360 Flip Skate @ Miami
360 Flip Skate For more, visit: www.360flipskate.com
Filed under Trampboarding | Tags: FLIP, Miami, Skate | Comment (0)Tour the Inside of Osama’s Compound Post-Raid
Take a look inside the blood ridden after math of Osama Bin Laden’s once luxurious compound.
Source: Youtube.com
Filed under Culture | Tags: Compound, Inside, Osama's, PostRaid, Tour | Comment (0)Ciara Crashes Mindless Behavior Show
Ciara came out to support the young heartthrobs, singing and dancing along to the remix of their single “My Girl.”
Filed under Culture | Tags: Behavior, Ciara, Crashes, Mindless, Show | Comment (0)How To Skateboard: Setting Up Your Board
There isn’t much to setting up your board. I could do a video on actually putting it together, but this is just a video to answer the many, many questions I get about what kind of board should I get, what kind of wheels, what kind of trucks. It’s out in the open now, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not wal-mart 
Build Your Own Home Office Furniture (Popular Woodworking)
Build Your Own Home Office Furniture (Popular Woodworking)
List Price: .99
List Price: .99
Your Price: .74-
Setting up a home office involves time, money and careful planning. For the creative woodworker, it can also mean the satisfaction of building each piece yourself. With designs ranging from weekend projects to a fully-realized computer desk all of the plans in this book are fresh, functional and fun to build, including a stand-up desk recalling the unique work habits of Ernest Hemingway. Everything in this book is accessible, even for beginning woodworkers without elaborate shops. Designs include desks, shelving, room dividers and more. Easy-to-follow instructions are accompanied by detailed photographs showing all the key steps. Projects can be completed quickly, so craftsmen save money without a huge investment of time.
Your Price: .74 –
WENAS AUDUBON CAMPOUT: Chasing Birds and Grasshoppers
This male Mountain Bluebird took a big beetle into the nest box and left it for the nestlings; apparently he realized that he had made a mistake, because next time he came back to the box, he grabbed the beetle back and left the box with it
When I was a boy, my friend across the street loved butterflies, and he ran around the neighborhood with a butterfly net in hand, with one of those intense passions that young boys often develop. I didn’t share his butterfly passion, but I also loved being outdoors. The boys in the neighborhood all had bikes, and we would bike into town or to a park several miles away or to a baseball diamond for a pickup game. The freedom of summer was a wonderful, unstructured time that allowed for childhood exploration and creativity, without today’s parental concerns about evil lurking down the street.
The bright purples and yellows of spring wildflowers attract older people with their beauty–and they attract butterflies and bugs and thus kids who take a natural interest in insects
So it was wonderful to see a mother and her seven year old son–I’ll call him “Tim”–having a wonderful time outdoors at the recent Wenas State Audubon Campout that Karen and I attended. Tim watched Red-Naped Sapsuckers drilling into a tree; found the first Grass Widow flower on a botany hike; and spent a lot of time chasing and catching grasshoppers in the mountain meadows. He and his mother were car-pooling with us for two hikes; at the end of one hike he walked up to me and said that he hoped I didn’t die, because I was the driver to get him back to camp. Kids say the darndest things!
Tim wasn’t the only child on the trip. Among the 120+ Audubon campers, there were roughly a dozen children, all of whom seemed to be having a great time. I wish there had been more. In Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, he stated his mission of “saving our children from nature-deficit disorder.” His thesis is that unstructured time in nature is important for children, for their intellectual and creative development, and that they are not getting this vital childhood experience. He believes that this lack of nature experiences fuels the obesity, attention deficit disorders, and depression that have become much more common in recent years.
A young ground squirrel ready to duck into its burrow for safety from the big, mean humans
Let’s face it: we all spend too much time in front of colorful electronic screens. Children are not exempt, and the addictive [I use that word intentionally and from personal experience] nature of activities on computers, game consoles, and smart phones may be especially dangerous for young minds that need broad experiences, not the simple stimulus/reward experiences of gaming, Facebook, instant messaging, and online shopping.
End of rant. Just get you and your kids out there enjoying nature close to home or far away!
The Wenas State Audubon Campout is a great place to spend Memorial Day Weekend. The Wenas Campground, once a Boise Cascade public campground now owned by the State of Washington, is a big, flat Ponderosa Pine forest along Wenas Creek on the drier east side of the Cascade Mountains. People are
Camping at Wenas Campground under Ponderosa Pines and among lupines
Our campsite during a rainy evening in 2010
free to camp anywhere, except within 50′ of the creek, and the place can absorb probably thousands of campers. In the past few years, there have been groups of ATV riders and horse riders, in addition to the Audubon campers. Everyone needs to bring their own food, cooking supplies, and water. This year Karen and I set up a cook tent, in addition to our sleeping tent, because last year it rained while we were cooking.
Who can go? Anyone. Arrive any time and leave any time. There is no formal structure, except for meeting at assigned times for particular hikes. And that informal flexibility is part of the beauty of the weekend. There are no fees, except the voluntary donations for portable toilets and for the group camping permit. The weekend is filled with free group hikes to see birds and wildflowers in mountain and sagebrush habitats, plus campfire programs and owl prowls.
Owl Prowl leader Neil Zimmerman called in a tiny Pygmy Owl at the campground’s edge using his voice and recorded sounds; here it is illuminated by flashlight
It is so enjoyable that I’m surprised that many more people don’t take advantage of the experience.
It was wonderful to spend the weekend with people of all levels of knowledge and who are willing to share that knowledge. We saw our second Pygmy Owl and Northern Saw-Whet Owl on this trip, and last year we saw our first Long-Eared Owls. Don Knoke led some memorable botany hikes, and we had a chance to see an unusual native Brown Peony for the first time. Knoke also sets up plant identification boards around the Larrimer Tree, a big Ponderosa Pine
Plants of the sagebrush-steppe community, identified for we rain forest mossbacks of the Puget Sound area
along the stream, with a wide selection of native plants kept alive in little tube vases and on display so that people can learn about the different wildflowers of the sagebrush-steppe community.
This year we enjoyed a special new experience–visiting and birding 400+ acre Green Ranch in the Wenas Valley, now owned by a woman who had been a part of the Audubon Campout for years. She is dedicated to good stewardship of the land, which consists of riverbank forest, open pastures, and a beautiful old
Classic old barn interior on a Wenas Valley ranch
barn and outbuildings–as well as a collection (inherited from the previous owner) of several dozen old and decaying Volvos lined up near the barns; you may have heard of Cadillac Ranch; some people have called this Volvo Ranch! Note that this ranch is private land, and the visit during the Wenas Campout was by private invitation.
Over 40 of us went birding on Green Ranch, by special invitation of the owner, where we saw a good variety of birds, including Bullock’s Oriole, Western Tanager, lots of warblers, and a Wild Turkey egg
The Wenas Audubon Campout just completed its 48th year, so it is a well-established tradition that I hope will continue for decades to come. Legendary nature-lover Hazel Wolf was instrumental in getting the weekend started all those years ago, and she attended for decades until she passed away in the year 2000, at over 100 years old.
Big-Head Clover, with a flower nearly two inches across, is a lovely part of some sagebrush-steppe meadows
A beautiful meadow bordered by Trembling Aspens along the rutted and Beaver-flooded road to the campground (still, accessible to most cars)
Graceful shapes of slowly decaying sagebrush branches; especially artistic in black & white
In the photographs here you can get a sense of the natural environment and the creatures we saw during the long weekends (we have now attended for two years in a row). Don’t miss this experience next year!
Go to Wenas Audubon Campout for more information about these special weekends.
Western Bluebird male perched in Bitterbrush
Lazuli Bunting testing his lung power in a desert aria
Common Camas, a beautiful blue lily of wet meadows, was a staple food of Indians of the far west, who used the bulbs as a potato-like vegetable
With their elegant red bark contrasting with the green vegetation, the Ponderosa Pines of the Wenas Valley are the dominant large conifer
When the lighting is just right, the intensity of a male Mountain Bluebird’s feathers is extraordinary
An impressionistic view of balsamroot and buckwheat in a high meadow
Bitterbrush displays delicate yellow flowers in the spring
Townsend’s Solitaire in Bitterbrush
A graceful tapestry of Ponderosa Pine needles and branches photographed during our owl prowl
Eastern Kingbird perched on Bitterbrush
A brown cup fungus under the campground’s Ponderosa Pines
Black Canyon Trail through sagebrush-clad slopes
Female Mountain Bluebird examining the birders examining it
A Least Chipmunk feeding atop a fencepost
Pygmy Nuthatch emerging from its nest hole with a fecal sac (diaper) from one of its nestlings
In this dry country, wood weathers slowly and gracefully, as in this old fencepost end
Thompson’s Paintbrush is a creamy paintbrush common to the sagebrush-steppe
Chipping Sparrow singing his head off from atop a Bitterbrush branch
And now for something completely different: an abandoned truck among the Ponderosa Pines that has been on state land for at least two years along the road to a university sky observatory
Bullet holes and rust form a fanciful creature on the side of the blue truck
To see my web site, which includes photographic prints for sale, please go to LeeRentz.com
To see thousands of my photographs in large file sizes for use in magazines or other printed materials or electronic media, go to my PhotoShelter Website
Filed under Culture | Tags: AUDUBON, Birds, CAMPOUT, Chasing, Grasshoppers, WENAS | Comment (0)
Home is…where?
This year marks the longest I’ve been away from home. More so, this Spanish summer has been a time chock-full of changes – after D-Man finished his osteopathy studies and I began working on my thesis, we had a wonderful stroke of luck and got new jobs in the city, moved into a cozy apartment [...]
FreshlyPressed
Wednesday Wallpaper: Andrew Reynolds
This week The Boss, Andrew Reynolds is putting down a varial heelflip on a security-heavy triple set in downtown L.A.
Transworld Skateboarding» | Skating news, photos, videos – Transworld Skateboarding
Amy Winehouse Reveals She Wanted to Work With Busta Rhymes & more (Blog)
In a 2007 archive video by MTV, the late Amy Winehouse shared some her dream collaborations. The hip-hop community has always seemed to embrace the Rehab singer, so it was inevitable for her to be influenced by rappers.
Winehouse shared that her dream collabos would be with Nas, Mos Def, Busta Rhymes, and above all else Rah Digga.
Source: thisis50.com
Filed under Culture | Tags: Blog, Busta, More, Reveals, Rhymes, Wanted, Winehouse, WORK | Comment (0)Across the Danube River
I posted some photos from the Pest side of the Danube River in Budapest, and now here’s some more from the Buda side!
The first thing I saw when I crossed the river: it reads, “confidence in the ancient virtue,” the royal slogan of Franz Josef I, head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire….
The narrow, uphill streets on this side of the river catch gorgeous shafts of light in the evening….
At the top of the hill, in the Castle District, there are clusters of 19th century buildings…
…along with Hungary’s famous Fishermen’s Bastion, an expansive neo-Gothic terrace with great views of the city and the river. Here’s one of its 7 towers….
And just south of the Fishermen’s Bastion is the Royal Palace/Buda Castle:
Buda, with its small, winding streets and Castle District, has a medieval feel, while Pest is flatter, urban, and more spread out. I loved crossing back and forth across this wide river between the two very different sides of Budapest. : )
Filed under Culture | Tags: Across, Danube, River | Comment (0)
