30 October 06
La Ilustre Fregona
I like to mop. I’m strange that way, I’ll admit it. Tidying is a grot and sweeping’s not much fun either, and scrubbing hurts. But mopping delivers a huge amount of satisfaction for the effort. You can make a good serpentine pattern on the floor, weaving the wet with the as-yet-unmopped dry. It’s a meditation, mopping.
The myth goes that the mop was invented in Spain. I’m going to guess that like so many other things it was actually invented in China and introduced through the Moors into the Iberian Peninsula, where it did undoubtedly undergo whatever modifications have led to its perfection somewhere before the time of Cervantes. (The kind of mop I’m talking about is the one that proliferates in Fantasia and that requires squeezing in a basket attached to the top of a bucket, not some miserable sponge-lever-effort that breaks after two uses. The Fantasia mop has survived for five centuries with no improvements necessary, though it doesn’t stop them from trying.)
Today I mopped up the leavings of last Wednesday’s windstorm, the traces of a week’s worth of cobwebs, the clumps of cat fur from the fierce play Diego and Charlie indulge in. The cats sit on the sofa arms watching me in a kind of horrified fascination. The floor glistens and then dries to its dull tile self, snug and ready for the next onslaught of walnut pieces, compost, smelly beetles, whatever else we track in from outside…
27 October 06
Falcon in my Office
I’ve had this really big critical push at work to get a project finished, but yesterday at three we were lured out into the sunshine by shrieks of delight. A falcon with jesses, a bell and a transmitter had just wandered on into the student lab, and Tamara had scooped it up and was looking like something out of a fantasy story set in Scotland. 
Except we’re in Davis, not Scotland, and this weird looking bird was not a peregrine, not a kestrel, not anything like anything I’d ever seen.
The falcon belongs to a falconer who had lost it in the huge windstorm we had on Wednesday. He had posted flyers all over the place, never really expecting to see the bird again. (It’s a hybrid cross between a Barbary and Taita falcon: falconers do barbaric things in their spare time. But as such, the only one like it certainly in the United States, it’s probably worth a bit of money.)
Santiago the farmworker guy was hanging out when the falcon landed in his truck. He brought it over to us, not sure of where he was going (he was heading for the Raptor Center but was unsure of his way). He called the owner, who dropped to his knees when he saw the bird on Tamara’s wrist. He calls the bird “Bird.”
A different kind of excitement than the red-breasted or taiga flycatcher, which hasn’t been seen since Wednesday evening…
26 October 06
Inbox Zero
In the fit of organization that has overtaken me as a result of my office move, I’ve been inspired to tackle my email box. Merlin Mann’s series Inbox Zero has proved very helpful. One day into the experiment, my inbox is indeed at zero, and life is good. You just have to be drastic, and make liberal use of the delete key. And most importantly, keep on doing that.
Besides, email may be dying off as a medium anyway.
25 October 06
Things to do
1) Come up with a workable “class” to teach on Saturday at Cold Canyon as part of our training. It’s only 20-30 minutes. I am wavering between birds (hard to see in the canyon for anyone, frustrating for novices), sketching, or calligraphic gesturing of plants that they will have had a good chance to look at by the time it’s my turn. Any ideas?
2) Finish laying mulch on the gardens, such as they are. The flagstones are nearly in.
3) Make fences for both gardens. (It’s blowing very hard outside now and I wish I had gotten to this earlier. However, the plants seem to be establishing well so maybe it’s alright.)
4) Come up with a Christmas card idea before November 1. I know I should call it a holiday card but if I did I wouldn’t make one, simple as that. (It has to be easy to produce because of 7, below. I am thinking of a linocut print this year.)
5) Defer my copperplate learning to the spring. My online teacher is very unresponsive and has never given me information about how to pay her, so I’m going to bow out of this one easily.
6) Persevere with my urging of coworkers to stop leaving candy on counters at work, which has started to creep back with Halloween approaching and threatens not to depart until well into the New Year. A distressing encounter with a bowl of Candy Corn (which I don’t even like!) on Monday triggered a grovelling plea from me yesterday. They seem to have taken it well enough. When you have a sugar addiction, it’s probably best to be very clear about it.
7) Write a 50,000 page novel during the month of November as part of National Novel Writing Month. (It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to get done.) I’m doing this to try and get a big monkey off my back. I have the suspicion it doesn’t do that; the monkey just gets more clingy, but I have to try.
There, see now. If I start to seem a little crazy be sure to let me know.
Things to check off:
The red-breasted flycatcher, this evening on Putah Creek. First lower-48 record. [John Sterling’s photos of this bird can be found here
[PS: Make that a taiga flycatcher (split from red-breasted), first mainland North America record. It wasn’t seen today, as far as I know.]
19 October 06
Two Days Late
Inspired by the Day in History project (thanks Richard), where British bloggers were encouraged to produce an account of their day on October 17th, and amazed at the few accounts I’ve seen so far (humdrum isn’t uninteresting, it turns out), I thought I’d try my hand at one myself.
17 October 2006
Charlie-Cat woke me up well before dawn, kneading me for breakfast and attention (Diego, his brother, waits patiently). I get the kettle on for tea after giving them food, leaving Numenius to doze for another hour and a half. I get online (we’re still on dialup) and check the baseball score from the NLCS of the previous night. I do my round of email (two accounts) and RSS feeds, look at the BBC news site and Google news. It’s dark these days until about seven, and I drink lots of tea before sunrise. It’s Lipton loose-leaf tea, strong, with lots of milk.
We have indoor cats but we take them outside on a leash. They’re interested in the white-crowned sparrows that have been back for about a month. There’s a fairly strong north wind and the “gate” (held in place with a straw bale) has blown over at my vegetable garden. Charlie drags me in there after a sparrow and ends up grazing on grass, growing from the discarded straw which must still have some wheat in it. I need to spread the pine needles I gathered from work to discourage the weeds…
I’m always late for work. ALWAYS. This is bonkers because I live within five minutes of my workplace. I have a short shower today thinking I really need to scrub the shower (we’re on a well here; our water is even harder than tapwater in Davis, and it makes for a disgusting grunge on the walls and chrome). Breakfast is, as always, cooked nine-grain cereal with dried fruit and nuts, which I eat with non-fat yoghurt (Numenius has his with milk).
I hop on my bike (a green Giant Iguana mountain bike with front shocks, ludicrous overkill for flat Davis but essential when my bike commute included a three-mile downhill dash in Santa Barbara), having put my bike-basket on the rack, and pedal into the wind over the bridge and in to work.
Work, today, is mostly about reformatting a bunch of modules for a training course on how to deal with Avian Flu. It’s tedious but oddly satisfying, transforming ugly Word files into something more useable and graceful. They are going to be available online and should have been there a month ago, so it’s a mad dash as usual. I’m trying to wean myself off web and email at work but I’m addicted and in particular I find myself checking on baseball news, even though I know there won’t be any. I have an RSS feed set up at work for blogs that are image-heavy (we’re on dialup at home, as I said). I try to scan them before I’m ready to settle in for the day, having made my cup of green tea (loose leaf straight into my mug, which I top up all day with hot water).
I bike home for lunch (which I rarely do) and get a load of whites done and hung. It’s great drying weather.
I get home around 5:45 pm, feed the cats, get frustrated by my inability to find a lid for a container for the stock I made on Monday. Numenius gets home half an hour later and we head out to buy some more tape for the labeller (we’re on a huge organizing binge), catfood, and groceries at the Co-op. We don’t buy much because the 11% sale is coming up this weekend, meaning we’ll be stocking up on 25 pound bags of things, cans of tomatoes, olive oil, and toilet paper.
Dinner is salad with leftover brown rice, a yummy black tomato I found at the Coop, an avocado, a vinaigrette I made with mustard, olive oil and balsamic vinegar, some jalapeño-cheese bread, and a glass or two of a cheap Argentine Cab. We have no TV and radio reception of the Mets-Cards game is poor after dark, so Numenius keeps me up to date with check-ins on the Web. I go to bed early as usual (around nine) and read a few pages of Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done before turning off the light.
17 October 06
hipsterPDA
I’m in the midst of moving offices at work—just across the hall, but this is to finally get a window after six years in a windowless cave. I’m seeing this as a good opportunity to fashion a new organized self and have been discarding recycling barrels full of paper these past few days.
As Pica related, last week we discovered the hipsterPDA and the Getting Things Done (GTD) system for productivity. It’s too early to say if the hipsterPDA is a personal reform that will be long lasting, but all signs are good. There are three reasons why I think this is working for me. The first is that it is small and very easy to carry. Any binder-based organizer however compact gets bulky quickly—it’s not something you’ll bring to the ballpark or many other places. The second is that the system is analog. I’ve done enough time with a Handspring Visor PDA to realized that there is a lot of overhead with digital organizers. Finally, the GTD system makes a lot of sense to me. Pica has worked with Franklin Planners on and off for many years and I just can’t see using one. There is too much emphasis on priority setting within a daily calendar. The GTD system is by contrast bottom up—you track projects and next actions, and the calendar is reserved for actual appointments. I’m having fun with all this, which is very promising.
16 October 06
Malthus' Ghost
Tonight, at some point, the 300 millionth “American” will be born.
The population of the United States hit 100 million in 1915; 200 million in 1967. It wouldn’t matter so much, really, if we didn’t consume at the frenzied rate we do. Our footprint is out of proportion to our size, geographically and in terms of population. By the time the 400 millionth person is born here, water will be as precious a resource as oil now is.
Who are the breeders these days? Republicans, natch. We childless progressives are painting ourselves into a corner. But this in itself does not constitute a good reason to have children, people. We can rant and rave and shake our fists but the future and what a mess we’re making of the planet will have to depend on the children and grandchildren of those who insist global warming’s a figment of Gore’s imagination…
16 October 06
There And Back Again
Yesterday evening I went to my 25th high school reunion, which was held at a Livermore Valley winery owned by one of my old classmates, not that I knew the lad—it was a high school class of around 400. I have never been to one of my class reunions, but 25 is a good number, and I currently live in reasonable hailing distance.
(There is definitely a geographical bias to who attends these things).
I was quite glad I went—it’s just fun to see all these familiar names and faces again, and to know that this bunch at least is okay. The neatest aspect of the event was seeing folks I knew not just in high school, but in elementary school too. Third grade is a long time ago.
13 October 06
Calendrical Ponderings
We went this evening to the sixth annual Davis community iftar, which has by now grown to be the largest such interfaith community iftar in California, with well over seven hundred people there today. The keynote speaker gave an introduction to Ramadan, and one thing she noted is that the month of Ramadan shifts throughout the solar year, it cycling through the seasons on a 33-year basis, since the Islamic calendar is strictly a lunar calendar, and the lunar year is about 11 days short of the solar year.
This year the start of Ramadan coincided with Rosh Hashanah, which is not that unlikely an occurrence since both events are keyed to the new moon, Rosh Hashanah occurring on the first of the month of Tishri. But the Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar—every couple of years they stick in an extra month into the calendar, presumably so the holidays don’t migrate throughout the solar year (leading to problems like the harvest festival Sukkot being celebrated in the dead of winter). So I wonder how often does the start of Ramadan coincide with Rosh Hashanah? It does next year as well. My guess is that it usually occurs twice each 33-year cycle, but sometimes only once, and rarely three times.
All these mysteries and many more can be revealed through study of this Gregorian-Julian-Islamic-Persian-Hebrew-Mayan calendar converter.
9 October 06
Digital to Analog
Not finding such a thing as the perfect calendar/planner system to buy, I may be closer to designing my own: while perusing a fountain pen forum, Numenius found a site where you can put together your own paper PDA. The most interesting idea, I think, is a stack of index cards you carry around with a binder clip, called a Hipster PDA . Watercolor paper, calendar, cards for projects: what more do you need? Plus you can choose what kind of paper to write on rather than having it chosen for you.