Hahamongna Blog Day

Counselors from Tom Sawyer Camp set up a learning center on the shore of a natural lake at Hahamongna Watershed Park (click to enlarge).

This Monday, July 12th, Pasadena's City Council will discuss and probably decide once and for all whether or not to build soccer fields in Hahamongna Watershed Park.

One field is planned for the location pictured above. This natural lake fills with the spring floods, then slowly dries out in summer. It provides habitat for coyotes, bobcats, ducks, swallows, rabbits, ground squirrels, toads, egrets and herons. These are the animals I've observed there.

Soccer is more popular than ever before. Yet the City Council recently voted millions in budget cuts, affecting salaries and city services. Caught between this rock and that hard place, what's the City Council to do?

We have alternatives. Vacant lots and little-used playing fields all over town lie waiting to be repurposed. There's no need to spend millions during a recession to fill in a lake and build unsustainable soccer fields in a flood plain when we have access to other, more appropriate land.

In almost every issue of Pasadena In Focus, the city's useful and effective newsletter to citizens, we're urged to reuse and recycle. Repurposing unused lots is recycling on a grand scale. Let's use land that's already flat, already outside the flood plain and all ready to be played on, to make financially and environmentally sustainable soccer fields for Pasadena.

If you'd like to email your council member, you can do so here. And thank you.

Today several bloggers have teamed up to talk about why we think Hahamongna Watershed Park isn't the place for athletic fields. Please visit all the blogs (and one website!) participating in Hahamongna Blog Day:
Altadena Above It All
Altadena Hiker
Arroyo Lover
A Thinking Stomach
Avenue to the Sky
East of Allen
Finnegan Begin Again
Go Deep...Find Truth
Greensward Civitas
LA Creek Freak
Mendolonium
Mister Earl's Musings
My Life With Tommy
Pasadena 91105 and Beyond
Pasadena Adjacent
Pasadena Latina
SaveHahamongna.org
Selvage
Temple City Daily Photo
The Sky Is Big In Pasadena
Webster's Fine Stationers Web Log
West Coast Grrlie Blather

My thanks to Barbara Ellis and Karin Bugge for helping put Hahamongna Blog Day together.

Hardware

John and I are a little in love with the light in our house, especially at the day's extremes. Sometimes, around sunset, I'll catch him standing still, head cocked as though he's listening for something. But I know better. He's watching the light work its magic. I do the same thing.

If you peeked in our windows in the early morning or late day you might see one of us with a camera, following the sunlight around as though it were a butterfly and the camera a net, attempting to catch light as it flits from faucet to hinge to windowsill.

photo by John Sandel

Of course the light has been here longer than the house's 85 years. These old doorknobs aren't old after all. Amazing, really, that something so fleeting as light comes all the way across the solar system and finds its way through our windows to touch these inconsequential things.

Zen Monday: #102

Welcome to Zen Monday. In case this is your first: Zen Monday is the day you experience the photo and give us your thoughts rather than me telling you what I think the photo's about. There's no right or wrong. We're here to have fun.

I look for a photo worth contemplating or, failing that, something odd or silly. Unless I absolutely must say something I stay out of the comments box to avoid influencing the discussion, because when I get in there everything goes downhill. Or comes to a complete halt at the curb, as the case may be.

Amber Waves

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

America the Beautiful, the 1895 poem by Katherine Lee Bates set to music by Samuel Ward, has several more verses. (Read that first link if you want to know why the poem was originally entitled "Pike's Peak.")

For all its flowery drama, I think it's a beautiful song no matter how you sing it (and some ways are more interesting than others).

Happy Independence Day.

Solar Salad

When I moved here from Illinois I thought of living in southern California as a vacation on another planet, especially when it came to plant life. Sometimes I still do. Click on this picture to enlarge it. These are bean pods.

The brownish stream on the lower right of this photo is bean pods. The branches above the stream show where the pods came from.

What kind of tree drops bean pods in purple, orange, yellow and green? Surely something not from our solar system.

This photo was taken awfully close to JPL. Maybe I shouldn't be wandering around over there.

Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters

Jameson Brown Coffee Roasters is situated off the beaten track, which is the first thing I liked about it before even walking through the door. Then there's the ample seating, the casual decor, the friendly service and the cleanliness.

But I can't tell you how good the coffee is.

Really, I can't.

I'm going to come clean here: I haven't had caffeine in 69 days (who's counting?). I'm not particularly happy about it but the doctor said eliminating caffeine might decrease the frequency of my migraines so I said I'd give it a shot. I can't tell you how furious it makes me that he was right.

At Jameson Brown I had herbal tea. Which was fine. Pictured here is the Jameson Brown latte, which my friend tells me is "the best latte in town." I'm so happy for all of you who get to go taste it.

Theme Day: Reflections

Nordstrom shoppers at the Westfield Santa Anita Mall.

Here it is the first of the month again, and that means a City Daily Photo theme day. On the first I like to update you how many blogs we have in the family (1243), and today I'll also mention the newest, Oxford Daily Photo (UK). I spent a summer studying at Oxford in 1999 and I still miss it. Uhoh. A new blog to love.

Not every City Daily Photo blog participates in theme day.
Find out who's reflecting today!