Wet II

There's a small creek that runs close to my neighborhood next to a small hill called 'Cathedral Oaks Park,' and it was dry for a long time thanks to the drought, but now it's pumping with water.

this is the trail itself, next to the road

there's a chain link fence guarding the creek

the creek is very urban looking, though it has a lot of shrubbery and moss everywhere

the green hill is Cathedral Oaks Park, and I can't even believe it's called a park, it's so tiny

a nice close-up of some filthy water flowing away

another angle. the water is moving pretty speedily

 Okay, so I took some videos of the water as well

Here's just a video to illustrate how fast the water is moving, since the picture doesn't show that.

This next video is mediocre quality (and short, too) but I wanted to show the disgusting creek-foam that was forming as the water fell down the step.

So long!

Wet

Hey!
January has been pretty rainy and chilly. Some days are wet, some days are less wet. Generally there are a few days of sun in between but mostly it's cloudy.

Sunshine on Mt. Umunhum

chilly evening

a wet sidewalk

a rainbow (at my school)

cloudy day at Saratoga Library

Cool clouds on the freeway

more clouds on the freeway

I have some pictures of a creek near my house so I'll upload that next!

Winter Evenings

Later in December I went on a couple of biking trips to a nearby county park, and I took a couple of pictures of the scenery. I wasn't used to the lock-on shoes my dad forced me to wear for this bike trip so I ended up falling over a couple of times, which wasn't fun.
There was a lot of slow, grueling uphill on these trails, but since we ended up taking the same trail back, there was also a lot of speedy, bumpy downhill as well.

Some trails were closed due to the rain, but this trail dislikes bikes in general

This area is foresty and leafy: also a lot of uphill, unfortunately

In some areas with fewer trees there was a lot of reddish dirt and rock

 

a sign that says no parking

here's a kind of zoomed out picture of the above image: a trail

A cool, cloudy day

In this image you can see the sharp downhill into the forest but also some of the city

after a nice hard day of biking, a pretty sunset

I think I still have a couple of Taiwan pictures, so I guess I'll try to upload those some time soon. My life isn't very interesting so I don't know if I would be able to continue posting new photos of the same scenery. Maybe I should try taking pictures of still life or something like that?

Happy New Year! (Tahoe Trip)

Happy New Year!
Looks like it's finally 2016 - nothing's really changed, and it's just another cloudy day in California.
I went on a snowboarding trip to Lake Tahoe, so today I'll be uploading a couple of pictures from a Nevada ski resort. We left on Christmas Eve and went skiing on Christmas Day and the day after.

Here's a picture of the US Route 50 sign in the snow. It looks like there's a picture of a poppy on the top.

I was pretty excited since I had fallen asleep in the car and woke up to a snowy landscape. In the morning, back in a warmer part of California, it was raining.

Here's a picture of the road. Earlier we saw a car wreck, in which a couple of people were standing around a car that had crashed into a tree on the side.

This is a picture I took of a flowing river. It's later in the afternoon by this point, but it's pretty dark because of how cloudy and snowy it is. I was surprised to see that the water wasn't frozen.

another picture of the river

Now here are a few pictures from Tahoe Town (that's a name I just made up), where we stopped by to grab some food.

We stopped by a Safeway to stock up

a green light

kind of cool - a Rubik's Cube electric panel. I think in Taiwan they liked to paint nature scenery on these things

 We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Tahoe Town. The food was actually pretty good, and the tea was fragrant and warm. When we were pretty much done with our meal, the waitress came over and offered to replace our tea. I thought she was just being a nice waitress, but when our receipt came, we realized their plan all along: they had charged us per pot of tea.
I suggested we dump all the leftover tea from the pot into another container so we could get our money's worth, so we put it into a Starbucks cup that previously held some peppermint cocoa. Yes, that was a little cheap, but tit for tat, y'know?

Now here are a few pictures from the ski place.

Early morning on Christmas Day - sunny with a few clouds.

another glimpse of the mountains. As the clouds indicate, later that day it snowed.

Here's a view of from on top of a ski mountain after you get off the lift. If you look closely it says the elevation on that cubicle kind of thing.

 Here's a warm lodge where we rested before snowboarding/skiing some more.

 

Here in the picture you can see Lake Tahoe on the left.

Here's a picture of my feet. I ended up doing quite a bit of walking since there was a lot of flat ground (and snowboards can't move on flat ground)

Picture of the ski slope when stopped to put on my feet straps

Another picture, taken in the afternoon as the sun was setting.

Looks like there's some kind of X in the sky due to the vapor trails left in the sky.

The bottom of a ski lift, closed at the end of the day.

Here's a fake fireplace - it's gas-operated and the logs are actually made of cement or something, since they don't burn. It's used to regulate the temperature of the room.

That's about it for today. I'll probably be uploading more California pictures since I've been on a few biking trips to a few parks in the past week.