Tahoe Nature Day with Jenny...

On another perfect Spring day, Jenny and I met up for a long walk. Yes, I'm in my Happy Place.

"The mountains are better when shared with friends."




It's the simple things done with friends that make me the happiest!
"We should all be thankful for those people
who rekindle the inner spirit."
-Albert Schweitzer

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Birthday Month Day #24 in Tahoe

Having returned to my Happy Place, it was ideal that my first day back was spent with Karen. She has a knack of reminding me why I love Tahoe so much!

We began our morning catching up at Cuppa Tahoe.
Needing to get out in it all, we then headed to Taylor Creek.

With hopes of spotting newly awakened bears, none were to be seen. We were disappointed.
What we did witness, in plentiful quantities, was evidence of beavers.
After extinction in the Sierra Nevada by the early 1900s, Castor canadensis were re-introduced to the Tahoe Basin between 1934 and 1949 in order to prevent stream degradation and to promote wetland restoration. Descended from no more than nine individuals from the Snake River in Idaho, these little guys are plentiful and way so cute. For some reason, in the winter of 2014, one beaver ignored the designation of nocturnal and would appear in the afternoon, to the delight of a vast audience who knew his schedule.

This darling image has been taken from my post describing that winter sighting.
With 60°+ temperatures, it felt like late-Spring but the foliage still had the bleak look of a recent winter.
That said, upon closer observation, Spring was discretely appearing. What JOY!
Karen then treated me to lunch at a new-to-me place, Cascade Kitchens. What a perfect return home. JOY, indeed.

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A Detour to Tehachapi

I've been traveling to this little town for 30 years now. It is not just for its quaintness but it is the home of my college friend Leslie (a major part of my life since 1982).


My timing was perfect to catch a matinee performance at the historic Beekay Theatre. How cute is this theatre? The story of the old movie house and its incredible journey is as unlikely and heart-warming as any Hollywood film. It began during the Great Depression when two Tehachapi businessmen, Frank Baumgart and Leo Kanstein, decided to build a movie theater to entertain the local population.

The two entrepreneurs combined the initials of their last names and spelled them out to form the name BeeKay and opened the doors in 1936. Local residents streamed in to watch double features of black-and-white movies and animated shorts. The BeeKay was a hit.

The movie marquis outside was the only neon sign in the valley and people would drive by just to marvel at the lighted sign (if only I could stay out until after dark). The movie theater soon became a landmark of the downtown. The years went by and while other businesses came and went, the BeeKay persisted — the solid building even withstood the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake with very little damage, though most of downtown was destroyed. Like all things, it fell on hard times but has risen through the 'rubble' to become a delightful performing arts venue. What a Tehachapi treasure.
We were there to see The Big Five-Oh!, described by the director as “It’s Dick Van Dyke meets That ’70s Show."
"Whoever said life is better after 50 had better be right! George Thomas is turning 50 on Saturday, and it has been a terrible week. His dog is sick, his son is a slacker, and his daughter wants to marry a Republican. With a neurotic wife and a widowed neighbor providing more challenges than even George can overcome, this may be the worst week of his life. Through these trying days, George will discover the wonders of family, the responsibilities of parenthood, and the results of his latest physical. The Big Five-Oh is a hilarious, sometimes touching account of a grown man coming to terms with his age, his relationship with his son, and his future."
What a fun look at life and what a heartwarming conclusion about what's truly important. With this being Day 22 of my Birthday Month, it seemed a perfect way to celebrate. Bravo to all!
The rest of my time there consisted of many rounds of Scrabble, long walks with Leslie and her dog, and two mornings of amazing sunrises. Leslie's porch is one of my favorite places to be!



Another true Tehachapi treasure is Leslie's mom, Barbara. We spent both days at her home dining on wonderful meals, playing games, and just delighting in each other's company. Ging Hunter wrote, "You should enjoy the little detours. To the fullest. Because that's where you'll find things more important than what you want." Now on to Lake Tahoe!

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A Return to Laguna Beach

On September 12, 1987, Steve and I said our "I do's" in Laguna Beach. With both of our parents gone, my big brother Chuck flew in from Virginia to give me away.


He hasn't returned to Laguna since our wedding so I planned a very fun and very full day there.
The weather could not have been more conducive to seaside delights!

Last year was the 50th anniversary of the release of the movie that kept me out of the ocean for years. Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg. Based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, it stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shaw), hunts a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers at a New England summer resort town.
When I learned that the Laguna Playhouse offered matinee performances on Thursday afternoons, I bought tickets for The Shark is Broken. The timing could not have been more perfect (I actually saw Jaws for the one and only time with Chuck in the movie theater when I was 13).
The intriguing play description read, "The first summer blockbuster movie is being filmed - but no one working on the film would know it. Dive deep into the tumultuous, murky waters of the making of a major motion picture with testy, feuding costars, unpredictable weather, and a shark prop whose constant breakdowns are looking like an omen for the future of the movie. In this comedy co-written by Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon, the short tempers of "Jaws" stars Robert Shaw (father of co-writer Ian Shaw), Richard Dreyfuss, and Roy Scheider take center stage as they bond, argue, drink, gamble, and pray for an end to the shoot, not knowing it will change their lives forever."
Over the course of its 97 minutes, the play grew on us. As we got to know the characters, and understand the magnitude of their challenges 'filming' Jaws, we became engrossed.
Afterward, as we meandered through the Village, our appreciation of The Shark is Broken grew. We all really liked this play. And I think I'm ready to see Jaws again. A half of a century wait is long enough. What fun!


Renowned artist Tom Fruin is exhibiting a trio of plexiglass and steel sculptures on the lawn at City Hall. The sculptures are a nod to utilitarian design and structures we usually overlook, casting colorful shadows and reflecting sunlight during the day while interior lighting creates a captivating glow in the evening. I would have loved to have seen this aglow! Next time.
We enjoyed Happy Hour at Las Brisas overlooking the magical Laguna shoreline.

Steve and I had our first date in Laguna, began our married life here, raised our boys playing at the City park, all while adding to a lifetime collection of unforgettable memories. How wonderful to add this day to that amazing collection. Wow.

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My Big Brother is in Town

My big brother Chuck arrived for a five night stay with us. While he'll be using some of his time here to visit with San Diego friends, we have much quality sibling time lined up as well, which started with Monday's amazing afternoon at Cougar Winery with Karen and David.



"Dining with one's friends and beloved family
is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights,
one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal."
-Julia Child

Here's to more memories to be made...

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Pop Art and a Mall Library...

Our Saturday came in three parts. After Scripps and lunch at a sidewalk café, we visited La Jolla's Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which invites all people to "experience our world, our region, and ourselves through the prism of contemporary art."




With this exhibit closing the next day, we were excited to see A Decade of Pop Prints and Multiples, 1962–1972: The Frank Mitzel Collection which marked the public debut of Southern California-based collector Frank Mitzel’s gift of more than sixty Pop Art prints to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Assembled by Mitzel over the course of three decades, this vibrant collection offers an impressive and valuable survey of Pop’s growth across the United States, England, and Europe during an era of rapid transformation.
"Although it was never a monolithic or unifying movement, Pop Art emerged in London and New York in the mid- to late 1950s in response to the simultaneous exuberance and unease of the postwar period. Pop artists soon embraced printmaking as a democratic medium, one that enabled them to reach broad audiences—and thus was truly popular—while courting associations with the commercial culture that inspired their work. Rejecting the overblown heroism of the previous generation’s gestural abstraction, such artists turned to advertising and mass media, embracing bright hues, flat graphics, and rapid legibility."

Of course there would be Warhols! In 1962, Andy Warhol painted his first Campbell's Soup Cans by hand, but it was his adoption of screen-printing that year that aligned his techniques with his imagery, mirroring both mass production and habits of consumption. Soon, Warhol's studio, which he called The Factory, had produced soup cans in a range of colors and substrates, including shopping bags produced for the artist's 1966 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Made for Warhol's 1964 exhibition at Castelli Gallery in New York, Flowers, too, shows Warhol as canny merchandiser and expert image proliferator.


"In the late-1950s, Roy Lichtenstein's borrowings from pop culture, including imagery cadged from Disney and contemporary comic books, effectively announced a move away from abstraction and a return to figuration in the form of commercial objects and imagery. Lichtenstein's 1967 print signals his turn from Pop-art enfant terrible to art historically savvy, neoclassicist savant. Using his trademark benday dots, Lichtenstein depicts the fluted shafts and curled volutes of an Ionic column, while also evoking the carved-up spaces and rays of Analytic Cubism, bringing opposing aesthetic ideals into deceptively neat Pop alignment." Did you see that, too? Hahaha.



This huge work, by Lucia Koch, was one of my favorites. "Once a small bag of pasta, Rustichella's pseudo-architectural interior alludes to the remnants of these once occupied spaces which now lay empty, as bygone remains of a consumerist culture. Upsetting the expected hierarchy of scales between these modest objects and the size of the artwork, Lucia Koch momentarily disassociates the photographs from their immediate references, transforming them into views of invented rooms. Using carefully placed cut outs to allow for the intrusion of ambient light, Koch's photographs evoke a certain moment in time, challenging our usual ways of relating to space." The viewer is literally looking into an empty bag of pasta. For me, it's almost a depiction of a hunger or a longing. I don't usually see, or agree with, the description that accompanies a piece of art. Consumerist culture or someone who really loves pasta... who's to decide?!
This one just made me smile. "Between 1966 and 1968, John Baldessari worked exclusively on text paintings, including this satirical piece. With this early inquiry into Conceptual Art, the artist hired a sign painter to produce Terms Most Useful in Describing Creative Works of Art, thus removing evidence of the artist's hand and playfully distancing himself from the act of creation. Poking fun at tropes of art criticism and interpretation, Baldessari's sardonic approach emphasizes the semantics of words by isolating them from grammatical context." This was a fun way to end our first visit to this vast, diverse art museum.
Last stop was the Mall in Escondido. When we first moved to Temecula in 1993, this was our closest shopping area (until our Mall arrived in 2000). When the kiddos were little we trekked the 37 miles for mommy playdates. Currently, we came here because it is the temporary home for the Escondido Public Library
for approximately one year while repairs and upgrades are done to the Main Library in downtown. This I had to see!
The Library has taken over four different store fronts. My first stop was at the Friends of the Library Bookstore. When Steve saw me divert here, he left in search of a coffee. Moments later I received a text which stated, "They have a bar in the middle of the mall. I'm having a beer!" I knew my time was now my own.

The Main Library is housed in the defunct Abercrombie & Fitch store.
I was so enamored, I had to get a library card.
What child wouldn't want to hang out in this library space? An entire store just for kiddos. Wow.
And just when I thought the Library in a Mall couldn't get any more magical, I discovered this event space where a sold out flowering arranging class was happening.
What a perfect spot in which to end our fantastic day!

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