First Time for Everything

I did accept tangerines when a friend offered me some from her tree!

Not to worry, I still love fruit from friends and neighbors!

A neighbor had kumquats all over after the wind storm and I helped by picking them up!

A different neighbor's lemon tree was bending with
the weight of the fruit and she asked people to come pick them.

Yesterday a friend gave me lemons along
with tangerines and blood oranges.

Today the mail carrier brought navel oranges from
a customer along her route (picture does not show all
of them because I ate some before taking a picture).

And I told my friend with the tangerine tree that I would be happy to have some next week.

Powerless

 Or maybe I should have titled the post Powerful. I complained that the water in the swimming pool was too hot (sorry, Dad) and then a windstorm came through town and knocked the power out all over, including to the heater for the swimming pool. Be careful what you ask for.

Even though we were without power I was able to
make a cup of coffee with a kettle on the gas stove.

We have some hand-cranked flashlights but I was

happy to be able to use our solar lantern.

Our generous neighbor rushed out and got a generator in the morning and brought over a cord for our refrigerator! I was lucky that I had not gone the store on Friday as originally planned so nothing was lost.

What was lost were a tremendous number of trees. At some point I had to stop checking out the neighborhood because it was overwhelming.

Cactus Fruit

 

Last summer we our Night
Blooming Cereus grew a piece of fruit.

It split open, but no animals seemed to eat it.

It just fell to the ground, maybe to
have its seeds grow to form a new cactus?

This year we harvested the fruit before it split.
To me it tasted like soap.

Guest Post by A on Academy Museum in LA

 I’ve never written one of these blog posts before and I also haven’t read them so I think the goal is just to talk about my day and my trip to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in LA my aunt.

We got tickets to the museum a while ago because there is a traveling exhibit on Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli and Noemi are both fans. Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation film studio that’s probably most famous for “My Neighbor Totoro”. The exhibit is the largest collection outside japan but we had to get to LA first which as always is easier said than done. The three-step process for getting there was first I was driven by Mom to Azuza, then got a train (where I made the sketch below):

Hin, Markl, and “ Turniphead” from Howl’s Moving Castle

to Pasadena where I met up with my aunt and finally, we drove the rest of the way and parked at the LACMA. There’s a bunch of museums all in this block so we saw some of the famous LA sights such as a larger than average rock and some poorly spaced street lamps.

The “Urban Light”  by Chris Burden

After finding our way to the museum we presented our vaccination cards (N. had hers and I had a picture of mine) along with a photo ID. We were given a health check wristband and then got our museum tickets and went to the fourth floor for the exhibit.

The permanent Ghibli Museum in Japan has a strict no-photo policy due to its popularity and constant crowds and the exhibit in LA followed the same rules, there was an area outside for pictures with these beautiful living moss walls and large prints from scenes of the movies. The moss walls also had little “Susuwatari” in them which are the little black soot balls.

The exhibit itself, which I do not have any photos of, was quite incredible. I had some storytelling elements of how the films are imagined and made and tons of original sketches and concepts of all the major movies. The precision and style of these sketches were amazing and beautiful with some being full of detail and some clearly taking a few minutes to make. There were original storyboards and even some full pieces of art made for posters or covers. Of course, the music and atmosphere in the museum was as mystical as any of the movies and there were some great installations of a large tree or glow-in-the-dark wall paint of tree spirits.

There were also some other fascinating exhibits such as the original painted backdrop of Mount Rushmore used in North by Northwest

along with a story about it and a lot of original costumes and props for both old a recent films.

Black Panther costume and R2-D2

Wallace and Gromit

After a stop at the gift shop where I got some pins and a pack of playing cards I was dropped at the train station and took trains back to Azusa where I was picked up (in a slightly different spot due to a mistake on my end) by Mom. I sketched another Ghibli scene on the way back.

Bad Cart Parking

 I always put my cart away and often put away other carts, too. Turns out this is a topic of discussion.

Here is the link to the discussion about people who or don't put away grocery carts.

Just kidding. There were lots of articles about this topic, like this one and this one.

It was the category of neutral evil that got me started on this post. I was locking up my bike

and on two consecutive days people were leaving their
grocery carts on the ramp by the handicapped parking spots!

The whole reason I started parking over there was because so
many people were using the bicycle parking spots for their grocery carts.

Maybe when I retire I will get a job at the grocery store, but only putting away grocery carts.

Guest Post by D for New Year’s Day 2022

While J and A chose to ride bikes in the mountains (which are stunning with cold sunny weather and views of snow capped peaks) I maintained my long standing tradition of riding out to the Rose Parade in Pasadena.  Going out with J to the base of GMR in the car saved me 10 miles on the way out.  

Last year the Rose Parade was cancelled due to COVID-19.  This year they went ahead, but with many restrictions for those in the ticketed areas and with many people staying away.  It is an outdoor event, and I had no interest in being in a crowd with strangers, so my plan was to ride to a point near the end of the route which is often less crowded and allows me to arrive later since the parade takes a couple hours to get to the end of route.  Often I do this ride with others, but today I was riding solo which has been how most of my riding has been the past two years.  One change is that now I ride with a GPS unit that logs much more data than a cyclometer, and enables me to post the rides with maps, photos, statistics, and comments.  Here is a map of my New Year’s Day ride:

I only watch a fraction of the parade and then I cycle back home.  This year I wanted to pick a very low density location along the parade route, to minimize my exposure.  I picked a spot near the last underpass on the route.  It is the only time that I have been able to be right at edge fo the parade route with no one between me and the parade.  This means I was much closer to the floats and my pictures were better able to capture the details of how the floats are decorated.  The floats that are too tall to go beneath the underpass are designed to bend themselves so they can fit under the overpass.  You can see that in some of my photos that parts of some floats are in this state.  I like seeing how they address this engineering challenge!  Many of the floats have moving parts even when they are not folded too.

The City of South Pasadena had this float of with Turkeys attempting to take flight.

I liked the ocean wave (with the surfer and dolphin), the cyclist, and the rock climber on this float from an insurance company!

These marching band characters were very tall when upright, but they really had them bend backward to limbo under the freeway overpass!  On this photo you can really see where they are decorating with full flowers and where they are just using flower parts to get a particular color but a smoother texture.

This float from the City of Torrance had much more realistic animals than most of the floats I saw which were more cartoon like representations. I liked how this used plants to depict a more natural scene.  It was funny to see the real people on the float holding cameras, I suppose they were supposed to be safari tourists. 

There are of course many real animals (mostly horses) in the parade.  This group was less militaristic and more decorative than most.  In the next photo you can spot the pooper scoopers who follow each group of horses wearing white (presumably tyvek) jumpsuits.  Some of them are quite animated with their shovels and rolling waste bins.

These are two angles on a beautiful float with a dragon, a knight on horseback, and a castle.  Everything is lowered but I think the decorations here were among my favorite.  It was beautiful.

The City of La Cañada Flintridge had a skatepark themed float with all the characters wearing black and white checkerboard Vans sneakers.   What I really enjoyed about this float was the array of foods they used to decorate the float.  Beyond the flowers you can find Oranges, Lemons, Limes, multiple varieties of Apples, Cabbage, Lettuce, and more!

This float from Kaiser Permanente was promoting science which I feel is a needed message in these troubled times.  Kaiser pulled all their medical personnel who were scheduled to march in the parade with the float because they are so short staffed fighting Omicron cases.  

I enjoyed this Kiwanis float with the cycling turtle at the fore.  

While I did not manage to see this friends of the Zoo group marching in the parade, I happened upon them as they were taking off these beautiful costumes.  It reminded me of the Lion King musical.

Overall it was a wonderful outing.  I stopped in Sierra Madre on the way back and bought a slice of Pizza far from the crowds.  Riding home I came across a group that rides regularly in our area.  I enjoyed their company for several miles before moving on at my own pace.  I do like seeing other cyclists out on rides.

Thanks for reading!

D

December leftovers

 

Still doing a little Danish,
Hungarian, and Spanish each day

Shaker Lakes in late fall

Home of the Cleveland Guardians

And I got this great poster at the team store.
I can almost hear Tom Hanks as I read it.

My lucky day - I found some
buckeyes among the fall leaves

A Great Horned Owl in Claremont!!

Snow on the mountains