2 January 07
End
Death has been much on my mind lately. My father died in December seven years ago; James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein just died. The 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq was just announced, surrounded by scores and scores of Iraqi deaths. The ten thousand candles lit on New Year’s Eve in Davis’ Central Park were a stark reminder of it all. So much death.
I attended a healing ceremony following Mass at a Franciscan church in Sacramento yesterday. A friend is about to undergo surgery. It’s a fourth knee reconstruction (the first, over 30 years ago, was occasioned by a motorcycle accident). But this friend is not well, so very not well that 7-8 hours of anesthesia for the surgery are a real concern. For her, naturally, but also for the medical team and particularly her cardiologist. Her femur is now hollow; if they don’t operate, she’ll lose her leg. If they do, it’s a risk whose odds I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with.
But it’s win-win, said brown-robed birkenstocked Father Anthony, cheerfully. If she dies, she will be with God; if she doesn’t, she gets to be with us.
Yes, he really said that. In exactly that way. You have to hand it to these chaps for not bothering to sugar-coat the issues.
It is so long since I swam in circles of that kind of certainty, though, that I hardly remember what it’s like. They wouldn’t really call it certainty; they’d call it faith.
The prayers yesterday were like a dim echo. I knew them all. I said them. I even said “we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come amen.” I said it. To say it marked me as a member of the Tribe of Catholic. To say it was also meaningless and therefore hypocritical.
To those who operate in this realm of certainty, it wasn’t meaningless, my repeating the words. He’s there even if you don’t believe, they’d say. He hears it anyway.
Which sounds like Pascal’s wager, to me. Operate on the assumption it’s all true and what have you got to lose? Like Thomas, though, I’m after a bit more evidence. There’s an awful lot of evidence against, at the moment…
20 December 06
Solstice
I’ve hurt myself. I slipped yesterday on the plank across the ditch, trying to get Charlie inside before I was late for work. (Ha.) There was frost on the plank, and I came a cropper onto my back. No harm done, thought I after a brief horizontal assessment, but this morning I woke up with a kind of reverse whiplash. Muscle strain, said the doc tonight; it’s going to take about 4 weeks to heal.
!
Anyway, what I wanted to say was this: the best writing I’ve seen for ages and ages is Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, sent to me by my dear friend Joe in Glasgow. There’s a beautiful piece about looking for the darkest dark, failing to find it on a ferry trip to Orkney but finding plenty else to write about. Damn but this gal can write, and as we hunker down before the shortest day the longest night, sucking down anti-inflammatories, it’s a good time to ponder why we’re here. And what we’ll do with the time we have left.
16 December 06
Rocks For Free
This morning we got a free rock pile. Pica has turned into an enthusiastic freecycler and is an alert member of the Davis Freecycle list, which has about 1400 people. One of whom had a pile of 1 to 3 inch landscaping cobbles which had been sitting in his driveway for months on waiting for the next project. He offered them up on Freecycle, and was delighted to help move them 3.3 miles to where they now rest on the tarmac under our almond tree.
6 December 06
What to do When...
I’ve been attending a two-day training on Emergency Communications. It’s been fascinating. I deal with the media as part of my job but usually only tangentiallly; there are professionals on campus whose function it is to do this and we have a truly wonderful person who has been good at getting the word out about the work of the Wildlife Health Center. Since much of it is newsworthy, what with West Nile Virus and oil spill and mountain lion attacks and avian flu, reporters and cameras are part of the horizon.
But the training I’ve just done will equip me, in the event Sylvia is out sick or on vacation or dealing with another emergency or the same emergency if it’s big, to handle the media on my own. In any emergency they’re often on the scene just as the emergency responders are getting there. They need a person to keep them informed, to keep them getting enough so they keep out of the way. I can certainly participate in a large-scale campus or city-wide emergency.
The scenario we were given was that a jet airliner crashed into the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Inside, speaking to a packed house, was Senator John McCain. The building was flattened. Our brief was to set up a Joint Information Center, allocate functions to everyone in our group, and come up with three messages as well as a system of dealing with the converging media city.
Rumor control was obviously a big part of the job, which means someone needs to monitor the news constantly. (I didn’t volunteer for that part. Ugh. Not owning a television almost really disqualififes me from participating in such an exercise…) During the drill we were interrupted constantly by updates and by breaking news flashes alleging terrorist attacks.
The Mondavi Center is about 250 yards from Mrak Hall, where the news service is located. We might have a situation in which the communications efforts for an entire crisis is handled by people who are satellites.
It was interesting, exhausting, and showed up a few gaps in our system. This is why you do drills….
——
On a separate note, Tim Lindgren of The Where Project writes of a fascinating book, The Economics of Attention by Richard Lanham. The idea is that “the new economists are the artists, the designers, the rhetoricians because they are the ones best equipped to deal in the cultivation of human attention.” Tim talks about Darfur and how his attention (and with a few notable exceptions) that of the West is firmly turned elsewhere. A genocide is happening on our watch in Darfur, he says. Are we paying attention?
1 December 06
More Index Cards
The hipsterPDA experiment continues to go well, though I’m behind on doing my weekly review. Here’s a Japanese perspective on index cards as a productivity tool, though apparently index cards are hard to find in Japan.
27 November 06
Eventful Weekend
a) Saw Bobby
b) Saw The Prestige
c) Soaked in the Mud
d) Made pesto with the last of the basil
e) Ate same
f) Yukked it up all weekend with a dear friend
g) Bought two pineapple guava plants
h) Got back to work today to discover that my colleagues at the Oiled Wildlife Care network had their own busy weekend, a mystery spill oiling dozens of gulls with food oil.
They headed up to Arcata on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, spent the next two days finding and collecting birds and then stabilizing them. The birds had apparently gotten into a trailer with discarded cooking oil.
The situation seems under control now with most of the birds either recuperating in recovery pools or waiting to get washed tomorrow.
14 November 06
Don't Waste That Water
When we lived in Santa Barbara, we had the opportunity to rent a cabin in the mountains for a year while Art and Lynn and their daughter Maya travelled in Central America. There were forty fruit trees and numerous other plants and we had strict instructions on how to care for them. (It was a 26-page lease, which was a little excessive for rainbow children, we thought, but we let it go. The year turned into two and a half. It was magical. Even through the rodents. I never expect to be able to share living quarters with a canyon wren again, for instance.)
Water in arid climates is a precious commodity and plants need water; some need lots of water. Art figured he’d let no drop of water get wasted, and reworked the rudimentary plumbing of their cabin so that all water except from the toilet got used at least twice.
There was a shower outside, solar-heated, and it watered the peach tree. The kitchen sink drained onto the kumquat tree. The outflow from the washing machine drained wherever I put the hose that day; sometimes it was avocados, sometimes the chayote tangle, sometimes the passionfruit or papaya. Santa Barbara is just at the northern tip of “subtropical” and some of these plants didn’t thrive, but the chayote wasn’t one of them. We ate chayote in soup the entire time.
Art has just finished revising his graywater book. He sold the manufacturing part of his business (biocompatible soaps) a long time ago and now concentrates on designing for biocompatible living — graywater is a tiny part of that whole endeavor.
It’s an important part, nonetheless: see the new, improved, revised edition of Create an Oasis with Graywater.
10 November 06
Soot on the Ceiling
Thank you, everyone, for leaving such wonderful suggestions about what to do with my elongated eggplants.
Today is Veterans’ Day, a new holiday for the State of California, and consequently for those of us who work for the University of California. I decided to tackle the alarmingly aging aubergines.
In the oven. I cut them up, marinated them in olive oil and garlic. Then popped them in the oven at 350. I didn’t have to decide right away what to do with them: I’d just get them cooked and worry about it later.
An odd smell emerged from the oven, but that’s to be expected. We never turn it on in summer. This is the first time the oven’s actually been lit since, oh, maybe April, and then it was just the broiler. Probably.
Went outside to walk the cats.
Came back in. The cobwebs on the ceiling were black. There was black on the stovetop. The cats’ feet were suddenly black. It smelled like walking carcinoma.
I turned off the oven.
About twenty cremated hazelnut corpses lined the broiler tray: they looked like the mummies in Pompeii.
The eggplants are now officially inedible, and I spent a second bout of cleaning the stove, mopping the floor, and washing all the rugs.
Phooey, as they say.
4 November 06
Not So Fast...
Coming home last night from Sacramento, via the drugstore to order some antibiotics (Numenius had a minor procedure done), we got stuck waiting for the train. This is a normal occurrence for us: pretty much anywhere and home is divided by the train tracks on a very busy line, so we have to stop maybe 10% of the crossings.
This train, though, was a very long freight which slowed to stop right at the crossing. One did this the other day for 40 mintues. I turned around and went back to get the antibiotics and some supper, it now being nearly 7:30.
When we got back in one of the cats had thrown up a frothy mixture all over the house. Diego continued to do this until it was just dry heaving at 2:00 am. Every hour I contemplated taking him to the animal hospital; every hour he seemed to get better.
I finally got some sleep, so did Numenius, so did Diego. But not so many words have been written this morning, and I have some novel catchup to do today… am thinking of going to the library.
31 October 06
Analog Revolution
One of the default assumptions in my professional circle and probably the general culture as well is that going digital is the way to better utility and higher productivity. I’m having fun questioning that these days. My growing success with the hipsterPDA is one example. But many other practices deserve a look at their analog equivalent. Realizing this, I’ve gone to the habit of trying to write out everything longhand, preferably with a fountain pen, before touching a keyboard. It’s definitely a different writing experience. Does it help? I think so.
Computers are good at two things—being able to do complicated numerical transformations at amazing speed and being devices that can replicate information with perfect fidelity. It does not necessarily follow that digital interfaces are easy to construct or use nor that digital data is incorruptable and long-lasting. Were I to save the draft of this blog post, written in Noodler’s Ink, rather than commit it to the recycling bin, the paper document would likely far outlast the digital trace of this post. And let’s not even get started on the issues of electronic voting—it will suffice to say that the geekier one is, the more one is scared by the prospects of it.