This is Ansel, who graced these pages twice last year.

If you throw his stick once for him to fetch it, he will not understand why you won't want to keep doing it all day long.

In various Statements of Financial Condition, Donald Trump claimed that his apartment in Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet. Today's ruling against Trump et al. says that it's really 10,996 square feet, and notes

In opposition, defendants absurdly suggest that "the calculation of square footage is a subjective process that could lead to differing results or opinions based on the method employed to conduct the calculation."

with the footnote

Despite this assertion in their motion papers, counsel for defendants, Christopher Kisa, Esq., conceded during oral argument held on September 22, 2023, that square footage is, in fact, an objective number.

As much as I'd like to explain what a sporadic group is, it's too involved for a blog posting. Let it suffice to say that there are 26 sporadic groups and they've interested mathematicians since Émile Léonard Mathieu discovered five of them in the 19th century.

It wasn't until 1964 that another sporadic group was found. Mathematicians of the day didn't expect there were more than five. Croatian mathematician Zvonimir Janko was trying to prove that but in the process discovered a sixth.

Decades later, at a celebration of Janko's 65th birthday, fellow group theorist Bertram Huppert said that only two events in his life had really surprised him: Janko's discovery of a new sporadic group and the fall of the Berlin wall.

This is such a classic country road: narrow, picturesque, sometimes shared with cows (see Tuesday's pic).

This is part of a ¼ mile stretch that's too narrow for two way traffic. Normally you have the road all to yourself but it's seeing a lot of use since the main road up from the valley floor got destroyed. This is the road delivery trucks are taking to get to my neighborhood, as the other road that's still open is even less suitable.

In 25 years of living here, I never saw these fields so lush with sunflowers (Helianthus nuttallii).

I once wrote:

One day, when I was little, I discovered I could hammer a screwdriver into the asphalt of the street in front of our house. This took me by surprise and made me revise my concept of the street as being hard, impervious, and permanent.

Seeing the recent damage to roads in my neighborhood threw me. When a friend sent me a pic of the spot shown in yesterday's posting, part of me believed it was real and part of me needed to see it first hand to really believe it. I rode my bicycle down the closed section of the road to check it out.

So yeah I remember when I was a kid discovering that roads are impermanent but this week I was further schooled in how impermanent roads are.

I've never considered living anywhere that's subject to frequent hurricanes. (Some people feel the same way about California and earthquakes.) I've occasionally said I thought it was dopey when public money helps people rebuild homes on the coast in the southeastern USA when it's only a matter of time before another hurricane comes and it happens all over again.

And now I find myself wanting to see a key road to my neighborhood rebuilt: a road ruined by a tropical storm, a road in a canyon which will flood again some day, a road whose repair might for all I know be funded in part by federal disaster aid.

Of three roads from my neighborhood to town, only one is passable. One is better than zero. All roads out of town to the rest of the world are closed. I'm guessing that won't last too long though. Considering the size of this storm, things could've been a lot worse. I'm glad the power didn't go out here.

A tropical storm is headed my way. This area might get a fair amount of rain, although less than what some other parts of the state are expected to get.

The county is not finished repairing damage to the main road to my neighborhood from storms this spring. There's a detour onto a narrow, twisty road that isn't suited for the traffic it's now carrying.

Never a dull moment this year.