24 July 03
Not Ranting About Dentists
I’m not going to rant about dentists, not about how they get you at a pre-pubescent stage and slap braces on you which, for those of us who grew up with un-fluoridated water (or even with it), consigned us to a steady stream of root canals followed by crowns, which despite flossing consultations consigned us to a steady stream of gum problems, which then consigned us to terrifying visits to periodontists, resulting in the loss of said gums and ultimately our teeth on which we’ve already spent thousands and thousands of dollars, which we could have avoided if only they’d given us dentures at age eleven instead of all this trauma. No steaks, granted, but we might have invented the world’s most delectable pap, just think of the wasted culinary opportunities….
Instead, I’ll talk about the rain. It rained this morning, audible rain, rain that made you leap out of bed to go and stand in it and even have fantasies about the green returning. The jackrabbits and magpies were in ecstasy.
19 July 03
Cooking With The Sun
We’ve had lots of fun these past several years with this solar cooking kit from Solar Cookers International. The persistently sunny Sacramento Valley summertime weather is excellent for using solar cookers. Place the food in the black pot, keep the apparatus pointed towards the sun, and several hours later, your meal should be ready! Today’s was beans with red and yellow peppers.
6 July 03
Al of the 71
Butuki of Laughing~Knees had a post today about a homeless man on the subway in Tokyo and an ugly scene of intolerance. I originally wrote the following piece in response to Fred First’s request for stories about town “characters” while I was visiting the East Coast recently. I’m glad to have the chance to post it today, reminded of it by Butuki’s post and by the oft-repeated statistic that most Americans are three paychecks away from homelessness…
When I lived near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I took the 71 bus to Mount Auburn Cemetery in May for an hour or two or warblers before work. At that time in the morning the bus was often practically empty, but usually Al would be riding the bus.
Al knew all the drivers by name and rocked back and forth in a sing-song about how many cans he’d found in the garbage on his last run and how much he’d won on his last scratch ticket, which is where he invested all of his can redemption nickels. He had ample opportunity to buy tickets: early in the morning the drivers all stopped for coffee on Huron Avenue and Al hopped out with them to try his luck every time. He seemed pretty much to break even.
I never knew where Al lived or whether he even had a home—or whether his home was actually the 71 bus. (He had no bags other than those with his cans inside, so that didn’t seem very likely.) When I visited Cambridge last year, I heard the legend that Al’s parents had left him a fortune when they died, along with their house. It’s possible, but it’s also a kind of Cambridge legend.
I saw Al again on the morning of June 23 this year as I waited for the 71 to take me into Harvard Square from Watertown and on to South Station. His hands and jacket were their usual grimy selves but he seemed to move more slowly than before, a hazard when your strategy for crossing Mount Auburn Street is simply to barge out into the traffic.
Al didn’t recognize me-after all, I left the area seven years ago-but he did manage a half-smile back. It occurred to me that he probably faces far more scowls than smiles most places he goes. As age starts to grind him down, I hope he has some guardian angel other than the 71 bus drivers to look out for him…
5 July 03
Historical Maps Online
I’ve been doing a bit of browsing lately for websites that feature online historical map collections, particularly for the United States. A couple of repositories seem prominent. The first is the Perry-Castaeda Map Collection at the University of Texas Library (their historical maps are here, and they also have a list of other historical map websites.) The second site is the American Memory digital archive for the Library of Congress. The page giving their map collections is here. Their Panoramic Map collection is especially interesting, giving bird’s eye views of cities from 1847-1929.
19 June 03
Food, Glorious Food
Staying in a house where two of the other occupants experienced, as I did, English boarding school food (three different schools, identical kitchen) has led to some interesting musings on what the effect of that has been on us: we all agree that we spend more than the average bear on groceries. In my case, I also go to the local co-op several times a week in order to have fresh food all the time, as green as possible, organic mostly, and not inexpensive. Nor do I eat meat.
I can’t help it. When you’re still recovering, decades later, from battered spam and spotted dick (a suet pudding with currants in a long tube shape, served with custard), which you had to gobble quickly, where the kitchen’s response to the oceans of stodge they crammed down the gullets of ravenous teenagers was rhubarb stewed to oblivion, and where the only fresh fruit was orange quarters at half-time in field hockey matches (too bad if you weren’t on the team), you develop a certain aversion to institutional food. The odor of overboiled cabbage that lingered through the wooden hallways until the next installation of overboiled cabbage made going to smell the corpse plant last week an almost nostalgic experience for me.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out on Saturday. Apart from the magic, the only thing that distinguishes the experience of these children from our own boarding school experiences is that the food’s good. So we eagerly await the publication of the book (I’m getting it delivered here and left copious room in my bags for it) in an effort to rework the memories.
9 June 03
The Worth of a Blog
A Brazilian blogging friend recently told us that, last year, there was a service offered in Brazil’s burgeoning blogosphere (estimated at more than 300,000 strong, most using Blogger) where someone would leave a comment on your weblog—for a fee. Not just a “me too,” or “right on,” or trite comment (see Fred First’s chuckler on this, where he discusses comment anxiety), but something of substance.
Apparently that didn’t fly, because now there’s another enterprising Brazilian movement afoot: “I’ll leave a comment on your blog if you leave a comment on mine, and in less than a month you’ll have five thousand comments…” Comment CHAIN LETTERS?
Gosh. I guess I have a different idea of what makes someone’s writing worth reading. We were more than a little amused, then, to dicover we’d been listed in Blogshares. Our blogworth is apparently $2,002.51 as of 6:00 pm today. The value seems to be calculated by, among other things, inbound links, which will surely exacerbate the “please blogroll me” pleadings. If we add the Blogshares logo onto our homepage, we’ll apparently be “verified” and able to trade.
An interesting measure of one’s existence. Insider place blog trading, anyone?
6 June 03
Commencement is my Life
I was wearing a T-shirt today that said “Commencement is my Life”; I silkscreened the calligraphy onto a white shirt a couple of years ago. Among other things, I’m responsible for making sure that 500 graduate students and their faculty go across the stage next Thursday in the Recreation Hall at UC Davis in an orderly manner; that the 70 or so volunteers show up and make this happen; that there are enough chairs, not too close together to impede movement nor too far apart to overrun the space; that the faculty who say they are going to show up to get their PhD students hooded in fact do so and go to the correct side of the building; that the food for the volunteers, food for the orchestra, food for the police, and food for the guests and students gets to where it needs to be in time; that students have their academic dress on the right way around and the correct names on their reader cards and an adequate pronunciation guide of their name in case it’s needed; that guests not place themselves and others in mortal danger by hanging over parapets with tripods. I’ve never been a mother but I imagine this is what it’s like to have several children under the age of five.
And yet….
It’s not quite true. Commencement isn’t really my life. Certainly, the graduation ceremony does occupy an inordinate amount of my time at work these days, but it will be over soon. To be honest, I was tossing and turning at three this morning, but it wasn’t because of commencement stress; I was mentally composing an essay in response to our first collective “Bloggers of Place” assignment (see the Ecotone Wiki, Collective Blogs). I did get up. I did write the essay. And now I can sit and watch it percolate (it’s not due until June 15, but who knows what my life will look like between now and then), while the last few stragglers (“I don’t really want to walk at graduation but my mother wants a picture”) beg for late, atrociously late, admission, while the details of who hands out programs (which of course omit the names of the atrociously late) and where the sign language interpreters stand and what the Dean says (which depends on what the Provost says) and where the bigwigs sit and what position the flowers take and how to explain to the conductor that no, we can’t have the orchestra fill the entire auditorium, because there are nine hundred people that have to file past it—take up my day to the point of breaking.
I’ve been thinking hard about place. My heart has been in Venice today.
26 April 03
Riding Again After Twenty Years
I’ve been riding again after a long absence. Horses are large, unpredictable creatures that seem to have a soul that resonates with mine. I know that spending even a short time around them makes me forget everything else. The smell is something we used to dream of distilling as adolescents. Basically, you either love it or hate it.
Like riding a bicycle, riding a horse is a skill remembered mostly in muscles that don’t necessarily work as well as they used to. But the old instincts are still there: I can still tell when a horse, frisky in the north wind, is about to bolt. Not that this will necessarily save me!
The UC Davis Equestrian Center is adjacent to Highway 113. There are about 60 lesson horses and many others that are owned privately. It’s time for it to move on. There’s a ranch out on Russell Boulevard which has been earmarked for the new Equestrian Center and which is being celebrated this coming week. I hope there will be an indoor arena: riding in the mud in winter and searing heat in summer is no fun. If Davis is successful in its bid to get the new Biosafety Level 4 Lab from NIH, it will sit on the current site of the Equestrian Center.
16 April 03
Interruptions
Feathers of Hope is back online after all sorts of hardware woes on the server. It’s been moved to a new server at the ISP which will hopefully have better luck. Such interruptions definitely break the writing rhythm.
Back at home, the Davis Enterprise had a feature article on blogging yesterday, but once again they fail to put it online. If the local rag has a full-page article, I guess it means blogging really has gone mainstream.
1 April 03
We’re Live!
Feathers of Hope goes live, as I finally got my archiving scheme up and working. There are all sorts of template and stylesheet tweaking to do, but that will come in time.
Oh, the title of the blog refers to the Emily Dickinson poem.