Philbrook Museum of Art cat cams

see the cute kitties and read the story here

Bali kite festival

In the many hours I have spent at the museum researching the objects from the Pacific Islands, I would occasionally come across something somewhat unrelated that would catch my interest. In my search for symbolism of Balinese wood carvings, I found this photo which looks like a child flying through the air behind two bulls:

I couldn't figure out what it was at first, but that's a kite!

 Since it's nearly July, I thought I'd share what happens in Bali during this month. July is the middle of Bali's dry season, and there is a constant easterly wind, but rice crops are grown year round with the help of irrigation. The reason for flying these monstrous kites is to promote good harvests by sending messages to Hindu gods.  Typical kites flown during the Balinese kite flying season can range 10 to 30 feet! (The rule is no bigger than a two-lane road.) About ten adults are needed to help fly just one kite. Traditional shapes for the kites are fish, birds, and leaves, and colors typically include white, black, and red.

 

Each village, or banjar, helps build and fly the kites. They are constructed from bamboo and plastic or cloth skin and sewn together. Most of the largest kites cannot be dismantled because of this, but are instead walked in a long religious procession to the beach where they are sent up to the sky.

Just think how fun it would be to see these up in the air!

the weekend

This weekend was the Oceanbeach Street Fair & Chili Cookoff. I only participated in the street fair aspect of it because I do not enjoy chili one bit. It was incredibly crowded and it took me 1.5 hours to go the 10 miles from my house to the beach on the trolley and bus. Oceanbeach is known as the "seediest" beach in San Diego. I completely agree, although they've also got a great farmer's market and this festival wasn't so bad either. (As long as you don't walk under the pier, you'll be okay.) It's also one of the more popular surfing spots.

I spent most of my time scoping out surfboards in stores and on the water.

I've made it my mission to find or make a wind chime while I'm in California. There's a store in Old Town that is full of every kind you can imagine:

I happen to think this is pretty great too, though I'm not sure what it would sound like:

At the place I am housesitting this week, there is a giant wind chime made from three-inch-thick cast iron I-beams. Of course with it being so heavy and the lack of anything other than a little breeze, I never heard it and didn't know it was there until I saw it today. I tried it out and it sounds great, and would be perfectly suited for the Kansas winds!

I spent a lot of time in the garden today, pulling weeds and doing turtle inventory. There should be four, I believe. I only found three, and one was lodged between a plant pot and a brick. I thought he had gotten stuck there and died, but he was sleeping apparently, as I found out after tickling his foot.

In the evening, I cooked some miso soup and baked some honey almond cakes, recipe courtesy of my sister. I found these adorable cupcake liners at Ikea for only $1, but while baking there was no cupcake tin to be found, hence the puzzle-piece blob cakes.

                                                          Still, my roommates seemed to like them!

it's officially summer...

...according to both the calendar and the weather. It finally got above 70 degrees here, and combined with the sun, it felt especially nice!

I've been doing much of the same cataloging and researching objects at the museum, except with different collections. After the Oceania collection, I moved on to toy boats-- little clockwork tin model boats from the 1920s to the 1980s. I have to admit they look like fun, especially the submarines. Too bad I can't try them out...

After that came the "medical boxes". I thought museum cataloging couldn't get any worse than arsenic-stuffed taxidermied birds until I opened up one of these and found a Civil War surgery kit, complete with amputation saws. I've seen many of these in museums before, but let me tell you, there is a whole lot of difference when they are safely behind a piece of glass as opposed to just sitting there in front of you. Fail me out of grad school, I don't care, I am not going to take those things out of their box for individual pictures!

I'll skip a picture of that collection and leave you with Robert E. Lee and his pony, Traveller

 Thankfully I have now moved on to lighting. Yes, just lamps and the like: buggy lanterns, whale oil lamps, lighthouse lamps, etc.

old lighthouse lantern

"There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged  in his deepest reveries-- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in that region... Yes as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever." --Moby Dick, Herman Melville

La Jolla Cliffs

sea lions & a sunset

sea lions

  a lovely evening at La Jolla

Little Mogadishu

Just south of my neighborhood in San Diego lies City Heights, an area known for its ethnic diversity. This area includes neighborhoods of Indian, Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Hispanic, as well as Eastern African people. Approximately 55,000 Somali refugees have come to San Diego legally since 1991 to escape war, and about 20,000 live in what is called "Little Mogadishu", in City Heights.

All Somali refugees that come to San Diego are put on welfare, and it is very difficult for them to move beyond this state. There are several organizations who work with the state department to help the Somalis assimilate to living in the United States. One of those groups is International Rescue Committee, or IRC, who provide services such as immediate attention upon arrival in the U.S. (food, shelter, clothing), and promote self-reliance through community and cultural orientation, education, English-speaking classes and job placement. As you can imagine, it is a difficult struggle to make a living: http://www.bantubeads.com/.

For high school students, there is a program called Students Plus, where volunteers do after-school tutoring. In addition, they've created other programs like sports teams, and currently there is an exhibit, "A Different Life", at the San Diego History Center that focuses on the transition faced by seven high school-aged Somali girls living in San Diego. It was co-curated with the girls themselves working with museum staff, so they were able to provide their own items for the displays, and also, for example, demonstrate how a dress is worn. It was sad to read their stories, especially about one whose grandmother had been killed and whose father had been targeted simply because he worked for the government.

map from the museum showing the girls' routes

Overall, it was noted that these refugee communities live rather isolated lives, so I think public exhibits such as these are incredibly important for acknowledging the different communities that surround us by creating awareness not only about their culture, but how they connect with our own.

four weddings and a sand castle

Yes, that's right. There were four of these on the beach tonight! All lovely.

And an amazing sandcastle:

where are those Santa Ana winds?

I really should have checked the climate reading for southern California before I moved here. Then I would have known it is a "Mediterranean climate": an average of 57 degrees in January (sounds good!), but only 72 in August. The only time San Diego really gets a hot streak is when the Santa Ana winds blow from the eastern deserts.

We drove through Phoenix on the way here, and it definitely was a desert-- hot, dry, sunny. Now that I'm on the coast, I've experienced the complete opposite of Kansas weather. I remember once this spring in Kansas when it was below freezing on a Monday, and 90 degrees on that Friday. Here, it's sunny all the time and very consistent temperatures in the 60's.

Still, today was cloudy in the 60's. One of the docents turned on a space heater in the boat's library (I'm not the only cold one!), and for once I felt comfortable. I've been wearing all the layers I brought with me when I go to work, which isn't much considering it's summer and supposed to be hot, or so I thought. It felt so nice with the heat that I was seriously considering going to buy a space heater for my room just so I could be out of long pants and a sweatshirt for once.

I was talking to my cashier at the grocery store the other day about this conundrum, and he told me to "just wait a month". We'll see about that...

Happy World Oceans Day!

Today I found out that the hordes of adorable sea lions around here are actually considered a problem for boaters. I was so excited to see wild sea lions when I first got here, and I was unaware how many there are along the coast of San Diego, but it's their migrating season now.

Apparently, not only do they enjoy the rocky cliffs along the water, they also enjoy relaxing on boats.

That orange construction netting is suppose to keep them off and the larger male sea lions can weigh about 600 pounds, so it's easy to see how they can damage the boats. The city has people working to move them by using water hoses and nudging them off with long poles, but I read about how they will slide off when they hear people coming and just wait under the boat until they leave!

the beach!

I've finally made it to a sandy California beach! How exciting! Coronado Beach, to be exact. (Sidenote: I swear this is the second cloudy day I've seen in the three weeks I've been here. The first cloudy day was the first day I got here. It was actually sunny all day until this evening.)

They've got to be cold!

No wonder there is a no kite flying rule. The runway is right at the end of the beach.

And the lifeguards drive Subarus. I want to be a lifeguard. Until those crazy surfers go out in the freezing cold water and get sucked into an undertoe.

good morning!

today's venture: a hill-mountain hike

The highest point in San Diego is named Cowles Mountain, after a rancher who lived in the area in the 1800s. It's only about 1500 ft high, but you can see a fantastic 360-degree view from the top. The west side of it is a rock cliff, a former sea cliff actually, from thousands of years ago.

This is not the west side (the west side would be the ocean, not more mountains), but it is a rock cliff.

 I made two trips up today. The first to scope it out, and the second to see how long it takes. It's only a few miles from my house, so I plan on making it a regular part of my day (running around here has not been so successful with all the traffic and people in general). 

The protected area it's in is very dry and desert-like with no trees, and the trailhead signage tells me that this is what southern California is naturally. No palm trees and pretty flowers! Just lots of dry dust.

It was all steep switchbacks toward the top and with runners (and stumblers) flying down and around the corners on their return, I was sure I was going to get knocked off the trail into the prickly scrub brush. I've never seen so many people fall down on a trail before either, but dust-covered rocks make for a slick descent.

air show

The Wings Over Gillespie air show was today in El Cajon (I'm learning new Spanish words every day!). I took the trolley to the airport this morning, rather than drive, since I'm making the most of that expensive trolley card I waited an hour in line for. It's got to be cheaper than $4.25 gas though, right? The trolley stop is at one end of the 1.5 mile runway, which meant I ended up walking two more miles to get to the actual spectator area. I did not know this at first. The aerial view on Google maps always makes things look much simpler.

Lucky for me, I found an old veteran man on the trolley who was also walking to watch the planes, so I ended up listening to two miles worth of war stories along the way. He told me all about the importance of the multiple buddy system, and then about how he had been married to a pilot for 13 years before she died in a crash in the mountains-- so sad.

The airshow itself was entertaining, but not as exciting as others I have been to. There were no jets, no aerobatics, no formation flying. Ah well. There's always Kansas City's air show when I get home in August.

At least the weather was beautiful, as it has been since I've been here. It's a lot warmer the farther you get from the coast. Since the maritime museum is on a ferry boat, the space is mostly open to the outside, so there is always a cool (cold?) breeze from the water. I'm usually freezing because of this and so for lunch I walk three blocks inland to Little Italy. There, on one of the street corners, is a nice fountain with black metal benches. These are my heat source, and I feel just as a lizard does as I eat lunch there and watch the tourists roll by on the historical trolley tours and gawk.

corner of Little Italy

just look at them go!

it's the end of an era: no more free pancakes

I've left the hostel! I was really quite used to staying there, and I even miss it a little. Especially the free pancakes in the morning. And meeting so many different people. It makes me want to go on a trip far, far away. Today's acquaintance was an older lady from Victoria, Australia who is finishing up a 10-week "holiday" on the west coast. She was a lot of fun to talk to and eat pancakes with.

I'm somewhat moved into my new place with four other roommates, and I feel at home-- probably because I spent the last week sharing one room with up to 9 other girls, so it's nice to have my own space again. Little did I know that at this new place I'm actually sharing a bathroom with two guys. I thought just one. I also thought no one had been using the bathroom when I walked in to unpack because there was nothing to be seen except for some shampoo in the shower. I opened one medicine cabinet and nothing. I opened another and found toothpaste and a razor. It must be nice to be a guy.

I'd say I packed rather efficiently, wouldn't you?

My tiny Ikea mattress. There's just something nice about being able to cram it into the back of a Subaru and it's just as comfortable as any other bed. I had to buy an extra wool blanket (from Ikea...) because it has been COLD here.

New bracelets, plus a not-so-new favorite.