Visit a neighborhood festival, a reading fair at the Public Library and the Descanso Gardens. Get your broken stuff fixed at Repair Café. Learn about native plants and fish, and about rainwater collection. Plus: ongoing events and this week's random read.
Wonderful Water: A Neighborhood Festival. The Farmer’s Yard in NW Pasadena is hosting a water festival on Saturday. Expect lots of activities and sustainability presentations for young and old.
Repair Café returns. Tinkers and Tailors will be available on Saturday at All Saints Church to fix appliances, electronics, clothing, jewelry, dull knives, tools and toys. Free coffee.
130 Years of Reading is the title of a fair at the Pasadena Public Library. Family fun activities include a cake walk, a caricature artist, face painting.
Grand opening. On Saturday, Descanso Gardens is celebrating the opening of a new section called Oak Woodland. Expect lots of activities for children and adults including a viewing of a Mars Rover model, crafts and guided family walks.
Native Plants from Seeds. Advanced gardeners can learn how to propagate native plants from seeds in a class on Saturday at the Huntington.
A family nature walk in the Arroyo. On Sunday, native plant specialist Tim Martinez will lead families through a section of the Arroyo Seco where small, rare native fish, the Arroyo Chub, have been reintroduced into the watershed. He will teach participants to identify native plants that have been used by the indigenous population of California as food and medicine for thousands of years.
Rainwater collection. Will Gaskill will give a presentation on Sunday at the Neighborhood Church on rainwater collection systems.
Pasadena's watering schedule for the winter now applies. Pasadena Water and Power customers may water on one day a week only. It must be a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday.
The Arroyo Food Co-op is now open on Saturdays and Sundays for shopping and pick-ups. Orders placed online by Sunday midnight will be available for pick-up starting next Tuesday.
Gardening. Transition Pasadena's Throop Learning Garden (usually) meets on Sunday morning.
Survey. Pasadena Water and Power is conducting a survey on the city's energy future. To participate go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PWP_Energy_Future2014. (Note: PWP has not posted any information on when the survey period ends, but as of this printing the link was still up.)
Cycling. On Sunday morning Pasadena Cyclery will hold Gwen's Group Ride and the Sunday Morning Neighborhood Stroll. For details see the calendar page of Pasastainable, CA.
Random read. Every once in a while the artist Sarah Lazarovic goes on a year-long no-shopping diet to create a dam against "the endless stream of stuff that both dazzles and disgusts." In 2012, she decided to paint all the items she was longing for but didn't buy. She put the two-tone shoes, striped sweaters, and dresses in shades of Rothko on paper and added hand-written text. Beautiful, thought-provoking and timeless, her visual essay, A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy, leaves readers with some useful advice: "A scarf can change so much." (Lazarovic' book with the same title as the essay was just published by Penguin Books.)
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