Too much fun!
Just another plaza in paradise.
I noticed in August 2006 that this plaza is getting redesigned into a sculpture garden and these plants are gone! We’ll have to check back to see how it turns out. Always changing, never twice the same.
In mid 2007 the plants were indeed gone and the sculpture in. It’s all black marble against the blazingly bright outside, and I haven’t caught a decent shot yet.
Entering from a different direction and a first sighting of the iconic rebar bougainvillea trees.
All these fabulous lawns are there for the using. You can enjoy a picnic, watch the kids roll themselves stupid, or just sit and take the sun.
What they themselves have to say about the collection. There’s a lot of explanatory/educational material in their website about the items and artists in the museum.
The Getty Center Museum offers many public education opportunity. The Trust funds formal academic programs for research and conservation.
More. The I-can-never-remember-the-name Tropicana Canna Lily.
Check out these two faces. It’s fantastic!
There are many free tours available throughout the day and all are well worth the time if you’re in the mood to shuffle along with a group. The guides, all volunteers, have a lot of freedom to choose their own program so you can go again and again and always get a different perspective.
Here’s a link to the Tours and Gallery Talks.
Sunset pictures following, another view of the opening sculpture.
Me and the Louies.
Both Angela and Darryl really enjoyed the whole Outrageous France in the 1700s scene that the Getty has faithfully recreated in what seems an entire floor – room after room of Decorative Arts in Furniture
A guide is discussing this picture and the crowd is entirely engrossed in her words, listening carefully, jockeying for position to see better, and asking thoughtful engaged questions.
They’ll probably leave having had a personal experience with a picture and isn’t that basically the whole point.
A thing I do now by habit, when scanning LA Weekly looking for the haps, I check what’s what up at the Getty. The exhibitions can be fantastic and they also have classes and performances.
Wow. I just got one snap off before the guard told me this was one of the on-loan pictures (on loan from Forest Lawn(!)) and no photos allowed. Isn’t it magnificent.
DONE! The Villa is OPEN. Have you been following the story? I think the curator chick is getting a bum rap.
October 22
Another wonderful outing to Lotusland for me and the Nancys and a first time visit for Sharon and Sandy. We had a private docent tour and two docents in training. I took somewhere between a gabillion and a jillion pictures.
Just two follow because when I get home I’m going to update my previous chapter on Lotusland and use the stronger pictures and some contributions for the others too. We were all going around slack-jawed and snap-happy.
After lunch and the orchids we were heading back looking for a nice stop to stretch our legs and came upon a wildflower display put on by the California Native Plant Society at, I think, the visitor’s center at Malibu Lagoon State Beach.
It was very fun, a community effort, casual in presentation yet serious in purpose.
Sandy in total concentration, the first step in what will no doubt become a fabulous art project.
Of course you have read The Orchid Thief? If not you are in for a great treat. You’ll get to spend some serious quality time with real fanatics and see how orchids have become the center of a devoted and complicated way of life.
March 26
Nancy Artz, front and center, you go! Nancy is fast becoming our designated good-time-girl. She takes us on cool outings and we say ‘wow, what a good time we had. Thanks Nancy!’
Nancy and Sandy in the back row. Here we are enjoying a wonderful lunch out on the patio of the cafe in the Malibu Country Inn.
Here they don’t have so many varieties like you’d expect after reading The Orchid Thief but still numerous gorgeous examples of the more commercial types.
I suppose if they did have the rare ones they wouldn’t be out on free display!
There was a nice easy walk outside the visitor’s center and we identifed a few places that would make for a perfect picnic spot.
(n.)
Women on tour, and that one guy who was the one voice allowing the requisite ‘what do you think this IS Anyway?’ and ‘hey, my granddaughter could do this’ sort of expressions. Everyone else seemed very appreciative of such an illustrious collection and more than glad for the chance to be there.
The guide was wonderful. That’s her, looking back towards the group, answering every question with contagious enthusiasm and offering information you wouldn’t know you didn’t know.
December 8
Welcome to the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation tour, by appointment only, and it’s free and you know how I feel about that! It’s only available during the week so being Retired makes it all the better.
That’s right, we buzzed the Goodyear Blimp. Robin radioed the blimp pilot to ask if ‘his photographers’ could take some shots and the guy radioed back ‘wull sure, ok’.
That Robin really was a wonder just like he said he was. We didn’t get the least short shrift not being, you know, celebrities or anything – he gave us celebrity treatment. More like professional treatment, taking our requests seriously and making every idea happen.
ks.
Coming in at the Compton Airport.
It was interesting that the helicopters had to land in the same flight pattern as a plane even though they don’t need the runway the idea being not to confuse anyone or get in anyone’s way. Kinda like life.
p/ks.
I’m crazy for the sand in this one. You can actually see both piers, Manhattan in the foreground and Hermosa in the far distance.
For tech-types and PS devotees this is amusing, from Ken ‘Here’s one of yours. Lot of cropping–I tried to keep in most of the patterns-in-the-sand stuff since you seemed to favor that part of the composition. This started as a 4000dpi scan so it was a little trickier to reduce to 640×480.’
p/ks.
From Ken ‘Hermosa Beach Pier and Pier Avenue Plaza, the South Bay’s hot party nexus for twenty- and thirty-somethings. Essentially all the storefronts on both sides of the one-block pedestrian mall at the foot of the pier are bars.’
ks.
Maybe I just didn’t want it to be over? On the way back I kept noticing this and that that simply had to be photographed. Robin was keen and eager. Ken was kind and patient.
I have no idea what this is but it’s cool, huh!
p/ks.
From Ken ‘Nice aspect of that shot is that, looking north from 2nd St. at the south end of Hermosa, it covers just about all of the tiny 1.2 mile-long Hermosa Beach coastline, which ends just shy of the northern (Manhattan) pier. Also shows killer buildings.’
I was gaga over the killer buildings feature of this shot. In the big version you can see the residents brushing their teeth. Cool on the coastline too.
p/ks.
Yowuza wow-ee that was all just too much fun for a real word.
ks.
(included in this story: Ken Sarno, Robin Petgrave)
Here’s a link to the company’s website: Celebrity Helicopters.
The pilot, Robin Petgrave, was on the Tavis Smiley show the night we rode with him, talking about his youth programs. Click here for audio and extended coverage. It’s worth a listen.
Ken’s house(!).
ks.
It’s hard to choose without doing them up… There’s this one, one that features the freeway, and one that features the busses. Maybe you’ll have to look at them all!
p/ks.
October 12
Our pilot Robin with a Celebrity Helicopters associate, and Ken with 500lbs of camera gear around his neck. It was a door-free complete and total 100% blast and neither of us for one second felt the least hesitation.
p.
Another view of the catamarans that are now providing the majority of the transportation services from the mainland to Catalina.
We spent a lot of time admiring how these catamarans propel themselves and imagining if you could ski on the wake. It really was entertaining and we passed the hour quite happily.
Caleb was quite entranced with the look of the town. He noticed that the strange vehicles, the stone streets, the village-style buildings all made you feel like you had traveled off into another country.
We met up with A&C while they ate lunch at a sidewalk cafe, Caleb got some delicious chocolate ice-cream, and then we were off to join our jeep and driver.
The guide would periodically go back outside and throw buckets of fish food into the water causing the fish to literally charge the boat.
We were on the first boat of the day so the guide said the fish would be particularly active. Wow. These submarine tours have been running for more than thirty years, as long as this has been a protected area, and have stopped in the same three places many times a day for all these years.
This is what one of the frenzies looks like.
The Catalina Conservancy is in charge of all this back-country on Catalina and we learned some of the history of the area. If you’re interested, Click Here: Santa Catalina Island Conservancy.
See those two buffalo in the lower left corner? We just Loooved seeing them way out there and whoever among us spotted them first got a nice hand from the group and we urged the guide to please find us some closer.
The main reason to pay the big bucks for this tour is that you can’t get here otherwise except on bus tours as the Conservancy has some exclusive rights, and keys, to get you around.
Time for breakfast! Let’s see. Bacon of course. Extra crispy bacon and hot chocolate!! Yummy!
We chose this lovely place along the main drag and while we were eating…
Tooling along at a very modest pace we came upon this big guy.
He was standing right where we needed to go and he was not about to move. Our driver didn’t want to honk or do anything to annoy him and eventually she simply gave up waiting. Fine. She turned around, and we took an alternate route taking an extra half hour or so. Really.
This is a kind of rescue station where a very cool fox came right up to this fence for a chat.
Treats provided by the tour operator.
We’re now on ‘the other side’ of the island at a lovely secluded bay the vision of which caused A&C to proclaim that Nepenthe really needed to see this place.
After this we went to the cute-as-pie airport located at the top of one of the highest mountains there, then back down and goodby to our guide and our sturdy jeep.
Next A&C took us out on their zodiac to motor over to Nepenthe for a snack and a nice tour for Caleb to see a little of what it’s like to live on a sailboat. (What in the World happened to the picture of Caleb at the helm!?!)
We motored back into town and then Caleb got to choose whatever he’d like to eat. I would never have guessed. He chose chicken strips at KFC! Then back on the catamaran, and home sweet home.
On the deck of our ‘submarine’, getting ready to go down under.
The vehicle itself didn’t really submerge but once inside you could look up and see you were in fact under the water. Everyone got a window and we settled in.
…this seagull started howling and shreaking and squaking his head off trying to get that rival seagull off His heater hood. And no matter how much noise he made the rival was not to be moved.
ANOTHER TRIP From a Long Time Ago…
October 16 2004
Off at dawn with Caleb for a birthday day in Catalina.
At a quieter moment you could really pick out individual fish. We saw whole schools of Garibaldi, Opaleye, Surfperch and others but the most amazing heart stopping sight which I Failed to catch with my camera was a cormorant who dived under the sub so you could see him pass going down on one side and back up on the other. It was so quick and so amazing it took several seconds to figure out what had happened.
The giant kelp forest is also a highlight of the reserve with some species of kelp growning an inch per hour. Hey Caleb’s mom and dad, we had fun and we learned stuff too!
October 16
You’ve Gotta check this out. I’ll be adding pictures very slooowly since my machine is weeeeak and Ken’s film camera that I was using, at mid-level scan produces 114MB files and now I’m lusting after a new computer… Check the date for new adds.
Click Here: WOW Look At THAT.
All the horses wanted to play! And if you happened to have the oat bucket in hand, all the better.
Meet Cindy who gave Christa a Perfectly Fabulous Horse Day! Here is a link to the website for the Shamrock T Ranch.
The donkeys – and later in the day Christa RODE one of them. The pet goats were in the next pen over.
They had two baby horses and Christa learned how to manage the lead by helping to train the babies. Here she is finding the ‘sweet spot’, different for each horse, where, if you scratch them there the horse will absolutely purr with delight.
This is called ’round pen training’ where you get the horse to go this way and that way…
What Cindy liked to call ‘a Mexican standoff’. She starts training them to the halter when they are just a few days old so that she can still be strong enough to win this tug of war.
…and this is called ‘joining up’ because you make some command and then the horse will follow you Anywhere.
It’s all WorkWorkWork around the stables. That’s Craig drilling holes.
And at the end of the day, Cindy and Christa and the dogs are off for their trail ride, out to the hills and a highlight to the end of a wonderful day.
Hi Hunter! Craig and Cindy’s four year old. The one and half year old was hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa. And Craig and Cindy both hold down full time jobs in ‘the city’. So much energy!
So much to learn! By the end of the day she could do a lot of these chores by herself – she had the brushing routine down, could put the halter on and off without help, and could lead using all the right moves. Good job Christa!
Christa was Faaabulous and Cindy’s lesson gave her so much direction and confidence.
You always brush the horse clean before you saddle up and again after you ride.
They cleaned her hooves too which was quite amazing, to watch Christa with this honkin’ hook tool digging muck out from around the horse shoe and deep into the horse’s hoof.
Super Dupper Pooper Scooper. A daily job around the stables. Christa got to do Eeeverything.
Time for a full dress cleaning, good enough for a parade even! They washed her with soap and then added conditioner to the mane and tail…
