los cerritos wetlands

another awesome event! a special camp fire wetlands walk and restoration

taylor giving us the ground rules and telling us what to expect on our walk



for any of my faithful readers who have heard me lecture on the necessity of saving the wetlands (rants maybe?) we are finally seeing some real work being done to do just that. last week i attended the second of six community meetings designed to get the public involved in the restoration. it was run by eric and taylor, just like a lecture you would expect to hear in a college biology or ecology class (love!!) i will include the link here so you can check it all out. what i love is how formal and REAL this all is, people actually make a living doing research on this stuff and spend their days counting birds, testing water samples, watching the tides, collecting seeds and on and on... (career change maybe??)



the los cerritos wetlands has a few areas that are pristine but much of it is heavily degraded... still the animals and plants exist here. can you imagine how a fully restored wetlands will look?



so here is lizzie along the river channel looking for sea turtles, yes sea turtles here in long beach! they are attracted to the unusually warm water coming out of these electric plants (they use the cold water to cool their "engines" and pump warm water into the channel. this is the bike path i have used to get to the beach my entire life and its been only recently known that turtles are here. these are juvenile green sea turtles, and they are stopping here on their way up and down the coast. we would normally never see them so this is a real treat. the biologists say this is a way for them to avoid predators and they eat the algae produced by all the warm water



last week i had a sea turtle meeting (we have hooked up with the love a sea turtle group from north carolina, more on that later) and those kids really knew the answers to the questions taylor and eric asked them (felt good they remembered!!) so if you are local, plan on coming out to one of the wetland events. this is really happening folks and if we want to save it all, we need everyones help! i still have a few more things to share about todays event... coming soon!

camp wasewagan

most of my camp fire kids had conflicts with our second trip to camp wasewagan (the camp next to yallani) so i had just three rascals to hang out with last weekend. we weren't sure what to expect this time of year, last time it was november which was cold but no snow. there's something about snow that makes kids go crazy and mine spent every waking hour making a snowman and having snowball fights. here is our cool cabin:

the weekend was designed to have discovery level kids from our councils mingle together and work on activities challenging them in areas of trust and communication. i was in charge of an orienteering (sp???) nature walk where groups of kids wrote up a path using a compass (pacing and putting out markers for guidance) and then the groups rotated to follow the paths the other groups mapped out. it was FUN! and the kids (including me) really learned how to use a compass.



up behind the camp was another deserted camp with retro cabins that i became obsessed with







really fascinating... old style like i used to camp in. wasewagan cabins are heated and can be used year round which is great but my heart loves these old tent/cabins too!



here is our little pack of discovery kids



and the snowman that took two days to build


and a trend my daughter started:



tails to go with their animal hats!! :)

el dorado nature center

an oasis in the city: el dorado nature center. i grew up going here many weekends with my dad and walking the one or two mile loop trail. lots has changed here, more native plants and a more manicured path but fun all the same

my big camp fire kids held an "environment" meeting here, hosted by three kids, part one was our walk today and a craft and lesson will complete the "trail" at mondays meeting
winter time is the best time to be in california, the mountains can be seen (with snow too!) and the days are cool, windy and sunny
one of the first outings our group did together was visiting the nature center and it's been 6 years since! wow!
i couldn't help myself with all these group photos, such a wonderful way to spend a weekend morning
and one more....

thanks for six wonderful years together girls, i can see the bright futures for all of them shining in their eyes. what a great feeling!



i am heading to work and hoping to share more about our new "garden club" at the kids school i am FINALLY getting started! more to come!

5 months from now....

we'll be in italy!! southern italy that is. i have been super busy planning this trip... for 2 years now! yep, hoping we could scrape this huge trip together and so far it looks like a go! i became enamored with italy many years ago when i went on a trip with my parents, husband and emily when she was about a year and half old. we went to venice and the tuscany area, renting houses in each spot for a week and exploring on our own. italy has a similar landscape to california but with way less people. it was definitely the best trip of my life and still remains so today. when i returned i dusted off the "under the tuscan sun" book i had started a decade before and read it cover to cover (and a second time too) wondering why had i not gone to cortona!! we had been so close! it sent me dreaming of another trip someday... which has been more than 10 years now. emily will be 12 when we hit rome and start our adventure through puglia, basilicata and up through naples back to tuscany and YES cortona!!!

researching this trip has been a blast and i went from two to three weeks and now a little more than that as i added city after city...



puglia is not as touristy as other italian regions so i am hoping our june/july dates won't be too crowded. i am sure rome will be a challenge but the kids really can't miss school right now



inspirations for choosing puglia came from here and here and here

funny how once on the trail i stumbled onto many italian blogs written by americans... even becoming "friends" with many on Facebook and adding even more places to our list of cities to visit. one very special person turned us on to basilicata and another fellow so cal gal has the b and b in tuscany we will be staying at. last, our trulli in puglia was found by another ex pat from laguna beach (just down the street from us) crazy! here are some of the links, in case you are curious:
tuscany
puglia
basilicata

basilicata really has become a major player for me now with it's rugged coast and hilltop villages, visit my pinterest board on it if you really want to be wowed! like i said, it reminds me of growing up here in southern california before it got so miserably crowded and smoggy... stay tuned for more on italy!!

resolutions

so this year i have the usual resolutions... keep hitting the gym (love my aquafit class!!) try to lose weight (always) and start painting again. for some reason i have had some kind of "block" keeping me from painting even though i love it and think about it all the time. actually doing it just seems so hard...

i hauled all my stuff up to the cabin a few months back and then ignored it for the three days i was there sooo... i hauled it back home and it has sat waiting for me to dig out and DO SOMETHING!! i have read books on creativity and i guess it's just a fragile thing for me, not really doing creative stuff but attempting to paint is a struggle. i learned to paint from my dad after several horrible art classes in college and he was just positive and happy to hang out so i loved it. i had one plein air workshop that was amazing and i painted the two best paintings of my life there. when i took it the next year i struggled (while we thought our cabin was burning down) the entire week and actually walked out during my critique at the end. i just couldn't take the criticism which i KNOW is not meant to be personal but it just floored me. i think it's because i really don't know what i am doing and don't completely understand the "how to's" of painting in a formal way. i am just playing around and if something is not the right tone or value or ??? i have no clue. i just know that "something is wrong" or "something is right" and thats about it. anyways! i am so happy i just jumped in today and knocked this little painting out:



i went back to my basics, back to how my dad and i painted and just copied something i liked, using it as a reference and tweaking it as i went along. i really liked how it turned out, especially since my brushes are pretty wonky and i wasn't using the right palette to mix paints. i bought water based oil paint and it was wonderful! hardly any smell and everything cleaned up great. hoping i can continue chipping my way back to a regular painting schedule!!

candy sales once again

so this year candy sales has begun and unlike other years, the first weekend was bad bad bad... i am sure the economy has something to do with it. whether people just dont have the money or because so many organizations are struggling, everyone is being nickeled and dimed to death. i know we are as a family, fundraising for the schools foundation, cheer and band as well as just coming off christmas, when will it all end? it's a real bummer though to sit for hours and hours watching dozens after dozens of people walk by saying, "no thank you" one after the other. 

so we try and keep our spirits up with lizzie and her giveaway drawings...



emily kept "fake answering" the pay phone near her...



and when the silliness takes over...




just go with it!! let's hope we get through this month without too much anti camp fire crap from the girl scouts (already have had some which unnerves me to no end) and have a great sale to keep the lights on at our local council.

Spinning wheels, 2012

so i just got renewed for another year here on typepad, automatically and for some reason i was annoyed that i hadn't had a chance to decide whether i would continue with this blog or not. funny, you don't give something much attention but then you can't give it up either... my goal for this space originally was to post mostly about being a camp fire leader and it has surely morphed into many other things. travel journal, kids growing up journal, save the wetlands outlet...still very superficial really. facebook and now pinterest have overshadowed much of my blogging (twitter not so much), it is so quick and easy and interesting. i have found most of the blogs i read to be either really boring (lots of deep thought and thinking, which i did a lot of as a teenager and young adult: DONE!) or really annoying (whining about kids non stop and having baby after baby after baby: DONE) or all about food and cooking (YUM!). maybe a travel blog or "normal" parenting blog or two and thats it. 

 

Soooo.... since i must continue on i will dig just a tiny bit deeper today and post what is actually happening this morning and my thoughts on it:

because it reflects what is going on at this moment, right now... coffee grounds on the way to my new composter (all i wanted for christmas this year and santa brought it!!), "yellow" limes from the dwarf tree that finally produced fruit (i have been torn up about the loss of our lemon tree for like 5 years now and struggling to replace it), cork from the italian wine my husband got for me to try last night (from the region of italy we will be visiting in june...more to come on that), large jar i will fill with the organic farro i custom ordered from an organic farm in oregon that has been amazing! (this recipe rocks!), our avocados are finally ripening and this is a record year for tastiness, a nice flower someone placed in a jar (camellia) and a monster sized bisquick left over from camping to make pancakes for our sleepover guest this morning... last day of vacation for the girls and i have to work so a special breakfast is in order. i am thinking i might even elaborate on my job more in this space since it has become such an enormous part of my life (emotionally) lately, but we'll see. it's pretty heavy stuff. and now its time my morning ritual of coffee in the jacuzzi!
Happy New Year!!