Who doesn't love a good parade?!

Every year, after the end of The Rose Parade, the floats are parked on Sierra Madre and Washington Blvds at the end of the route for viewing for another day or two. This is something we do, every year, if we can (if we're in town). What I love about this is that you can get up close to the floats to see the details –  what flowers the builders selected and all the intricate work involved. You can meander past the floats at a much slower pace as well, compared to the floats driving by you if you were there, live, at the parade. What I always forget about the float viewing is that you can actually smell all the flowers, as well –  –  always a lovely surprise for me.

Here are some photos from this year:




Not a cloud in the sky on January 3rd, sunny and almost 90 degrees F. This is exactly why I love living in Southern California. Tank top, shorts and plenty of sunscreen lotion.


Aren't all the flowers just gorgeous?

 
More detail of the ladybug, below. What care the float-builders took in laying out patterns of seeds, like in the ladybug's spots. Whew!



The pink line = the Rose Parade float driver navigation line.


The drivers hidden deep inside the finished floats can't really look out to navigate their way. This pink line is painted along the parade route (yes, down the middle of the road), as I understand, so the drivers and their floats will stay on course.

This is part of the line at the end of the route, where the floats are parked for public viewing.

Why, yes, it *is* rocket science

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, in what seems a prior life, I worked on this, the RS-68 engine.

The last few times we've driven by the Discovery Science Center (the one with the cube) in Santa Ana on the way down to Balboa Island, I'd see the banner for the Boeing Rocket Lab and think, "Oooooooooo". 

Note: I'm not a rocket geek. I can't recite rocket history and power rating numbers. Nope, sorry. I don't play with Estes rockets. I do, however, have a great sense of affection for my old rocket pals, support the idea of manned spaceflight, and really like all that fire and steam.

J had to go on a field trip and decided to check out the Discover Science Center. We dutifully checked out the exhibits on Grossology (The Impolite Science of the Human Body), the geology and earthquake exhibits (timely, as there had been one a few days before), the science of hockey, the TinkerToys, the dinosaurs.

"Gah!", I thought, as I got jostled by another little kid running around, "When are we going to get to the rocket engine part?!?"

There, in the cube ...
So, what's the deal with the cube? I had no idea. They didn't explain what the deal was with the cubeness of the cube, even, right there at the Science Center. You'd think they'd make a bigger deal of explaining about the cube, considering that it's SO BIG and it's what you see as you're zipping by on the freeway. And everybody identifies that science center as the one in Santa Ana with the cube. Or maybe I completely missed that placard. I finally checked online and uncovered that the cube is a solar Cube and produces energy for the Science Center.

Me: "Ohhhh".

From the Discovery Science Center website:
"There are three perfect 3D geometric shapes in nature: the sphere, the pyramid and the cube. [Me: and I've had to teach students to draw and shade them all]

Architecturally, the sphere has been built at Disneyworld and the pyramid has been built at the Louvre, the Luxor in Las Vegas and the California State University, Long Beach basketball arena.

The Cube has not been built before.

[I got to this point and thought, "Ever?! What about, oh, the Borg?! That's right, the Borg! Oh, that's in the future. Okay, never mind."]

Thus, Discovery Science Center architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia of Arquitectonica thought that The Cube would be the perfect icon for Orange County’s science center. The Board of Directors concurred and it was incorporated into the center’s plans."

We got to the cube and noticed it was leaking. They had caution cones around it: Mind your step. J says, "I wonder if it always leaks".

I peered through the perforated metal and went, "OOoooh, the rocket stuff is inside the cube". Hence the leakage.

The water-pressure propelled mini rocket display was cool and all, but it pales in comparison to the real thing as well as memories of real life-size Space Shuttle Main Engine tests.

Did you know the Space Shuttle program is coming to a close soon? Only two more Shuttle launches, and then, what's next for U.S. manned spaceflight? What's next for all those rocket people?
:( When I was at Boeing, I remember them saying that the Shuttle program would end around 2010, and it seemed like a long ways off. Sort of how the year 2000 seemed like a long way off when I was in first grade. I could barely do the math; that was like 30 years away. Who could imagine? And yet, it happened. All of it happened, and here we are.

What's next up for U.S. manned spaceflight? If I were a real rocket geek, I'd know, huh? Thank goodness for the internet. J responded to my visible concern (he takes these things in stride - that I'd know about the end of the Shuttle program and was so concerned about manned spaceflight): "The U.S. would never stand for the idea of other countries launching astronauts while we weren't".

You think?

So there it was, that big ol' RS-68 engine. Wow. So cool.
J asks, "So, what kind of power do they get out of that?"

And all I could say was, "Gazillions, baby. Ga-zillions."

= = = Happy weekend, all! = = =

Conference marginalia

20090425_WDC_notes

I attended a district design conference which was held in Santa Monica, right here in LA. There were a lot of good talks and great ideas to take away from two days worth of presentations. After each of the past few conferences, I’ve tried to track down articles that might summarize either the salient points or maybe describe the overall experience, going beyond the presentations themselves.

Lots of people take notes (or in this particular case, since they’re designers, maybe they’re drawing…), but I don’t know how well any of the information gets shared, back at the office, if at all. I’m trying to decipher my own notes and hope to be able to share at least some of the meatier thoughts with my colleagues. We always wish that we could get digital copies of the presentations, but would that really help? The longer I wait, the harder it is to recapture the sense of urgency and passion of the speakers.

I found this on a table in the back of the main room and had to stop to take a photo of it. I’m not sure what it says about the attendee or the speaker. At a casual glance, I admit, it doesn’t seem to speak well of how things might have been going on-stage. After musing about it for a couple days, though, I think this represents the best part of conferences. You can’t predict or capture the marginalia – all the side conversations, chance meetings, and random thoughts that the presentations inspire.

It’s tough to get everyone together and involved in a region as vast as Los Angeles, but it's clear that it really is a small community. There was a lot of catching up, shaking hands, trading hugs and/or punches on shoulders, and talkin’ smack challenging neighboring offices to basketball games.

Good times.

Dreamy gardens

I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigor of spring, as well as an infinite variety of color that no artifact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival... each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday. -Bernard Berenson

I spent some time in the library this week to look for books with good reference images of plants, trees, shrubbery ("Bring me a shwubbery!"). To daydream about a future garden. Or to paint. But mostly to daydream (you can imagine this, yes?). Flipping through, I realized that I have gardening books with great photos. And then I realized that I have plenty of really super images (or, nice images of super memories) from a class I took in school. It was an elective, The History of Gardens. There were lectures, but the field trips were the real treat. We toured a number of local Southern California gardens, both private and public. It was just fantastic.

The Lummis Home / El Alisal
The Getty
Huntington Library
Norton Simon
Descanso
Lotusland
Hannah Carter Japanese Garden

One assignment of the class was to keep a garden notebook, with images, trimmings, thoughts from the gardens and notes on several of our design assignments. I found my notebook and flipped through the pictures, thinking, daydreamily, "Oh, now these are what I should paint."

I managed to find and salvage the digital photo files from archive CDs and lookit, it’s just so much fun and so much from a bright sunny Southern California summer, that I had to share.


Click here for the Flickr photo set.

Sending dreamy thoughts of the first bursts of color of spring and the warmth of summer to you all. Have a great weekend. xox -w

Meandering Here and There

Remember, now:
No matter how warm it is, wherever you spend the holidays, what matters is that your heart is warm and full.

Click here for a few photos from the Hawaii Trip

The short of it: There are no drawings from Hawaii. I would have had to stay still for too long, and the mosquitos were just having a feast on me, as it was. The 'Scritch, Scritch, Scritching' would not have been of my pencils. Feh!

Notable: Shave Ice at Matsumoto's, Waimea Valley, University of Hawaii Warrior football, banyan trees at Kapiolani park, more burgers and fantastic shakes from Teddy's, roosters starting their crowing at 3 am in Kahaluu and that six-hour delay for our 5-1/2 hr flight back home.

And then, back home:
Did I mention that I love The Rose Parade? We went on Jan 2nd to see the floats on display in Pasadena. What a great chance to see them up-close and at a way more leisurely pace. Check out all the creative ways to use the natural materials.

Click here for a few photos from the Post-Parade Float Viewing

How can I get a job doing this?

Griffith Park

My class visited a few design studios on Monday. Because of the holiday, traffic was way lighter than I'd figured, and we were running way ahead of schedule. In L.A. Yeah, go figure. So, we hung out at Griffith Park for a little bit, in a section that none of us had been to before. A nice, unexpected break for us ... or, at least for me...

note - I'm testing how the posting from Flickr goes. Hmmm..