April 6th, 2015 at 11:00 am
Get out your walking shoes; it’s time to taste some wines. Downtown Ventura will be the site of this year’s Champagne on Main, a Spring Wine Walk and Street Fair. Start the day with the street fair, which will include live entertainment, local artists, crafters, nonprofit organizations, and more. The wine walk will follow and showcase champagne, sparkling wines and craft beer samples from downtown businesses. All who participate will receive a wristband, tasting cup, and map of participating tasting sites.
Where:
Downtown Ventura
300-500 blocks on Main Street
Ventura, CA 93001
When:
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April 3rd, 2015 at 8:00 am
Long before state Highway 118 sliced through today’s Simi Valley in southeast Ventura County, a spunky old lady almost singlehandedly built a sparkling gem of a home that has survived suburbia, earthquakes (barely) and city hall.
Tressa Prisbrey started creating what became Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village at age 60 in 1956. The folk-art fantasyland originally was intended to house her collection of 10,000 pencils. But it kept growing, eventually consisting of 13 structures assembled from approximately 1 million bottles she retrieved from a nearby dump and mixed with cement. The village housed a chapel, a pyramid of headlights, 20 statues, and a round house complete with round bed, round dresser, and round mirror. Her husband helped her out until his death in the early 1960s.
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April 2nd, 2015 at 3:00 pm
Home designs are capitalizing on the popularity of in-home suites. Commonly referred to as in-law suites, this home addition is now being occupied by more than one demographic. Most traditionally, an in-law suite was a place for older generations to occupy and be close to family and loved ones. However, now grandparents, boomerang kids, caretakers, and even dual-career homebuyers are seeing the potential that can come with having a segregated living space. According to a 2013 NAR study of buyers, an in-law suite was one of the rooms that buyers were willing to pay the most for, with 20 percent of buyers saying they would be willing to pay a median of $2,920 more.
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April 2nd, 2015 at 11:00 am
When you think ski chalet, it’s likely that sleek and modern is not the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, a more rustic, sloped-roof homemade of raw woods and stone is a more common image. All that may be changing now that Apple Store architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson has been commissioned to design an upscale ski community. The new collection of homes, The Stellar Collection, is part of the luxury Mountainside Northstar Lake Tahoe brand.
The firm was asked to think outside the box. The developer did not want a traditional ski chalet, but rather something new and modern. Drawing inspiration from modern Alpine buildings around Europe, BCJ came up with a fresh new design. These homes not only look different on the outside–featuring large windows, simplistic design, and void of embellishments–but the inside is also different. Interiors still feature natural materials, but not in the traditional sense. The home is warm and inviting. Light floods the home and there’s a clean and airy feeling inside. The renderings of both the interior and exterior give off a more urban feel than your traditional skiing community.
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April 2nd, 2015 at 9:00 am
Wondering if the dog walker you hired really took Fido out on the leash or just sat on the couch watching “Scooby-Doo” reruns? Want a map of where Fluffy is prowling on her nightly scavenges?
These days, pinpointing pets’ whereabouts is easy, whether they’re outdoors or inside. The same GPS tracking technology that lets employers check the locations of their delivery trucks, scientists follow dolphin migration patterns, and vessel operators find shipping containers is available in collar-size, rechargeable electronics.
Pet-tracking methods have been available for some time, including microchip implants that require special readers, tattoos with accompanying collar-notification tag, and collar antennas that transmit to dedicated radio receivers. GPS tracking, though, has taken off in recent years, especially with the rise of smartphones and tablets that let owners track animals on the go.
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