This is what you see when you first walk in. The kitchen in on the left, and straight ahead is the dining and living areas. The door on the right is the first bathroom.
Here are some more photos of the kitchen.
This is what you see looking out over the bar.
Alex and Cleo love this window.
And this is the dining and living room area.
As you can see, that strip of wall could use some more of Grandma's paintings.
This is from the upstairs
Kelley this will be your room - it still has nothing in it except for the lamp.
And here's the patio
You can still see some traces of the ivy that was climbing up the sides of the fence. Today I finally got around the planting the Aloe Vera, and hopefully by the time you guys come there will be some veggies growing there also.
I took some videos of Alex and Cleo exploring the patio.
Hey guys! Here are some pictures from the places I've been volunteering at. I can take you guys to either one when you visit in June, this is just to give you an idea of what they're like. The plant nursery is at Half Moon Bay state beach, which is right on the Pacific. It's a bit of a drive but both the drive and the beach are very scenic.
The nursery is behind that fence. We grow plants native to California from seeds, and when they're big enough they are planted along the coast. This is important for the land because these plants contribute to the ecosystem in a way that foreign plants don't. It's very nice working with plants, and I'm learning a bunch about the different types of species around here.
I also managed to take some pictures at the humane society. Baby squirrel season is almost over, but when it was in full swing we had a bunch of baby squirrels in incubators that we would bottle feed. All of the baby animals we receive are orphaned, usually because something happened to the mother like being attacked by a predator. We raise them until they are big enough to survive on their own, and then release in the location they were found. The babies were the cutest little things, but some of them were tough to feed because they were so picky with the milk. It had to be warmed to the perfect temperature otherwise they wouldn't take it, and most of them ate better when they were wrapped in a cocoon of blanket. Here are some tiny squirrels in an incubator.
Now most of them are bigger and in wire cages. We put them in wire cages so they can climb around. At this point we don't hold them when feeding them because we don't want them to get used to humans caring for them, so instead we hold the bottles through the cages for them to eat out of. We also try to wean them off the bottle at this stage so they eat more nuts and food they would find in their natural environment.
You can see their tales are just starting to get bushy. Once they get too big for the wire cages, we put them in outdoor aviaries, which are much bigger, and then when we're confident they'll survive on their own we release them.
Now we're in baby bird season. I don't have any pictures of the baby birds we have currently, but they are adorable. We have some baby hummingbirds, baby starlings, and another tiny one that we can't even identify yet it's so small. They get fed around the clock, tiny bits at time to prevent infection. They start out in the incubators, then when they're big enough we put them in baskets with netting on top, and after that we have big aviaries outside for them before they're released. I have a picture of a hummingbird in one of those baskets. It isn't a baby anymore, but still isn't fully grown. This little guy we got when he was a tiny baby, he had to be fed nectar out of a small syringe at first. Now he is self feeding, and looks for nectar in the flowers we give him. It's interesting how they instinctively know that nectar is found in flowers, even though they had it fed to them out of a syringe their whole life.
Here are some pictures from the bigger aviaries. This one has a lot of pigeons in it. Most of them are older, so they must have been brought in with injuries instead of having been raised by us.
This is one of the biggest aviaries, and is kept for the large birds. There is a raven in it, and we sometimes get hawks and owls too.
I find it a very rewarding experience working with animals. I'm sure you guys remember how I used to volunteer at the cat shelter back in New York, and then at Farm Sanctuary down in Los Angeles, but this is much more of a hands-on experience. It's not just feeding animals and cleaning their cages (or aviaries), it's raising them, bringing sick ones back to health, and making sure that they're happy.
