A Visit to the Dermatologist

I crossed the Causeway today for the first time in a while. I had a 10:15 appointment. They wanted me to get there at 10. I left super early because there are road works on I-80 and, well, there’s fog. I did end up missing the turn to get onto 50 and had to turn around, but I was still very early. They were thrilled, because they were very busy but I was giving them a chance to catch up.

Clean bill of skin health. I took myself off on an Artist Date to Rumpelstiltskin, a yarn store on the way home, by way of celebration.

Unyielding Fog

There has been unremitting fog over Davis and the rest of the Central Valley for about 18 days or so, ever since the 22nd of November. We had one half-day of sunshine on the 3rd of December but aside from that the temperature has stayed in the mid-40s Fahrenheit this entire period. It’s dreary and doesn’t make me inclined to sketch outside. Here is an account of this tule fog from NASA, complete with an satellite image animation. This is an unusual pattern and with climate change there have been fewer and fewer persistent tule fogs in the fall and winter in the Central Valley.

The natural color image at right is from the GOES-West satellite taken at 3:11 PM PST today (11 December).

Cold Remedies

Both Numenius and I have colds. A friend who has spent some time in Peru recommends a concoction that is basically an onion, stem ginger, stem turmeric, and an orange and/or lemon. Add honey if there is a sore throat component.

Speaking with my Iranian tutee on Monday, I discovered there is almost the identical recipe given as a cold remedy in Iran.

Grocery List Talmud

Before setting out on our weekly grocery shop early this morning, I looked at the back of the grocery list. It turned out this was where Pica had written down the quotation from Pirke Avot that she used a couple weeks ago in her comic art post The Work.

The quote reads “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” This seems equally applicable to grocery shopping as it does to charting out one’s life path. There is always one more item.

Drawing While Journaling

I’ve been doing my morning pages, but I keep getting interrupted by cats. So I draw them.

The Memory Keeper

I’m continuing down my genealogical rabbithole and while reading up on WikiTree I came across a reference to an obscure but quite intriguing piece of software called The Memory Keeper. This is genealogical and historical research that is built on something called TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is personal wiki software that extremely cleverly functions entirely inside of a single HTML page. The individual wiki pages are units called “tiddlers” and the code in the HTML page sets up forms to edit and save the tiddlers. I have been using TiddlyWiki since 2017 to keep a research log for work. There is a substantial community around TiddlyWiki who have built many extensions and plugins for the system.

Memory Keeper consists of a set of these plugins and templates that have been organized around genealogical and historical research. It is not meant as a replacement for traditional genealogy software but rather to help in the research process. The trouble with most genealogy software is that the software typically is good at organizing the results of the research (individuals, their relationships in families, events, places, and sources and citations) but the software isn’t really a place to record one’s working notes. Nowadays there are many software systems for taking non-linear notes (in addition to TiddlyWiki, systems like Zettlr, Obsidian, and Scrivener come to mind). What Memory Keeper does is marry the two types of software, providing fields for genealogical data while allowing for non-linear wiki entry linking.

I’ve been testing Memory Keeper out these past couple of days and I think it will be very useful. I’m using Hosea Curtice as my test case. Here is an illustration. There is a note in the published genealogy for the Curtice family that he served in the French and Indian Wars and that lists the captain commanding his company. I easily look up what company this was, but this leads into researching the campaigns of this company and its regiment. Traditional genealogy software will not have fields to store that information, but this is ideal for a wiki-based system.

My previous work with TiddlyWiki was not very sophisticated, but I see lots of potential for Memory Keeper, particularly around keeping track of geographies in personal historical research.

Anna's, Again

I got the page proofs back this week from my submission to an anthology entitled “Field Notes.” They are six pages featuring Anna’s hummingbirds, similar to my Birdtober series from last year.

Happy to have been able to get this done in and around the time of my mother’s illness and passing. I miss her every day.

Sapiens En Español

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens in Spanish translation for language practice. This was inspired by Andres, one of the guides on Dreaming Spanish, doing videos on the book chapter-by-chapter. He is up through chapter 7 now as am I. Sapiens was originally published in Hebrew so if I were to read it in English it would still be in translation.

This is the largest book I’ve tried reading in Spanish to date. So far it’s going well — I don’t understand every word and don’t try to look them all up but I’m certainly getting the gist of his arguments. So far it is a very good popularization of an extremely wide sweep of human history but I don’t think it’s nearly as groundbreaking as a couple of books I’ve read in recent years with a similar theme: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and James C. Scott’s Against The Grain.

Most of the books I read are history books so it makes sense for me to look for some in Spanish to read too. I’m thinking Eduardo Galeano might be next?

A Package from France

I met a friend for coffee this morning at Mishka’s (I don’t consider myself an expert in coffee but this European-style coffee shop seems to serve the best cappuccino in Davis). When I got home a book had arrived from Paris, a comic about climate change which has been assigned in my Comix Activism class. (The assigned book is actually an English translation but a quick bit of research revealed that the author was French, had interviewed multiple climate change scientists for the book who were also all French, so I decided to get a copy. In French.)

This is the kind of comic I’d like to write, though I shudder at the long, long hours it must have taken him, years even. Although I find the type treatment a bit fussy for a language with so many diacritics and (still) dislike zipatone screens, the art is gorgeous. So far, it’s very readable and engaging. (Love the opening sentence of Flaubert’s Salammbô being quoted on page 2.)

Genealogical Rabbitholes

I really ought to enter a lot more of my genealogy into WikiTree. I have entered four people in there, including myself. No matter — I can find ancestors of mine who are already entered into WikiTree, and learn from there.

Here is the WikiTree entry for Hosea Curtice (b. 1739), about whom I wrote a couple days ago. (I come from a long line of Hosea Curtices, so I have to specify the birth date). He was married to Susannah Kellogg, whose genealogy leads in interesting directions. 1) She is part of the Kellogg family, which in another century brings us to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and in this past century to the Kellogg Foundation. 2) You can trace a connection from Susannah Kellogg to Emily Dickinson. I am quite proud to have Emily Dickinson as my cousin, as the title of our blog would imply. 3) Susannah’s great-grandfather Samuel Kellogg (b. 1669) was kidnapped by Indians in 1677 and hauled off to Canada, eventually to be ransomed out of captivity. His mother Sarah Day was killed in the raid where Samuel was captured. Sarah Day is also the common ancestor I share with Emily Dickinson, through an earlier marriage of Sarah’s.

This raid happened in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, and there is an account of it on the website for the wonderful book Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks. I need to reread her book: it’s an illuminating journey into 17th century Indigenous geographies.