Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix

 We often travel to Arizona in the springtime to sell our mixed metal jewels at the Scottsdale Arts Festival and while we are down there in the usually wonderful warm weather we look for fun and interesting things to do after the art fair. At other California fairs in the summer and fall of 2012 we had several visitors to our booth tell us about a new museum in the Phoenix area called the Musical Instrument Museum that was started by a former CEO of Target stores and had opened in 2010. Everyone who mentioned it to us gave it a variety of rave revues so we decided to check it out on the Monday after the fair.  We now have our own rave review to share with you and we recommend that if you are ever in the Phoenix area you take the time to visit it. It's in north Phoenix just off the Pima Freeway (Highway 101) and is easy to find and get to. The website for the museum is http://mim.org/
The base guitar pictured at the left is the biggest I've ever seen and the player has to stand on a platform in order to play.

 The wonderful building that houses the museum has a series of large rooms upstairs, each of which is devoted to a continent of the world and features instruments and exhibits for a multitude of areas and cultures of each continent and the peoples that inhabit it. Visitors wear headphones that sync with a video player that is located in each of the small exhibit sections showing the instruments being played and broadcasting the sound of them. Some of the actual instruments displayed are featured in the videos. There were some really interesting and creative use of recycled and found objects used in some of the instrument construction such as these guitars at the right.

 One of the first rooms one walks into when first entering the museum has an entire wall of guitars some of which are amazingly fascinating. This double necked one was on the wall. I took a lot of guitar pictures to show my teenage grandson who is becoming a collector of them.

 Here, to the right is a shot of the guitar wall from halfway up the stairs to the 2nd floor.

 I took a great many pictures on my journey through the museum and have made a couple of collages. Drums are featured in this one. The rattlesnake rattles were really cool, I hadn't seen many of those rattles since my early days in Texas as a kid where there were many around. I still have a couple that different uncles gave to me when I visited their farms on summer vacations.

This is a collage to give you an idea of the variety of stringed instruments on display. I think I read that they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 instruments, some thousands of years old. There is also a room where you can play some instruments and that was fun to explore. There are also some gallery spaces that have ever changing displays.
And there is a restaurant where the food we had was really delicious.

Our visit was fun and inspirational although we are planning to go back on our next trip south because it got a little overwhelming after being there for 6 or 7 hours with so much input. Let us now if you get a chance to visit and what your favorite part was.

The Davis Whole Earth Festival

 On Mother's Day weekend, May 10th through the 12th we will be selling our mixed metal jewels for the 37th year at the Whole Earth Festival on the quad in front of the student union on the campus of the University of California at Davis. It's a fun, interesting and photogenic event that we do well at and enjoy a lot. I got my first digital camera in 2001 and have been taking a lot of pictures at the event every since then, up to a thousand a year now. I've been going through the archives and have picked out some of my favorites and will be posting a number of them between now and the festival.

 The festival features about 200 booths of
arts & crafts, wonderful festival food, 3 stages with continuous live music and dance presentations, alternative lifestyle exhibits, speakers, kid's activities and interesting surprises ever year. Free admission.

The little guys

I've become enamored of the idea of taking pictures of all the creatures that live in my yard and currently I'm focusing on the smallest of my neighbors. These little tree frogs have been hanging out on a plant in a half wine barrel just outside my kitchen door on the deck. I've been spending a lot of time each day I'm home seeing what kind of creatures live on this flowering plant and have found it to be a whole little ecosystem. There are three of these frogs spending time there, they vary between 1/2 and 3/4's of an inch long. I'm assuming

that they are waiting for insects to come close so they can have a bite to eat. I haven't seen them catch anything but they seem very patient. Bees, wasps, various flies, moths, butterflies, and many unknown little bugs visit these flowers each day.

I've seen four different types of spiders so far and they are very successful hunters like this jumping spider with a bee. 

It was late evening when I got this image of a hummingbird, It seemed like it might have been tired and perhaps cold. It let me get up to within a couple of feet to take pictures and it's feathers were fluffed out. Someone told me that they fluff out their feathers to help create more of an insulating layer around themselves to help conserve body heat when they are cold.









                      
I like the way this images shows the wasp bridging the two flowers.












I was driving down the street in Ft. Bragg when I saw a raven on this railing out of the corner of my eye. I like the color of the banister and the building as a backdrop so I stopped and got out to try and capture some pictures but it was scared away by someone walking by. I got in the van to drive away, disappointed at missing the shot but then it came back and I was able to get a few shots. Just after I took this one it flew away.

Wandering the Oregon Coast

On the weekend of July 20th-22nd we participated in a wonderful art festival at Bush's Pasture Park in downtown Salem, Oregon. We had a great time and did very, very well with sales of our mixed metal jewelry. Afterwards we decided to slowly wander down the Oregon coast on our way home to California. We drove up to Astoria, where the Columbia river empties into the Pacific to start our trip. The picture on the right though is from the very southern most state beach in Oregon, so close to California that we could have walked there in a few minutes. It's one of my favorite pictures from the trip though so it got posted first. It's the first time I've been fairly close to a group of pelicans just off shore and been able to watch them diving into the water after fish. I found it amazing to watch them hit the water, beak first, at high speed. They must have some pretty fancy engineering to be able to do that. A friend that I showed the picture to told me that they have a protective membrane that comes over their eyes as they hit the water that lets them see clearly underwater.

I like the fuzzy stuff on the top of their heads. I found out after I got back home that pelicans hang out in Noyo Harbor near where fishing boats come in and I went and took some pictures of local ones up close, one came up to within three feet of me. At first I thought it was being friendly but when it tried to spear me with it's beak I realized that it was being territorial. I guess it's a good thing I didn't try to pet it. Someone else I showed my pelican pictures to though said that down near Santa Cruz you can sometimes pet the pelicans there.

I call this image to the right "Steam Punk Sentry". It was taken up in Astoria on the waterfront, the rusty gear was some kind of apparatus to do something with boats in the past I assume. There were a number of enigmatic mechanical things just off shore there on cement pillars in the water. We spent one night in Astoria, found a nice natural food coop in the evening for dinner after walking along the waterfront and went shopping for books at a local thrift store in the morning before heading south. I harvested books at thrift stores and library sales all along our trail home to sell at my next book sale in September. Books are one of my major addictions.

We spent the next night in Florence at the Lighthouse Inn where we stayed the last time we did this trip in 2009. It's a block from the interesting area of old town and right around the corner from a thrift store that I found some good books at last time through. That proved to be true this time also. To the left is a sandpiper, one of many searching for food in a marshy area adjacent to the marina near old town.

We spent a couple of nights in Bandon at the Table Rock motel just 50 yards from the beach, and a very nice beach it was. There is so much public access to the ocean in Oregon that it's incredible. The islands off Bandon are a wildlife sanctuary. We went to another nearby place, a wetlands restoration project and enjoyed having a hunting hawk fly a few feet above our heads. I wasn't fast enough to get a picture of it however. The beetle to the right was hanging out on a rock near the ocean in Bandon. It was fairly large, almost two inches long and had lots of interesting furry stuff on it's undersides. It wasn't moving much but it was evening and fairly cool. I love it's color and textures. The next time we go up to do the Salem fair I think afterwards we are just going to head straight to Bandon and spend several days there exploring the richness of the natural world in it's vicinity.

Visiting Creatures

Continuing to capture images of the creatures that live around me. It seems sometimes as if they are posing and the images they let me take seem like great gifts. This one of a male quail and his child is a case in point. They usually flit away when people come anywhere near but he sat there for a couple of minutes while I took a number of pictures. The little one came out after I had already taken several. There was only the one chick for this  adult pair, sometimes there are 5, 6 or more. Naturally I call this image "Baby Sitting".

This cricket was on my living room floor one night, it had only one rear leg so couldn't move very fast, a situation that allowed me to capture a number of very close images. I had forgotten to turn the flash off which was lucky because it created really interesting and intense metallic like reflections on its external body armor. I put it outside after the portrait session. That's a styrofoam cup on which it rests.

Yellow, yellow, yellow, in bright sun on the deck outside of where I sleep.

This dragonfly was captured with the camera in extreme telephoto mode and from about 6 feet away. They are normally fairly skittish so I can't usually get close to them. It's the first time I've seen one of this color in my yard. I've been starting to draw dragonflies and have just completed making one as a pendant out of silver and gold.

This one was by a small pond at a friends place in Ft. Bragg, on a rosemary plant. It was unusual in that it allowed me to get up close, only about a foot away and stayed still for several shots. It then flew away and around but returned to the very same spot for a couple more shots.

Mendocino & Caspar Neighbors

 A jay with attitude to be sure. When this was taken I had just stepped out onto the deck off of the kitchen and had inadvertently scared this bird off from the cat food it had been harvesting. You can see that he wasn't pleased and was actually a little ruffled.

 Most of my friends who are gardeners really cringe when I show them pictures of these insects but I find them photogenic often. This was taken at the Mendocino Art Center

 This was taken on Mendocino's  Albion Street, in the middle of the street just a couple of blocks from the center of town. A garter snake trying to look fierce to scare me off. It actually struck towards the camera a couple of times. It seems to be spreading the back of it's head so that it looks triangular, mimicking the shape of the heads of poisonous snakes. Although in this image it looks as if it might be big, it's head was about the size of my thumb and it was about 18inches long. I shooed it off of the road into a vacant lot so it wouldn't become goo on the road from a passing car. Nice coloring.

 For a time insects were frequent visitors to these daisies outside the kitchen. It was rubbing it's hands together in glee I guess but in the still image it looks as if it is praying.

We don't see very many any more but in year's past we had very frequent racoon visitors to our kitchen deck checking to see if we had forgotten to bring in the cat food. Sometimes we would see 4 or 5 a night often in groups of two or three. I'm not sure what has changed but they are infrequent visitors now.

Birds of Springtime

 I'm been enjoying the increase in bird activity that has been happening. I enjoy watching the changes as species come and go. To the left is a Brewers Blackbird I think. This was taken near the pond on Main Street in Mendocino as I was out and about putting up flyers for Caspar events.

 Taken in front of the Caspar Community Center, a barn swallow. They are busy building nest under overhangs on the center building as they do each spring. I love watching them fly, sometimes only a few inches above the ground. As I was arranging books for my book sale inside the center and had the doors open, one flew in and was trapped in the room for a couple of hours but finally found an escape route out an open window.

 This fellow was sort of hovering in the moving air of a breeze as I took this shot.

 Near the post office in Mendocino, a raven. When it first landed on the post it was making the raucous call that they make a lot. I made sort of a clicking sound at it and then it started making the clucking, chuckling sound that they make sometimes. This shot was taken as it was making that sound, the fine feathers on it's head fluffed as it did so. When I first heard that sound in the forest I had no idea what was making it and only later figured it out when I saw two of them flying by talking to each other in chuckles.

There are very few robins about now but earlier in the spring they were around in large numbers.  I took lots of pictures of them. A friend who has one of these bushes in her yard said that at certain times when the berries have ripened and fermented, the robins get drunk eating them and exhibit odd behavior. I hope to see that next year.