Christmas Week Is Here

Hi everyone. I hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

Yesterday afternoon and overnight we had some snow. I snapped a few photos this morning before the hubby did some snow cleaning up and the dogs tromped around leaving footprints all over the place.

Can you see the one poor little chickadee is trying to get breakfast?  I walked out and shook the snow off the feeders for him and all his buddies. Funny how some of the chickadees just sit in the trees and do their danger call and some chickadees have no fear and practically land on you when you come near the feeder.

They really are fun little birds.

Before the snow arrived yesterday, I went out to disconnect the electric fence from around the bees. The bears and skunks should be hibernating by now. I also walked around the hive to give it a check, (it's too cold to open it), and I was glad to see the bees have been getting rid of some hive waste out the front. 

This waste means they are alive inside and just doing some cleaning as they are very meticulous about the state of their hive.  If the hive was suffering, cleaning would not be something they'd be up to. And yes there are a few dead bees, but most honeybees only live a few weeks so that is how it should be. If there were a lot of dead honeybees, then I would be worried.

It's hard to believe that Christmas is almost here. It's not many days until it arrives, is it?

For today I want to share another page for Valerie's When One Door Opens Another One Closes challenge at Art Journal Journey.

These birds are  excited that Christmas is almost here.

This page was a lot of fun to make. I started with blue paint and some of  big cardboard snowflakes that came in a package of 50. (And they were marked way down as the craft store obviously wants them gone by the time Christmas gets here.) 

I glued them onto my page, outlined them, and then added a layer of glitter over the page. 

The birds are die cuts that I colored and embellished.  I hand drew, colored and fussy cut the bird houses and the bird feeder.  I also added a few of those shiny little snowflakes because at Christmas some glitter and sparkle is expected.

The birdhouses have a little opening or doorways for the birds to get in.  I think a some of the birds are bringing their holiday decorations back to their houses to decorate because they just realized how little time is left to get it done.

I also want to share one more holiday tag for Pinky's Everything Christmas challenge at Tag Tuesday.

The middle of my holiday stamp didn't transfer clearly, and when I went to overstamp it, I only made that part worse. So I added the hearts and the dots. I left the flowers peeking out at the top, as well as the birds and the skates, and added a small version of this skating boy from TH.

And if you are wondering about the stitching, I photographed the tag on the back of a journal page, but I like how it looked so I left it.

If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you're not too busy to have a little fun this upcoming week. 

Have a great start to the week everyone. Thanks for visiting. 

More of La Brea Tar Pits- Los Angeles

 Happy Saturday everyone. We have some snow arriving today, (a general 4-8 inches or 10-20 centimeters) and it's our first bigger storm of the season, so maybe we'll have a white Christmas after all. 

Due to some interest about the tar pits, I'm going to focus my post back at the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA. I was surprised as we drove into downtown  we passed several oil wells, but it all makes sense when you think there are bubbling tar (or really asphalt) pits here. And yes Chris, they do have an odor.

If you read this Iris, here are some of Henry's cousins in this top photo. There's another Henry further in the post.

All of the large outside areas were fences off, but I managed a few photos. For this first one you can see the methane bubbling up.

I like this next photo for 2 reasons. First you can see how the tar pits are located right in a developed area. Also with the addition of the large animal models, you can see how mammoths and mastodons could get stuck  and then die in the pits. They weren't the only animals to be stuck. There were also dire wolves and  saber toothed cats  (as well as others) which could smell the decaying flesh of the these large animals and came in for lunch. When they went in the sticky tar to eat, they too got stuck in the tar pits also.

Here's a brief history page from the Tar Pits themselves if you're interested in reading about their history: Le Brea Tar Pits story.

No one was digging for bones in this pit the day we were there. 

I found these cones over soft spots in the park around the museum interesting.

You can see all the boxes of fossils still to unpack and process from their digs in the pits.

Inside the museum, there was a glass fronted lab where they cleaned and worked on fossils.

And here's either a scientist or volunteer who was working the morning we were there.

And it's not just the bones that tell a lot of information, but sometimes the microfossils tell even more.

A view of what the Tar Pits could have resembled back 10,000 years ago.

And yes, we used to have lions (similar to African lions) in North America.  

And I'll finish up my photos with a few more skeletons, starting with this extinct horse. I still find it fascinating that animals like horses and camels evolved in North America, and then went extinct here. All the modern horses we have (and camels also) were brought back to North America by humans.

They also had this cool exhibit that showed elephant/mammoth/mastodon evolution.

And a mammoth molar, adapted for grinding.

They've even found some bird fossils, including this giant vulture. (Sorry for the light reflection across the photo.)

And a couple of dire wolf skeletons.

There's nothing to give you a scale on their size, but they were the size of a pony or a small horse.

And for those of you more interested in plants than animal bones, they had a lovely indoor/opened to the outside conservatory.

You could also walk around it from  outside on the roof the building. In this next photo I am looking slightly downward and across.

And finally for today, a few views from  when we were in the park that surrounds the Tar Pits Museum of LA.

That was my pick for our 2 days in LA. My husband's pick was a movie studio tour. For his pick we visited the Warner Brother's studio, which ended up being quite fun also.  If you're interested I can share that with you another day or two.. 

As I said in my other LA post, there was a lot to do in the city, and one of these days, we need to go back. Two days didn't even scratch the surface.  

You've all shared such nice comments on my trip photos; thanks so much. 

Have a great rest of your weekend.

Holiday Whimsy Part 2

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday and almost weekend to you.

Yesterday it was cloudy but so warm it felt like spring. Tomorrow we are predicted to get 4-8 inches (10-20 cm) of snow. At least  with the  snow it might feel more like December, even though it was really nice to have some spring weather. 

Today I have a page for Valerie's When One Door Opens Another One Closes challenge at Art Journal Journey.

My page today is a bit of whimsy and holiday playfulness.

I started by painting my page with watercolor blue paint. Then I added some water color purple splatters just for fun.

I drew in the line to define the land, and then I used white acrylic pant to make it snowy. It probably isn't good for my brush, but I smooshed it to get that bit of snow texture you can see.  I also like how the white picked up just a tag bit of the blue from the watercolor. I like how it gives the white snow just a little more depth.

The striped house was cut out of a sheet of paper that I had saved because I liked the stripes. It originally came in a package of letter stickers. It was only as wide  as the house is. I drew, colored and fussy cut the door and windows on some white paper and then glued them down on my house. I put some clear drying glue over the windows to represent their glass.

My first thought was to approached this as a gingerbread house, so I used white paint to act like the white frosting you would find holding a gingerbread house together. 

Then I wasn't sure I wanted it to be a gingerbread house.  I decided to use a couple of  fun Janet Klein stamps. I stamped and colored them on white paper before fussy cutting them out and adding them to my page. I think these ladies live in a striped playful house full of youthful charm. 

I also added a few of these little "sprinkle" looking bits of crafting confetti to a couple of the trees. If I was going whimsy, I might as well play up the colors.  I then stamped the quote to finish up my page. 

I'm having fun making houses and doors for this month's challenge. Thanks Valerie for picking this topic. 

That's it for me today. I hope you are having a wonderful Friday and start to the weekend.

Driving the California Coast

Hi everyone.

You must be getting sick of seeing travel photos by now.  Smile.  Thanks for all your kind comments too.

I've shown a couple of teasers of our drive up coastal Route  One in California, so I thought today I would share the rest for anyone interested in looking.

We were driving north, starting off in the morning in Ventura, just north of LA, and ending our drive when we arrived in Carmel on the Monterey Peninsula.  This section we drove is part of the longer Pacific Coast Highway.

It was quite a dramatic drive with lots of twists and turns, made even better that the scenery was just amazing. We drove  south to north, which is the opposite direction of lots of recommendations. Usually it is recommended to drive north to south  because then you are on the ocean side of this 2 lane road.  By the time we decided to do this, we already had plane tickets bought and we were flying home from San Francisco International Airport.  The south to north direction is what it was going to be. 

I'm not sure it really made that much of difference though (whether you drive north to south or south to north).

You can see how twisty the 2 lane road was. We stopped quite a bit also, so the stretch of dramatic driving took us about 3 hours. They say if you drive straight it takes about 1 and a half hours to do. There are some hiking trails along this stretch of road too, but with it getting dark at 5, we decided just to drive and stop to admire the views.

The views were amazing. 

And a little scary too. Don't go too near the edge.

At first I thought all these floating black "things"  in the next photo were ducks. Now I am thinking maybe sea otters in a kelp bed. I couldn't get the photo zoomed in enough to tell,  but we saw some wild sea otters in Monterey Bay, and they reminded me of this photo. (This photo was taken with the 400x zoom on my camera lens.)

As we arrived closer to our destination, there was some light evening fog.

I wonder if these white fluffy grass like plants are Phragmites, also known as common reed, an invasive species. If I was home, I would say they are. Here in California I am not sure. 

And towards the end of the drive, the sun was about to set down onto the Pacific.  As I've mentioned, one of the drawbacks to traveling in November is that dark arrives close to 5 PM. We stopped ,and I had a bit of play with my camera. (I haven't touched any of these photos with Photoshop.)

And then in the last light of day, we drove on into Carmel. 

Hope you enjoyed the drive in photos as much as I enjoyed taking those photos.

Thanks for visiting.