RIP GeoCities and Hello hundleys.net

This link to an October 26 L.A. Times article is a good summary of the GeoCities history.

My first web pages appeared at an old, hard-to-remember, address in one of GeoCities' Rainforest neighborhoods. (Don't bother looking for www.geocities.com/RainForest/Jungle/8759/ - it no longer exists online). Back in the late 1990s, the only pictures on my site were pictures printed from film and then scanned into tiny files of less than 50k. Getting a digital camera of my own was great, but those first cameras were nothing like what we have today with all our big files and memory capabilities.


A few years later, the GeoCities neighborhoods were no longer necessary and our original address had changed from the rainforest/jungle URL to an easier "3hundleys" location.

After we switched our ISP to Pacific Bell/which became SBC/which became ATT, I created another site on the "new" GeoCities (www.geocities.com/venturahundleys@sbcglobal.net). I was already thinking about buying a domain in order to change the difficult web address when I got the closing notice from Yahoo, so wasn't totally heartbroken. I am sad about all the internet history that was not archived. In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do on our new Hundleys.net site.

Fall Colors, Version 2009

The past few years I've had a yearning to see fall colors, so we've been to Tahoe, Big Bear, Chicago, and Sacramento during Tom's Fall Break from school. Since we're traveling at the end of the week, I didn't feel like going too far away last weekend - so we drove up behind Ojai and found a little bit of color around the Sespe. Still a little early, but very pretty.

First Rain, pt.2

7:30 this morning: 1.5" in the rain gauge and the fishponds were at maximum fullness. The fish seemed to love it!

The New Rain Year Has Begun!

About a week earlier than past years I can remember, our first rain of the season fell this morning as a light rain. Real rain, not "heavy mist" or even "drizzle" but actual drops that splashed and caused water to run down Channel Drive. I join everyone in the burn areas around SoCal in hoping it doesn't come down too hard and fast, but actual rain in the third year of an officially declared drought is great!
It is just beginning, but as of 8:30am, we already had .20 inch in the rain gauge.

Koi & Goldfish 6 - Raccoons 0

I am so happy to have seen seven different raccoons in our backyard the past several weeks and none of them has caught a fish in our pond! Before I deepened and enlarged our fish ponds, I had gotten used to losing fish once they got to "good eating" size. As we begin to say goodbye to summer and look ahead to early fall (when raccoon raids have been the most destructive) it has been a pleasure to sit and watch the fish at their most active time. It has also been fun to have walked outside just as different raccoons have been crossing our pond bridge without trying to catch our fish! (By the time I had run inside for the camera, the raccoons were already in the tree or over the wall. I did get this lone 'coon as well as two of a group of four visiors.)