26 July 05
Aggie In Space
With today’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery, UC Davis has its very own astronaut orbiting the Earth. This would be Stephen Robinson, who got his bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in mechanical and aeronautical engineering in 1978. This is his third flight in space, and will be one of the two space walkers in this mission. He has made his way back to Davis in recent years. A few years ago, he was the grand marshal at the Picnic Day parade, and the year after that I heard him speak about being in space at the Davis Star Party.
21 July 05
Freecycle
Thanks to a post by Chris of Sister Spirit, I’ve finally discovered Freecycle, an organization seeking to redistribute things (okay, junk) according to whoever wants them rather than have them all end up in a landfill. The rules? It’s free, and you pick it up. I’ve joined the Davis group mostly because it’s good to have things go where they’ll be appreciated when you’re decluttering. And you never know: somebody might just have the perfect teapot out there, not sure about what to do with it…
19 July 05
Tomatoes
The tomatoes getting good here. Gazpacho time, cherry tomatoes in salad time, mozarella and basil time.
I’m amazed I like them. My mother tells of the time my father went to England for a week when we were tiny leaving her with no cash; the only thing there was to eat in the house was a box of tomatoes brought over by a neighbor. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. She says there might have been a little cereal, but no milk.
Right now, I can’t get enough of them.
13 July 05
You Know It's Time To Go Home
...when at 5:20 in the afternoon all power to the building goes out and you’re left feeling around the partition in the windowless cave of your office for the emergency flashlight. Meanwhile, all around you UPS battery backups are shrieking insistently, not that they do your own computer any good.
It’s gotten quite hot here—tomorrow it should be in the hundreds.
5 July 05
Imagining Memoirs
Now that my project is put away like the straw bales from our field that got loaded onto tractors today, I’ve been pondering a bit more about Spain.
Specifically, I’m wondering whether the man who was hand-picked by a dictator to be his successor—from tender years, having seen his father exiled, always in the shadow off a minor tyrant, groomed, indoctrinated, cloned—has any plans to write about any of it. Because the minute the tyrant died, against all expectation, the new king called a general election, and when the military rebelled, he calmed them down and nobody died. How refreshing.
Whether he has plans to write about seeing the decades of Doña Carmen terrorizing the jewelers of Madrid as she was driven up in the black Cadillac, terrorizing them so much so they took out insurance policies against her. He was unable to speak up or say much.
Everyone assumed he was stupid; he never said anything at all. Present at minor foreign functions and royal weddings in Europe, diffident, silent, brooding. Turns out he was probably thinking all the time.
2 July 05
Return Of The Solar Cooker
We recently replaced our old CooKit from Solar Cookers International. This is a very simple solar cooker made of foil-coated cardboard which reflects sunlight into a black cooking pot that is placed in a transparent roasting bag. It’s timely having the new cooker, for it’s definitely solar cooking weather—long clear hot Davis summer days.
It’s so convenient. Yesterday I threw some quinoa pilaf into the pot with diced tomatoes and garlic and put it outside when I left for work, orienting the cooker to the southwest, and when I returned late in the afternoon it was ready to eat for dinner! This was good since the house was pretty hot and I didn’t want to cook inside. Today the meal was artichokes—yum.
1 July 05
On Charrette
I feel like one of those legendary Parisian architecture students in the 19th century, finishing drawings right on the cart on the way to the delivery spot. We are now into third and fourth proofs of chapters of this thing. And delivering Part One to Kinko’s this evening, I discovered they’re going to be closed on Monday.
Here’s a wave from the cart…
19 June 05
Geospatial Geekery
I’m back now from my open source geospatial conference in Minneapolis, completely jazzed about the experience. There were a little over 300 people attending, a very good size for a conference, small enough so that you can interact with many of them. Yet it is a community that is growing quickly and is really starting to come of age.
I think of all the the open source communities I have some relation to, however tangentially, the geospatial community is the one with which I feel the deepest sense of connection. Naturally that’s because I’ve been in geography for a long time now, and also because of my distaste of the overwhelming dominance of the field by a certain 800-pound industry gorilla (no, it’s not Microsoft). Anyway, it was great to be able to attach faces and voices to familiar names.
The next such conference is in September 2006 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Pica and I might just plan a trip to Europe around that!
17 June 05
Smiles, Applause, and a Wolf
Last night I attended the Graduate Commencement Ceremony at UC Davis, an event I used to be in charge of coordinating. I casually volunteered to help in case my help was needed since my replacement in Graduate Studies hadn’t done this before; my help on the night probably wasn’t, but thanks so much for offering; suddenly, on Monday, desperately it was, there being so many special circumstances and just not enough people to handle them: there were two hearing-impaired students (one with a dog, an apparent Portuguese Water mix) who needed to sit in front by a screen where they could read the live captioning by the bearded, smiling Devon (who afterwards gave them both beautifully wrapped gifts, such a mensch, he) and be told when to join their lines, especially since the non-dog owning one was getting two different master’s degrees and wanted to walk twice; a faculty presenter who had shattered her kneecap (ouch) and was on crutches, also needing to sit up front with her student so she wouldn’t have so far to hobble; a student in a wheelchair who wanted to process with her class and who also had a dog (a loopy golden retriever, not that there’s really any other kind) who’d be joining her for the photo (a special before-ceremony arrangement) but who’d be sitting (the dog, that is) with her family during the ceremony; and David, a PhD candidate in Comparative Pathology in a wheelchair whose guide dog was a wolf. Timber wolf mixed with something-Valley-wolf (Siona could probably tell this by looking at the wolf, but I can’t). No dog. No domestic dog involved at all in the genetics, at all. At ALL. I think her name was Ohlona. She mostly slept through the ceremony on a fleece pad he brought for her.
My job last night was to make sure all of them were where they needed to be, plus run and get water or escort any one of them to the bathroom or what have you.
As arbitrary as it might sound, PhD students at Davis process onstage in order of faculty-presenter-last-name. David’s presenter’s last name started with a Z, which put him onstage last, even though they both started from the front row.
He went up the ramp at rear and crossed the stage in his powered wheelchair with Ohlona at his left, so the entire 6,000 people or so gathered there could see her. He stood up from his wheelchair, unsteady and swaying somewhat, to be hooded.
The entire place exploded. I mean, really, really went nuts.
Ohlona smiled a knowing, wolf smile. I cried. So, I think, did David, and I’m going to bet we weren’t the only ones. This was why, I thought. This was why I used to do this. Doesn’t mean I can’t in the future. I just don’t have to lose months of sleep beforehand anymore. But this is why the work I did there was important.
13 June 05
Woven Threads
A huge thanks to Numenius for getting us up and running on TextPattern. This was really painless for me: I was off counting scoters in Bodega Harbor while he slaved away. This system is “lean and elegant” (programmers apparently know what that means); it’s certainly easy to use and no spam so far.
While at my mother’s I helped her go through some papers, among which were my grandmother’s birth certificate, her marriage certificate to my paternal grandfather, the latter’s induction into the Blackburn Grand Lodge of Masons (interesting date system they had/have, those chaps), his obituary, a note attached to the obituary listing a relative, I’m assuming, whose address changed mid-note. I have never heard of this relative.
This kind of thing is the stuff of nightmares for declutterers: how do you know what someone might want later on? The answer is you don’t so you keep it, at least the pieces of this that aren’t duplicated elsewhere.
Such as the fact that my grandmother’s mother Augusta who was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, was living with her unmarried uncle, a “wool sorter,” in Bury, when she was eleven. Plots arise unbidden in my mind.