Grandkids Are Like Vitamins

 We've got two grandkids (and their parents) visiting since yesterday.  My phone weather app predicted that our glorious weather would end Sunday.  But it didn't.  Nor Monday.  Nor today.  Sunny,  short sleeve and pants weather.  Tested the borrowed bikes last night to go to the playground.  His is fine.  Hers has foot brakes and she tends to use her shoes instead of the brakes.  But otherwise she's a great rider.  Then an epic battle.  Though I did point out that we used to play just as well with paper and pencil. 

Today after a tour of the backyard, some time in sprinkler, we went to Kincaid.  They biked down the hill and we walked along and then down onto the beach,  The tide was very low.

We walked through the sandy part, to the rocky part, to the muddy part.  

Two sleeping vitamins on the way home.  Wonderful day.  Lots of fun.  

It's good to take a break from the world now and then.  Especially now.  

There are construction projects in the living room.

And I was told to find something on my computer.  I opened the paper and found this:

Bike Ride To Rocky Beach

 Biked over to Manitou Beach today.  

Downtown Seattle in the distance

Here's that picture again, cropped.  All of a sudden, all the gulls in the area took flight.  

Click on image to enlarge

Headed Home

 Now that we're at LAX waiting for our 7:20 pm non-stop back to Anchorage, we had the most beautiful day since we got here. Thanks to my mom's neighbor who drove us to the airport!   I did get in a bike-ride to the beach (stopping to duplicate some keys on the way).  

Not only was it warmer than it's been (low 70s) but clear too.  Though to the south you could see fog/clouds/haze.  This is looking north toward the Santa Monica mountains (really hills.)  I've been to a lot of places and I'm only now truly appreciating the great beaches of LA.  Not that I didn't always love the beach growing up, but I never appreciated the huge expanse of sand between the water and the buildings.  There's a lot of sand.  No rocks.  In the picture the water is to the left.  You can see a thin band of water between the sand and the sky.  

This African iris was sticking out from the wall of green between my mom's house and the neighbor's.  The plant itself was way inside, but the flower found the light.  It wasn't there yesterday.

These oranges were weighing down a tree in front of an apartment building in Beverly Hills. If people had more edibles in their gardens here they could feed a lot of people 

An oak tree across the street from friends we visited Sunday.

It's been a different, pandemic trip.  We've gotten take out, but haven't dined in any restaurants like we normally would.  

And the ceiling at our gate at LAX this evening.

This has been, until this week, a pretty chilly visit, for LA.  But it's been chilly for Anchorage too while we were gone.  Our house sitter reported that our kitchen sink pipes froze, but he was able to get that taken care of.  

Looking forward to being home for a bit.  

Birds And Wrack

We'd gotten a bike at Bikrowave for my granddaughter.  They're all used bikes that the do-it-yourself bike repair shop takes in and fixes up.  Yesterday we were going to bike down to the Venice Boardwalk.  But we hadn't gotten far when we discovered her fingers aren't strong enough to squeeze the handbrakes tight enough to stop the bike.  She ended up against a low wall with a hedge on top.  

And the bike rental places at the beach weren't open.  It had rained all day Thursday and more rain was predicted and I'm sure they just said 'it's Christmas Eve, just stay home.'  But while clouds surrounded us, it was sunny though cool by LA standards - high 50s.  That didn't stop my granddaughter from ditching her shoes and pushing up her pants and playing tag with the surf.  

There were various layers of wrack on the beach after the storms this week.

  

"Natural material that washes onto the beach is referred to as wrack and includes algae, sea grasses, and some invertebrates such as sponges and soft corals. Wrack serves as the primary source of nutrients to beach communities and is the foundation for the food chain."  [from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission]

And there was a fair amount of non-natural material in the wrack.  

There was even a woman picking plastic out of the wrack.  

Sanderling were also racing the surf - running down the wet sand as the water retreated, looking for little critters.

"Although Sanderlings are still considered fairly common, some surveys in the Americas show troubling declines of up to 80 percent since the early 1970s. Sanderlings' Arctic tundra breeding habitats are threatened by the rising temperatures associated with climate change, while their migratory and wintering habitats are at risk from coastal pollution such as oil spills as well as coastal development and other forms of habitat loss." [from the American Bird Conservancy]

There are lots of kinds of shore birds with longish legs and beaks, so I won't say for sure these are sandpipers, who moved in after the much smaller sanderlings.  

And we were even treated to a flying octopus.  

And toward the end this enormous flock of sea gulls took off at once and dotted the sky.  

Today was much grayer.  We opted for a walk along Ballona Creek.  This time I took my telephoto lens along.  

I'm including this one because I think the bird on the left is a female bufflehead.  The one in the water slightly to the right of center is possibly a male.  

"Black-necked Stilts are among the most stately of the shorebirds, with long rose-pink legs, a long thin black bill, and elegant black-and-white plumage that make them unmistakable at a glance. They move deliberately when foraging, walking slowly through wetlands in search of tiny aquatic prey. When disturbed, stilts are vociferous, to put it mildly, and their high, yapping calls carry for some distance."[From All About Birds] 

The waterborne American Coot is one good reminder that not everything that floats is a duck. A close look at a coot—that small head, those scrawny legs—reveals a different kind of bird entirely. Their dark bodies and white faces are common sights in nearly any open water across the continent, and they often mix with ducks. But they’re closer relatives of the gangly Sandhill Crane and the nearly invisible rails than of Mallards or teal." [from All About Birds]

There's a bike trail along the creek - really a cement waterway.  

Bike, Beach, Benny As My Knee And Weather Improve

My knee has a little more range of motion every day.  Lots of ice and anti-inflammatories.  Today, with the temperature in the mid-70s*, I seemed I had enough recovery in my leg to ride the bike.  And the weather was so deliciously perfect.

But things aren't all good in Southern California.  On the way to the beach I passed this small homeless encampment which wasn't here as recently as last July, the last time we were here.

There's about the same amount of stuff on the other side of the camper.










And even at Venice Beach there are more places where homeless folks have settled.  There were people near here in the past.  This is in the richest country in the world whose economy is doing so well that we have lots of multibillionaires.

I didn't want to overdo it, so I didn't go too far along the beach, even though the Sirens were calling me.

On the way home I took a picture of THIS palm tree that's been here a while.  I just  never had a chance to get it posted.  Vox says it's a cell phone tower.  The article also talks about other attempts in other locations to disguise electrical equipment.

"Over the past few decades, as cellphone networks have grown, thousands of antenna towers designed to look vaguely like trees have been built across the United States. Although these towers are intended to camouflage a tower's aesthetic impact on the landscape, they typically do the opposite: most look like what an alien from a treeless planet might create if told to imagine a tree."

That was my take as well.  

I also wanted to go to the cemetery today because the caretaker who keeps the jade plants for our departed family members' alive during most of the year only works there Mondays and Fridays.  And I wanted to thank him.  On the way we stopped for lunch at a Vegan Thai place.

My mom's got some famous neighbors, some of whom I've posted about in the past.  Today while we were looking for R, I found this marker.  Not sure how many of the younger folks even know who he is.  I remember him as a very funny man. But when I looked for some video, it was a different time.  But here's one with Bob Hope and Jack Benny.  





A good day to be here.  It's supposed to be a little cooler tomorrow.

And for those who wondered about the friend I mentioned the other day, who was going on the cruise through the Strait of Hormuz, well I got an email back from him.  He said that cruise isn't until March.  They had arrived in Cabo yesterday.  Still wondering if the March cruise is going to be rerouted.


*Really, just reporting, not gloating.  I hear it's actually cold in Anchorage these last few days.  I miss that too.

Gramping Trumps Blogging

Grandkids are a great source of energy.  LA has defied the weather predictions.  Yesterday there was just the slightest drizzles.  Today there were ominous clouds off on the horizon as we set out for the Page Museum at La Brea Tar Pits.

This is one of those places I spent a lot of time as a kid.  Before the museum and the other neighboring museums.  Before most of the big buildings along Wilshire.  When there were just a few fenced off tar pits and concrete replicas of giant sloths, saber tooth tigers, and other critters.

For those who don't know, these tar pits, smack in the middle of Los Angeles, trapped many, many Pleistocene Era animals.   Here's a the largest tar pit there with a replica of three mastodons, one trapped in the tar.

 From Live Science:

The Pleistocene Epoch is typically defined as the time period that began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago. The most recent Ice Age occurred then, as glaciers covered huge parts of the planet Earth.

I guess those folks who believe in a literal bible and that the earth is only 6000-15,000 years old just don't take their kids to places like this where their beliefs will be challenged.


Dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period.  From the Natural History Museum (London):

". . .  66 million years ago, over a relatively short time, dinosaurs disappeared completely (except for birds). Many other animals also died out, including pterosaurs, large marine reptiles, and ammonites."

So this was after dinosaurs were gone and there's no dinosaur bones at the La Brea Tar Pits.

I was very skeptical about them messing up "my park" when they began the Page Museum, but they hid most of the building under this build up grass hill that kids can climb up.  And the frieze on top depicts the various large animals found here.









It's hard to pick favorites.  The saber tooth tigers have to be up there.

This is still a very active excavation and you can see workers meticulously cleaning bones that come out of the hard asphalt.  They also find insects and even seeds of plants.










Then we regrouped at Santa Monica Beach so the kids could play at the sandy playground near the Santa Monica pier.  Unfortunately the carousel was closed for a private party.

The clouds were moving in and the wind was blowing, but the kids had a good time.  It still hasn't begun to rain, but it's coming surely.

I remember Christmas Eve being a day of horrible traffic in LA, but today it was almost a ghost town.

Beach Walk on Rainy, Cloudy, Rainy, Briefly Sunny Anchorage Day

Had a morning meeting at Kincaid Kaladi Brothers.  Healing Racism in Anchorage is finally ready to come out of hibernation.  (That means the three of us who have been waiting for a time when we were surfacing from deep commitment dives are all now back on the surface and ready to reach our for more members to make this a working organization again.)

Clouds were threatening and so I didn't ride my bike, like yesterday when I got soaked (enjoyably) coming home from another meeting.  And since I was close, I drove to Kincaid Chalet and walked down the path through the gnarly birch trees and and the yellow devils club.  (Not a typical Anchorage landscape.)





Then off the paved path, along a dirt path and finally to a path down to Anchorage's main salt water beach.

Looking south.

Looking north.

Lots of great garden rocks, but no way to get them back to the garden.  

And a good patch of mostly sand

Here's looking out to the lowering tide and the water.  Fire Island is in the distance on the right.  The resolution on this picture is too low to see the windmills on the island, the only sign of humans (other than the footprints) as you walk along here.

Come mid September and one is reminded to get out into the natural wonders all around here beyond the bike trails in town.  This beach is still in town, and I need to overcome my anti-driving bias and get out of town while the weather is still relatively warm and the roads ice-free.  

A Stroll On Venice Pier

It was a hazy day.  People were in shorts and t-shirts.  People had sweatshirts and winter coats.

Below us the surfers were catching waves.

There were lots of birds on the pier hoping for handouts from the humans.

Or posing for the photographers.

Then we made some sand castles on the beach.  A good day to be out and about with the family.