Sunday, September 16, 2012

Los Angeles Arboretum

I am way, way behind in my blogging.  You'd think, by the lack of posts here, that I had locked myself in the apartment for the summer and drawn the blinds.  In fact, I was out doing lots of fun stuff, and if I can motivate myself (I will), I will show you some pics from the summer.  Things probably won't be in order though.

In early August I went to the Los Angeles Arboretum and Botanical gardens.  We'd actually set out to go the Huntington gardens, but accidentally arrived there on the one day per month when admission to the (expensive) gardens is free.  "Great", you'd think, except that due to popularity, admission was by ticket only, and we were ticketless.  Luckily, the arboretum is just a few more miles down the road, and way cheaper!

I won't post a lot of photos as I know plant photos put a lot of people to sleep.  But here are a few of the more interesting sights of the day.

I had thought this was labelled as some sort of wattle, but I am probably confused.  It's very science-fictiony, and was in the Australia garden:



There was a prehistoric forest to walk through- these are from a bamboo grove in that forest:




My mom used to have this one as a houseplant, it was in one of the tropical greenhouses:


There were peacocks at large all over the place:


This cool cactus was in the Africa garden:


This one was the floss silk tree, I forget which garden it was in.


More bamboo, black this time:


Some of the bamboo had been cut, here's what the stumps left behind look like:


I forget what this tree was called, but the garden was chock-full of bottle-tree like water conserving trees like this:


This is a historical adobe building on the property:


The weather was perfect, but there was one cloud in the sky, this is it:


I loved the arboretum.  I'll still try to go to the Huntington gardens though, but this unplanned trip to the arboretum instead wasn't a disappointment.

Monday, September 3, 2012

EARTHQUAKE!!!

OK, it wasn't a doozy or anything, but this was my first California earthquake, or that I felt, anyway.  There have been a cluster of them lately.

This one was weak, only 3.2 (now upgraded to 3.3. I hear) on the Richter scale, but as the epicenter was only about 3 km from me, the shaking was strong enough to rattle stuff and wake me from sleep:


Epicenter was at N34.0682 W118.3915, which seems to be someone's backyard garage on Oakhurst Dr., just north of Wilshire.  The time was 3:26 a.m. pacific time.

Fun!  I enjoy non-deadly non-damaging seismic events.