8 July 04
Octarine Kitties
Diego and Charlie are here playing with the magic wand that Pica’s sister sent her a while ago as a gift. Fortunately, no permanent damage resulted, though we did have some difficulty retrieving the storage box after it levitated to the top of the ceiling.
[Postscript by Pica, Friday, July 9: I’ve added a few more photos to the kitten gallery.]
25 June 04
Worse for me than thee
I took the kittens in this morning to be spayed and neutered… from starving them to the fear that Babette wasn’t quite big enough, through their yowling all the way there in the car, I was a basket case by the time I got to the vet’s… I got chastised for having them in boxes not carriers, which didn’t help much.
All day I worried about them… I was told not to come back until 5-6. I called, at around 3:00pm, to check up, but there was no answer. I had to content myself with watching a juvenile Swainson’s hawk nail, and then eat, a juvenile California ground squirrel. So it goes.
Got the kittens home, cringing all the way (different yowls this time, yowls of pain?) and first thing they did when they got out of their containers was basically purr up a storm. Purr around food, purr around each other, purr around the blanket I had put down for them. They were purring when Numenius walked through the door from Bozeman. They’re fine, leaping about in an unseemly fashion. Purring.
Now, I can get some sleep.
21 June 04
Another Goodbye
This time, Denny’s hanging up Book of Life to devote himself full-time to writing his book. We’ll miss his quiet wisdom, his delight in creatures (especially birds), Kathleen’s photos. Stop by and leave a comment if you feel so moved, but get in there before June 30… the blog goes offline then.
For the cat people out there (and Denny’s definitely one of them), I posted some kitten photos today here.
19 June 04
Gearing Up
We took a jaunt to the Sacramento REI this morning with Richard, who needed to find a replacement hat for the one he borrowed from a colleague for our Salton Sea trip.
REI is like a dream palace for outdoor gearheads. Anything you could possibly want on a backpacking, camping, canoeing, or bicycle trip has been thought through, designed, produced, produced again but smaller and lighter and more expensive, and is available for top dollar on shelves of attractively packaged things. That nobody really needs. Or maybe they do, but they’re easy to make or improvise or really just do without. (Does the world really need twelve different grades of polartec?)
I was REALLY tempted by a cotton-lycra-knit hat-cum-neck-gaiter that, well, I don’t really need, except it was interestingly draped around the cardboard cutout of a woman’s head, well designed and pushing hard. It would take about twenty minutes to make such a piece of clothing, but then what would you use it for? I exercised RESTRAINT.
We settled for some dark chocolate Toblerone that Richard kindly bought and ordered some things online later on in the day from the much more reasonably priced Campmor.
18 June 04
Verticality
The kittens are moving up in the world. This morning Pica found Diego, the biggest of the four, on top of the bathroom counter, the first time any of them have been able to get up there. And they are being increasingly agile at climbing on our tandem bicycle, as Babette at right is demonstrating.
Perhaps we need to build a house for them like this one.
17 June 04
Commencement
For the past four years I’ve been the Graduate Studies Commencement Coordinator. Tonight was this year’s ceremony; I spent the evening at a friend’s house, where she was giving a party for her own graduation as a vet (that ceremony is tomorrow evening). I assume everything went swimmingly.
While I enjoy watching the students receive all the honors that are due to them for their hard work, I must say I’ve really enjoyed my spring, this year.
One of the greatest things I think I can learn as I grow older is that nobody, at all, is indispensible. Certainly not a commencement coordinator. It’s very liberating.
24 May 04
Independent Learning
The final in my Spanish class is tomorrow evening. I’ve put in a few hours studying both yesterday and today. I definitely know a lot more Spanish than when I began, but it’s a slow process, learning a language. I plan to take the next two semesters of Spanish as well, but the next class doesn’t begin until fall (end of August, actually).
It’s been interesting to get back into the habit of studying. Back in grad school, ages ago, we were encouraged to get done with our coursework fairly quickly, so it’s probably been ten years since I’ve had a final exam. And grad school coursework was always very focused on providing background skills for research. General study wasn’t part of the picture.
My independent studies these days include Spanish and statistics. I’ve started working through a somewhat mathematical (translation: a bit hard for me, but hopefully not too) new text on statistics (All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, by Larry Wasserman) that starts with basics of probability and ends reaching some quite recently developed techniques. It will take me a few months to work through the book. But as with learning Spanish, I appreciate that many studies simply take a long time, and the best approach is to keep plugging away.
18 May 04
Good Tidings From Massachusetts
We learned today that my stepsister Jennifer and her partner Amy who live near Boston applied for their marriage license and will be having a marriage ceremony in their backyard this upcoming Friday. I’m thrilled to hear this and by the fact that Massachusetts has leapt onwards to legalize same-sex marriage. Jennifer and Amy’s commitment ceremony was 11 years ago this summer, on a narrow spit of sand near Woods Hole, though it doesn’t seem very long ago!
Here’s a link to a Massachusetts wedding album slideshow that a friend just sent to us.
25 April 04
Sunday Potterings
We had a mellow day today following yesterday’s jaunt up to Shasta County. There was not a cloud in the sky and it’s gotten very warm — it reached 90 today — so we decided it was time for the solar cooker. This is a contraption that we got from Solar Cookers International where you place a black-painted aluminum cooking pot inside a oven roasting bag, and rest this outside in the sun on top of an aluminized cardboard half-box. A picture of the setup is at right. We cooked beans and rice today, ready by the time we got home after an excursion into town on our bikes this afternoon.
I also went through my bike basket, in the spirit of Pica’s archeology of the car. Items therein:
- 1 clear plastic bag
- 1 bike lock
- a scrunched up paper napkin
- a paper on the economic geography of talent, author Richard Florida
- the roster and program for the UC Davis vs. Cal State San Bernardino baseball game on Picnic Day
- the Picnic Day program from the Cal Aggie paper
- a clothes label saying “I am reversible”
- a printout from March 8 of books on loan from the Davis Public Library, namely The Boy’s Crusade, by Paul Fussell, Monsoon Diary, by Shoba Narayan, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Worms, by Amy Stewart, The Book of Wi-Fi, by John Ross, and Voices from the Pagan Census, by Helen Berger
- a couple of printouts of local geocaches
- 5 pencils in various states of unsharpenedness
- 1 Pilot pen
- 1 empty fountain pen ink cartridge
- and a type specimen sheet for the typeface Gentium
17 April 04
UC Davis Dog Day
Actually it was the 90th edition of Picnic Day today at UC Davis, but don’t tell Hooper that. My sister Judy, her boyfriend Brian, and Hooper their dog all came up for this event, reputedly the largest student-run event in the country, and from Hooper’s perspective, the largest gathering of canines he’s been with.
After watching the parade, the highlight of it being the passage of the visiting Budweiser Clydesdales — the most massive horses I recall seeing, and followed by three big eighteen-wheeler trucks to hold two Clydesdales each — we wandered west towards the dog events. Halfway there, a sheep ran across a parking lot and crossed the street, with four folks in pursuit — an escapee from the sheepdog trials down the way. Brian and Hooper decided to help, so they crossed the street and joined in the chase. The sheep was corralled after a bit, but not before it knocked down a woman in its way. Hooper followed his introduction to sheep-herding with observational studies of the experts, the border collies doing the trials.
We watched a bit of baseball — the UCD Aggies were playing the Cal State San Bernardino Coyotes — and did some sketching at the game, discovering that baseball is a great sport for practicing sketching since the players hold great poses repeatedly. We then saw some of the frisbee dogs chase and leap, and went to the field where the various dog adoption groups were set up. Pica was quite tempted by a soft and cuddly black lab puppy. Alas, no dogs allowed where we live.
And Hooper left with some new career possibilities. He still needs a bit of practice before he masters the border collie stoop-and-glare technique, but then fame is his.