Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 78
We know that it’s been a long time, but with the Tehachapi Library reopened one of the best places in Tehachapi to buy books is once again available. In case you’ve forgotten, or didn’t know, downstairs in the Library the Friends of the Library has their Continuing Book Sale. Books are classified into broad categories and set up on two walls – and the prices are cheap. The Library is open from noon to 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. If you come down to Farmer’s Market on Thursday,...
The Tehachapi Library is continuing to work toward getting back to normal. The library is open from noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday. The Summer Reading Challenge has started up, but there’s still time to sign up. When signed up, participants are given a “craft bag” and for those that complete the challenge there will be the opportunity to win prizes. Some of the prizes include Kindle ebook readers and gift certificates for TK Pizza and the Hitching Post Theaters. There are also gift...
The Tehachapi Library is getting back to normal. Though currently open with limited capacity (up to 30 people) and social distancing, the library is open from 12 p.m. to 6 pm, Wednesday through Friday. The drive-up system is still also available for those who prefer a more secure way of using the library. It will still take time before we’re back to the way it was before the shutdown, but one of the best ways to try to get things back to “normal” is to use the services we do have. Come take...
This has been some year hasn't it? Anyone remember the "murder hornets" from a few months ago? No? Well the Friends of the Library do, as well as all the plans we had for the year. Things sure haven't gone as expected. But we're back and still working to support our Library. Even if book donations and sales don't all happen this year (we still need to figure out how to be able to do that safely). It's open again you know. But like everything else, still not back to normal. It's here to support t...
The Tehachapi Friends of the Library had another great sale on Feb. 15, with around $1,500 coming in from both the Bag Sale and the Antique, Rare and Special Book Sale. That means a lot of people came in to help out by buying books. But that’s not the only way the Tehachapi Community helped out. Albertson’s donated the bags for the Bag Sale, BSE Rents helped by loaning large tables so all the books could be well displayed. The City of Tehachapi made sure that the information about the sale was...
Here we are in the year 2020 and it's already almost time for the first Friends of the Library's Seasonal Book Sale. That's right, the Winter Book Sale is coming up on Feb. 15 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And it is again two book sales in one. One is the ever popular "Bag Sale" where you buy a bag and fill it up with any of the books in the bag sale room, which is a deal that can't be beat. The second sale is the Antique, Rare and Special Books sale. These books are priced as marked and are still...
Yes, it's that time of year again. People in Iceland are preparing for the Jolabokaflod or the Christmas Book Flood. In Iceland, book publishing tends to focus on the end of the year. But almost everyone gets books for Christmas Eve and spends the evening reading. And I've seen books listed as good Hanukkah gifts as well. I still have books that I was given as Christmas presents after ... well an unspecified number of years. Just in time for all this holiday giving, the Friends of the Library's...
The Tehachapi Library has two new 3D printers. These were donated by the Greater Tehachapi Economic Development Council, along with several spools of the plastic filament that these 3D printers use. These are not yet available for the general public to use, since there are details still needed on the process to be in place for people to come in and use them. (They have to work through the bureaucracy.) But it's only a matter of time for that to be worked out. For now the library is providing...
Last fall we tried to go to Griffith Park to see the observatory. Emphasis on the "tried" part. The GPS took us there, though some of the roads were narrow. Well they felt narrow at least. And when we got there we were unable to find any parking. We actually drove far enough away that while we could still see the observatory, it was tiny and too far for us to walk to, at least up those hills. So we gave up and said we'd try again someday. Well, someday did come. We had noticed while we were...
I'm planning to visit Mars the weekend of Feb. 23 to 25. Well, at least a reasonable facsimile. You see MarsFest 2018 is going to be taking place in Death Valley that weekend. I guess that Death Valley has a bit of similarity to Mars, though conditions are still very different. Death Valley, even in winter, is quite warm in comparison to Mars. The atmosphere's all wrong and there's all that life everywhere. But the terrain is fairly similar – rocky, sandy, hilly, and dry. So, Death Valley can s...
Once again the path of the moon is going to match up well with the position of the sun in the sky. So we're going to get a solar eclipse. This one will be total for a large strip of the US; but given that the eclipse is a Monday (August 21), many of us won't have the opportunity to head off to someplace where the eclipse is total. (It's only a few hundred miles up to Oregon, for those of you that can!) Here in Tehachapi we won't be getting a total solar eclipse, but during the eclipse it will...
Back in 2015 I prepared a chapbook, drifter, which is still available on Amazon (or from me). What is a chapbook some of you might still be asking? Well it is typically a small book, about the size of a folded over piece of 8.5”x11” paper. (The same size as programs at the BeeKay.) And currently chapbooks are typically poetry, though some might be prose. (Some historical pamphlets might be considered chapbooks also.) Last year I didn’t have another chapbook, at least in part due to spending so m...
On April 22, Earth Day, there are going to be people marching for science around the country and beyond. People are going to be coming together to show their support for science, and believe it or not science does need our support. Back in the 1920s, Lysenko, an agricultural scientist in the fairly new Soviet Union, developed a theory of “evolution” that conformed to the political ideology then in power. It involved the idea that you could change the descendants of a plant or animal by doi...
There has been a lot in the media about the planetary system found recently around the star TRAPPIST-1. That’s the small dwarf star with seven terrestrial planets that were announced in February. Terrestrial planet just means smaller and probably rocky. Given that the star is only 40 light years away, it’s virtually in our backyard. But still it is small. It only has about 11% the radius of our own Sun. It was only discovered back in 1999 and was given an unpronounceable alpha-numeric designatio...
I am dealing with a change in my life. My home office is moving. I’m going to be changing from a small room to a larger room. Now normally that wouldn’t sound like anything that requires downsizing, but it does give me a chance to examine what I think I am. I’m going to end up with about the same amount of shelf space, but now all in one room. So in theory I could take everything that I currently have and I’d be OK. But do I really need all that? Much of my income comes from being a “statis...
In science, a “law” is a lesser concept than a “theory”. Theories include an explanation of why something works the way it does. For example: the theory of relativity, evolutionary theory, quantum theory, etc. When we posit a law, all that’s required is to formalize observations of some type of effect. Ohm’s Law relates three electrical quantities, voltage, current, and resistance. In the early 1800s Georg Ohm measured the relationship between them (OK, not exactly, but others generalized...
Seems like a wet year. Maybe it is, I haven’t been able to find a really good site for monthly totals for the past few years. But part of why it seems so wet is that the last few years have been so dry. Really dry. Exceptional drought dry. So now, even if we get an average year it will seem pretty wet. Even with the trend seeming to be towards a hotter and drier climate for our area, we will get periods when it’s not so hot, nor so dry. It’s known as regression towards the mean. Regre...
It’s another new year. So I guess it’s time to tally up my score for last year. I think I did pretty well. As a writer I need to track where I submit things to and what the outcome is. I keep a database which makes it easy to count up some of my important statistics. I was rejected 64 times this last year. While it might seem odd that I’d lead off with my rejections, it’s not that unusual for a writer to remember them. JK Rowling was rejected 12 times before her books about Harry Potter were acc...
As I write, I’m fighting with some small bug. Just a cold, but one that gives me some sympathy for those of you that suffer from allergies. Sneezes and sniffles. And I have no idea where I was exposed. I haven’t been getting out much with all kinds of things going on that I’ve been sticking around for at the house. I guess it doesn’t take much. A handshake here or there and there you have it. Luckily, I don’t have too much that I have to get out for right now, although I do have a couple tr...
Every night about nine o’clock, Moonpi (our dog) and I step outside. For him it’s an opportunity to do some sniffing around and do some other doggy business. For me it is an opportunity to look up at the night sky. For the past few months I’ve been watching a small triangle of stars in the southwest part of the sky. Of course, when I finally paid attention to what they probably were, it turns out that two of them were actually planets, Mars and Saturn. The other one is actually a star, Antar...
I’ve been getting exposed to history that I was never taught in school. I’m learning quite a bit from a podcast (which is an internet audio “lecture” or “discussion”) called “Stuff You Missed In History Class”. That podcast covers all manner of topics, from the tasty (a history of cheese) to the silly (the West Point Eggnog Riot of 1826) to the horrific (the Tulsa Race Riot). There are many things that just don’t show up in history classes. This is partly due to time. There just isn’t enough...
So far 2016 is the warmest year on record, following 2015 which was previously the warmest year on record. Out there in Death Valley, they’re flirting with surpassing the world’s record temperature (134ºF from 1913), but it wasn’t that long ago that we were still getting glaciers forming in the Sierras. During the Little Ice Age, which lasted from the 1300s to the middle or end of the 1800s, the glaciers in the Sierra Nevada expanded and contracted with the temperatures. Those cooler temper...
I get a lot of ideas some good, some bad. Of course the first place to go after you get an idea is to the Internet, and usually a quick search will show that I’m not the first person to have that idea. Sometimes it seems thousands of people have thought it up before me, and that’s just from the ones that decided to put it out on the Internet. There must have been many more that, like me, never bothered to mention it anywhere Google can reach. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that my ideas are a...
It’s May and Summer is around the corner. The end of April was very busy for me so I hadn’t really thought of anything that I could write about. But I discovered the National Day Calendar (www.nationaldaycalendar.com/calendar-at-aglance). And if you’re needing a reason to celebrate they’ve got you covered. Did you know that May is National Barbecue Month, Hamburger Month, Egg Month, Salad Month, Salsa Month, Strawberry Month and perhaps most importantly Chocolate Custard Month? (Of course...
Not too long ago we were watching PBS (it happens) and saw a short segment on a group here in California building structures out of EARTH (don't call it "dirt"). They had gracefully curved buildings that would remind a person of a hobbit home. Cozy. But other than being intriguing I didn't learn too much, other than the name of the organization being shown was "Cal-Earth". And that's where things stayed until the concept came up in a recent conversation. That sent me to the Internet and a bit...
