A Really Good German Lesson

I have found the quality of instruction at Lingoda to be very high and worth what I pay for it, but this morning I had an outstanding private lesson. With Lingoda you have the choice to be in a group class (maximum five students) or a private one; I have a lot of class credits saved up so have transferred some of my group credits to private. I always learn a lot more. You also have the choice, when private, either to follow the class content you signed up for (in today’s case, Konjunktiv I Wiederholung, or review of Subjunctive I, which is almost always reported speech) or just to chat.

What made this class in particular so good was that the instructor zeroed in very quickly on where I’m struggling and gently corrected my errors, but also gave me tips on how to remember things. The introductory topic of the lesson was about an astrophysicist discovering a black hole, not something I’m in any way familiar with but which is inherently interesting, and it provided a jumping-off point for a much wider conversation with someone who is interesting, intelligent, and a bloody good teacher. It made me feel great.

(And I still make dumb mistakes.)

Whole Earth Day One

Today was the first day of the Whole Earth Festival, a hippie fest that has been happening at UC Davis almost every year since 1969. The festival runs three days over Mother’s Day weekend. I walked down there late this afternoon to scope the event and perhaps do a sketch. I ended up sketching the outside of this booth displaying wares from the Harmony Tie-Dyes Company.

Other Perspectives

I had a doctor’s appointment in Sacramento on Tuesday… for various reasons I elected not to drive a borrowed car across the Causeway, which is under massive construction, and took an Uber both directions. My first driver was Iraqi (I think, though am not sure, he was Kurdish); the second was from Venezuela. He was given political asylum three years ago; because of the Trump administration’s moratorium on green cards for refugees, he finds himself in an uneasy limbo. He was able to bring his wife and son over from Venezuela eventually through hard work; his wife has a degree in business administration but is selling fruit.

When I asked my driver whether it was better here than in Venezuela, he was very clear: at least here they can eat three times a day and his wife doesn’t have to use ripped up shirts as sanitary pads (he choked up as he was telling me this part — the shame he felt at having to put his wife through this ordeal was still very real for him).

These stories are not unique. What struck me was how buried they become in the anti-immigrant narrative. People are working so much harder than I ever have, and can barely make ends meet… It’s a reminder that those of us who are fortunate to have enough to live comfortably shouldn’t take any of that for granted, when a lot of it is just an accident of birth and/or geography.

The Pigment Bazaar

I ordered six 5 ml tubes of watercolor paint yesterday for my palette expansion project. While trying to figure out which paints to order, I ran across an extremely useful site, Artist Pigments.org. The developers of this site have created an art material and pigment database containing as of this writing catalog entries for 78,729 art materials with color swatches for 21,203 of them. The catalog has entries for many different types of art materials, including watercolors, gouache, acrylics, oils, colored pencils, pastels and others. Where pigment information has been supplied by the manufacturer it is included in the catalog entry. Most of the swatches in the catalog have also had their color measured accurately with a spectrophotometer.

As an example, I mentioned earlier that I was interested in purple magenta which I have as a Schmincke watercolor half-pan. The entry for that Schmincke paint is here, which tells us it is made out of the pigment PR122 (quinacridone magenta). The page for watercolors with this pigment lists many different paints from lots of manufacturers. After reviewing these, I ended up ordering the Winsor & Newton Opera Rose.

The catalog is interactive and lets you save your own collections of art materials. I used this feature to save a list of paints in my current Pocket Palette and prospective paints for the Folio Palette that I am assembling.

This catalog builds upon lots of earlier work, especially Bruce MacEvoy’s marvelous site handprint, but MacEvoy ceased building out the watercolor material on his site around 2014. It is still invaluable: just today an artist with an YouTube channel about color wheels (Color Nerd) posted a video saying how the only color wheel he actively uses is MacEvoy’s pigment-based chart. I have a printout of his chart somewhere in one of my art drawers. Prior to MacEvoy, color theorist Michael Wilcox wrote a book on the finest watercolor paints, but his book is from 1991 and is quite out-of-date.

Postcrossing Stamp on the Way from USPS!

As I’ve said on here before, I am a member of Postcrossing an organization that allows you to send and receive postcards all over the world.

The United States Postal Service has announced a dedicated Postcrossing stamp to be issued in late May, an interesting triangular shape (the current international stamps, for both letters and postcards, are circular). I’m thrilled about this, having watched the postal services of several countries issue Postcrossing stamps; I’m surprised this has shown up on the radar, to be honest, but super happy.

Saving California Science

I caught the tail end of a rally in Sacramento today in support of California state senate bill SB 895, which would put a $23 billion bond measure on the November 2026 ballot to create a California Science and Health Research Foundation. This would essentially be California’s version of NSF and NIH (the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health), needed since federal funding for science has been decimated by the actions of the Trump administration.

I meant to attend most of the rally, but it was not where I expected it to be on the west side of the State Capitol Building which is where every other rally at the Capitol that I’ve been to has been. Instead, there was the surreal sight of hundreds of police officers in formal garb, with several troops of them mounted on horses, attending the annual memorial event for California peace officers fallen in the line of duty. No science activists were gathered on the west side of the building, nor on the north or south side of the building, and the east side of the building is now under heavy construction of a new capitol annex. After a long while I looked at the web page of the state senator sponsoring the bill (Sen. Scott Wiener), and discovered the rally was taking place at the State Capitol Rose Garden, several blocks to the east past all the construction.

I missed the speeches, but fortunately these are up on YouTube already (especially see Sen. Wiener at 21:25 and Shawn Fain at 52:27). Over at one side of the rally area there was a gallery of scientific posters highlighting research that has been cancelled by the loss of federal funding. The photo at left is a poster from Point Blue Conservation Science describing how they lost $2 million in USDA funding from their Climate-Smart Commodities program. The termination of that same program was the funding loss that led to my retirement last year.

The senate bill now has broad support including from universities in the state and labor organizations (Shawn Fain who spoke at the rally is the national president of the United Auto Workers, which represents 60,000 University of California employees). I think there is enough support to get the bill through the legislature, though the timeline is short. The bill would then need to be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, but he is an agent of chaos when it comes to signing liberal legislation. The measure would then have to be approved by the voters of California, who may or may not be in a stingy mood in November. It is both a lot of money, and not very much compared to what has in past times come from the federal government.

More information about the initiative is at the site Save Science Save Lives.

In Praise of a Good Grammar

I’ve said before that I was very pleased when not one person in Germany instantly switched to English when I opened my mouth. But I did find myself getting frustrated when I made obvious stupid errors — not stupid in themselves, but stupid in that I KNOW both tea and coffee are masculine, not neuter, in German and I consistently turned them into neuter nouns. Another error I make a lot is to use the dative rather than the accusative case (German has a lot of adjectives that ONLY take either the accusative or dative case, but a number can also take either, depending on context).

The one I found myself getting most agitated about, though, was using the incorrect form of a past participle (this is sort of an easy one to fix: just study them from a verb book and learn them). I turned to my trusty Hammer’s German Grammar and Usage to look this up, and was reminded that German has two participles that don’t exactly match onto present and past (they call them, instead, Partizip I and Partizip II).

This is such a great book. Clear descriptions, good examples with citations when useful. A lot of people hate using a grammar when they’re learning a language, but I like to be given the why of usage. Proponents of comprehensible input say it’s not necessary, that the grammar will seep into your brain with enough external content, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it was sixty years ago and I’m happy to do my bit to keep Routledge in business… (by the way, that first syllable is pronounced as in a boxing rout not root).

The Palette Expansion Challenge

A while back I discovered the credit card-sized paint palette boxes that are available from Art Toolkit which is a small art supply company in Port Townsend, Washington. I have been using their Pocket Palette for several years now as it fits nicely into my field art supply pouch. As can be seen in the lefthand side of the photo, I have loaded it up with 14 different watercolors. I’m wishing for more colors in my palette, so some weeks ago I ordered the largest palette Art Toolkit sells, the Folio Palette (in the middle in the photograph), and together with additional minipans (as seen at right in the photo) I figure I can get up to 30 different colors in the palette. But what do I choose? My bigger Schmincke paint box is giving me ideas. Raw umber, certainly. Perylene green, most likely. Purple magenta? It comes handy when painting the lamb’s ears flowers in our yard. Figuring out the tube watercolors I’m going to order is a good challenge.

Worm Comics

During a walk this morning I saw a worm, struggling on the sidewalk. I couldn’t stop myself; I picked it up and threw it into the grass. I’ve done this for years (during the big El Niño year in 1997-98 I had an article published in the Santa Barbara News Press about being a worm rescuer).

This evening during the SAW Friday Night Comics Workshop Sarah Maloney had us making dialog between two worms; the above is my effort.

Neighborhood Iris

There is an alleyway east of our house that runs for a block and has lots of good plants growing on its edges. Today I sketched this iris using Derwent drawing pencils, watercolor wash, and black ink linework.