15 March 07
Olive Oil Party-Oh
The new crop of UC Davis Olive Oil has arrived. We popped over yesterday afternoon to taste the three varieties, all blends, of Extra Virgin (Wolfskill, Silo, and Gunrock); bought some at a discounted rate; and ran into all kinds of friends, people involved with ecology and agriculture and horticulture and wine and radio and bikes and design and books.
The line to buy oil was long. I found myself standing next to an East-Coast transplant who was enjoying the weather (it was about 80 degrees) but tapping her foot at how slow the line was moving, then berating herself, jokingly, for doing so. Turns out she’s the new humanities and social sciences librarian at the university library. She had previously worked at Northeastern and at Harvard. She told me Widener has been refurbished considerably since I was last there, with the crucial addition of air conditioning (sort of important if you’re housing books that are hundreds of years old.)
We bought oil. We found we had eaten dinner by the end of it all. And we’re glad that UC Davis has found something to do with the olives that used to provide lubrication for bike paths!
More photos of yesterday’s event can be found here.
7 March 07
I Remember the Fog
I remember. I was in a daze, weeks of it. The world seemed to move on by without me. I remember the daze, yet I remember also super-heightened awareness of the world, the air, the color of a flower, the smell of the mist over damp earth. The rainbows I saw everywhere.
Recently several friends have lost relatives or close friends. Two people I know have just lost their father. Ron has just lost her sister.
My head remembers the fog, the daze. My heart tells me to remind them to stay in this place, to live it, not to rush.
Ron, Christina, Susan, Barbara: I love you all. I wish the hurt would go away, but I know it’s best to let it weave its way through your souls. I know it.
14 February 07
Reclaiming Your Inner Autist
We heard Dr. Temple Grandin today give two talks on campus sponsored by the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute (Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders). The two talks overlapped much in content, the first entitled Exploring the mind of a visual thinker, and the second entitled My experience with autism. My favorite work of hers is her book Animals In Translation in which she uses her experience of being autistic to better understand what animal consciousness is all about. She is a photorealistic visual thinker, and believes that many animals function the same way. Thought without language happens. It’s not a mode common in humans, but such a pattern gets developed under certain circumstances.
She identified three specializations of autistic thought — visual thinkers, music and math dominance, and verbal thinkers. The first, the photorealists like her, are those who function like having a movie projector in the brain, or in a contemporary analogy, a Google Images-like search engine. The second type are those who are good at patterns — much more abstract than the visual thinkers. She illustrated this with a slide of a praying mantis made in origami overlaid on top of the quite complex folding pattern of its square of paper. Some very pattern-oriented mind came up with that folding sequence. Finally, the verbally-oriented folks are those who are good at facts — the history buffs, the sports trivia buffs.
It seems autism isn’t one single thing or syndrome, rather it’s a manifestation of how different brains can specialize. Obviously it is important to work on making autistic individuals functioning members of society, but as Temple Grandin puts it, we don’t want to cure Einstein (non-verbal at age three). What we see in extreme in autistic individuals are unusual combinations of the intellectual potentials we all have.
29 January 07
Davis Food Bloggers
Spending the day with Sid, Rick, and Carol yesterday going for the smew meant we didn’t pick up the paper until quite late on in the afternoon. There was an article in there about Davis bloggers, specifically the subset of Davis food bloggers.
Our friend Fernanda has been blogging continuously since 2000. She’s one of the first wave of Brazilian bloggers and is well-known in the Brazilian blogging community. Her main blog is the Chatterbox, but she shares a blog about film, and about a year ago started a blog about food, Chucrute Com Salsicha.
And there she was, in the paper, shopping at the Farmers’ Market! It was a great piece about this subset community of bloggers, who love to cook, share food, photograph it, eat it, and write about it.
The article is unfortunately not online. But unlike most print articles about blogging that still just don’t get it, this one was sensitively written (and researched: Claire St. John visited Fernanda at her home and was fed lunch by her, f’rinstance).
Other Davis food blogs covered in the article were Crumpet Attack, Something in Season, Vanilla Garlic, and What Did You Eat?
This is an exceptional part of the world in which to grow good food. Fun to see people enjoying it on a new level.
25 January 07
What to Write About?
This morning I took a survey about blogging (thanks, Beth). One of the reasons I didn’t give was “it’s my turn.”
When it’s “my turn,” the day unfolds as a series of opportunties. Last night, for instance: the cat throws up on the bed. I get up and deal with it. I finally after much tossing and turning get to sleep, only to dream about a man knocking on the door in the dark, wanting me to call for an ambulance. Where are you from? I said, instead of calling the police (hey, it was a dream). Over there, he said, pointing toward the railroad tracks. Not sure whether he wanted an ambulance for himself or someone else, and profoundly suspicious, I vacillated until he showed every sign of dying on the spot whereupon I dialled 911 asking for an ambulance. “We don’t do ambulances,” came the reply. Then I woke up to the sound of a puking cat.
Or, I could write about my profound depression (and it’s at this point, I should probably admit to myself, medicatable) about the state of the world.
Or I could write about my new and exciting dalliance with Akim Cursive, a modern calligraphic hand I knew nothing about just two days ago, but which seems very suited to writing poetry. I was practicing this evening, drawing the vomitatious cat (he moved off), working working fast to try and push it hard. It’s fun when one of these things can be semi-mastered in a matter of hours rather than years.
21 January 07
Quote Of The Day
They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past.
— Father Efstathios Kollas, the President of Greek Clergymen, referring to the the first officially sanctioned ceremony held recently at the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens by hundreds of followers of the 12 major Greek Gods.
20 January 07
Day in San Diego
I’m just back from a quick day in San Diego, visiting my cousin Gainor who was at a board meeting for her work with the Episcopalian drug and alcohol recovery program. I’ll post a bit more about this tomorrow but we quickly took in the San Diego Museum of Art then after lunch went to Point Loma, where I sketched and she explored the lighthouse with her friend Kit.
It’s a good-scale city, I think. We had a wonderful day.
10 January 07
A Busy Day
I’m back from MacWorld. I thought an Apple phone, long predicted as the feature of this year’s Keynote, was a silly idea.
I can only say I’m really glad they weren’t for sale today, because I’d have gone against all good sense and plopped down a big wad of cash for something I don’t need.
Didn’t stop me salivating, though.
The event was the usual overstimulating paradise for geeks. As usual, there were the obvious tech types and the obvious designer types and the obvious mac nuts. Sometimes all these occurred in the same person, but mostly it was three separate groups.
I went down on the train with the Yolo Designers, a group that meets on the last Friday of every month in downtown Davis. They were able to help me come up with some specs for a new computer I need to order at work “as soon as possible.”
I’m well prepared…
6 January 07
Full of Joy
... is how my friend who is undergoing surgery on Monday described herself this evening on the phone.
So am I. I was full of joy in my encounter with two Jersey heifers across the road whose manure I was nicking for my compost; full of joy as I ate my veggie tamales at lunchtime; full of joy as I watched the killdeer overhead, scolding scolding as I put mulch onto my broccoli and onions, in preparation for the terrifying freeze we’re expecting this week; full of joy as I heard the white-tailed kite calling this morning.
And full of joy at my expanding list of creative projects to undertake sometime soon. I’m bursting with energy. Watch out, world.
[I am especially full of joy that Barbara is feeling so chipper. Thanks for the great conversation, Brabs.]
4 January 07
Continuing
Many thanks to all who commented on my End post or who emailed or who spoke on the phone. (And thank you for all the good wishes for my friend, which I will pass along.)
I am spending a lot of time thinking about this. It is not a bad time nor certainly a waste of time.
Numenius said something the other day that struck me as odd: he wondered why religious ritual needed to be connected inherently with belief. It would never occur to me not to connect them, but that’s not an answer. Look, he said, it’s a good thing, in itself, to observe Shabbat.
I certainly do crave ritual. It’s just that if it’s not backed up by substance, it feels empty to me. But it doesn’t stop me — the font at St. Francis is huge and central; I sloshed my hand in it on the way out to bless myself. Even with these thoughts of emptiness running through my head. The water was cool and, well, blessing. It always is.