaurant owned by the same company, has been consistently good.) Naturally they homogenized the menu as well.

That was the end of that.

A few years later, as part of the big project to renovate the area, both buildings were bulldozed to make way for a new strip mall segment. Panda Express got the prime spot in the new building, but all traces of Panda Panda are lost.

For the record: I’m currently sitting in a Wahoo’s taco place roughly where the driveway used to be.

Catalina Inversion, originally uploaded by Kelson.

The south end of Santa Catalina Island as viewed from Newport Beach this morning around 9am. The winds have cleared out a lot of the haze that would normally obscure the island, and I had a great view of its entire length.

Interestingly, while the sky seemed clearer at 8am than at 9am, by which time a thin layer of gray haze clung to the horizon, the photos taken at 9 are sharper. It’s almost as if the dust settled during that hour, clearing above the layer and obscuring below it.

There was also a definite mirage caused by that same layer. You can tell the lower 1/3 of the island is distorted.

Walking to lunch. Vacant lots are actually green! #

Spotted Venus at 1 in the afternoon! Thanks, Sky Map app! #

I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.

There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.

Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…

They’re taking the Great Park Balloon up! Would be the perfect day [all the snow]…but I don’t have time! #

Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.

Amazingly, I got to see something similar again today. In a way, even better, because this time the sky was clear, providing better light and an unimpeded view.

After yesterday’s rain and a prediction of more showers today, I was surprised to see empty blue sky this morning. While driving over a bridge I looked out the window and saw the mountains just coated with snow. As soon as I dropped Katie off at her office, I made a beeline for that spot near The District in Tustin that (for now) offers an unimpeded view of the mountains that dominate the skyline (on clear days) of Los Angeles County.

By then a few clouds had begun to swirl around in the distance.

San Gabriel Snow (Section 1), originally uploaded by Kelson.

I couldn’t tell at the time whether Saddleback had any snow or not, since it was still backlit (this was around 8:20 or so in the morning), so I didn’t take any pictures of it.

Here’s a panorama of the mountain range. Click on the image below to see the full thing.

First, here’s the view from the camera, at 3x optical zoom, to give you some context.  This is looking northwest from the park.  (It occurs to me I could probably have checked the direction with my phone’s GPS info.)

Everything’s flattened out near the horizon.  Near the right you can see the MCAS Tustin blimp hangars, with Santa Ana beyond them. The area I’m looking at is too small to see at web size, on the left side right near where the hill cuts in front of the horizon.

Here it is zoomed in and enhanced.

I gave it a shot with the digital zoom out to 12x, but it was way too fuzzy.  It worked out better just to crop the file and look at its native resolution.  Someday I’ll save up and get a nifty digital SLR that will save raw images instead of JPEGs, and let me swap out lenses for serious telephoto work, but for now, this is what I’ve got.

Actually, looking at the picture, I’m no longer convinced that it’s actually downtown Los Angeles.  What I can see doesn’t look clustered enough, and the buildings look shorter than I’d expect.  But I can’t think what else has a bunch of buildings tall enough to see at that distance and in that direction.

It could be that only the tops of the building are visible, in which case that black rectangle bordered in white, roughly in line with the top of the light pole, could be the top section of the Aon Center, the second-tallest building in the city and the one that’s mostly black with white corners and white around the top. But in that case the US Bank Tower (the tall round one) must be completely faded into the haze.

Or it could be Century City, which is a few miles to the west of Downtown LA, and has a couple of similar buildings (black with white outlines).  If that’s the case, though, downtown should be somewhere to the right and taller, and I just don’t see it.  And Century City would be closer to 45 miles, rather than 40.  Maybe the smog’s just thicker around downtown? Edit: This does seem more likely (see comments).

Anyway, I took some more pictures to make a panorama, which I’ll stitch together at home when I have a chance and see if it’s worth posting.

Smoke from various fires up near Los Angeles and Corona, creeping across the sky into Orange County.

Of course, there are other things in the area that could easily come out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Such as this Kobold Construction truck.

And then there’s the fact that all fire engines in Orange County are labeled ORC.

Let’s not forget the previously-blogged Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach.

And that’s not even getting into all the Tolkien-inspired street names in Lake Forest…

In the middle of the film, several characters start a road trip to San Diego. They start on the 5 freeway in Anaheim and drive south until the car breaks down in Irvine. Then they ride in a tow truck back up to Anaheim.

The problem: They used real backgrounds of that stretch of the freeway, but showed them out of sequence. Shots alternate between characters as they hold a conversation.

First you see the squarish beige office buildings lining the freeway near Jeffrey in Irvine. Then you jump 3-4 miles north to the edge of Santa Ana, where you can see a blue glass-lined building in the background near Fourth St. Then you jump back down to the beige buildings. Then up to Santa Ana again. Then down to the office buildings. Back up to Santa Ana. Down to the office buildings again, which finally give way to The Market Place (you can see the giant purple sign as it goes past).

Now I understand how all those Chicago residents felt watching The Dark Knight.

Although thinking about it, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me if it had been set somewhere generic, and just happened to use local backgrounds.

Ah, Hollywood Geography!