10 December 08
Done, Not Done
So very much is Not Done Yet in these weeks — hectic at work, lots of Audubon stuff, knitting is consuming me (current project, for instance, pictured at left; it’s not, in fact, a bra). I haven’t posted a bird for a week. Yet:
From Rana, by way of Pilgrim/Heretic:
Things I’ve done are in bold.
1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice (No. I was asked to by a gondolier, but I declined on account of being “sola.” “Anch’io son’ solo!” he replied. “Si, però,” said I.)
29. Seen a total eclipse (Of the moon, not sun)
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors (Some of them…)
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language Several, with limited success, including Irish, Morse Code, Classical Greek, and Hebrew. Only Hebrew can I read well enough to be able to follow prayers during Jewish services, but that’s because I have followed up the self-taught with paid-taught, or else I just learned the prayers… I have made it through 3/4 of the first Harry Potter book in Swedish which is enough to understand, as though I didn’t already know, that my formation in Germanic languages is lamentably lacking and ought to be remedied. It can get in line behind everything else, though. Maybe when I retire.
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
39. Gone rock climbing (Are you kidding? With my accident proneness? See #77, and that was just DANCING.)
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke (No, but I’ll confess I’ve been tempted, and I did sing in a blues bar in La Grande Motte in the South of France before karaoke was invented.)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa (Does Morocco count?)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted (No, but it’s been sketched many times, especially during Sketchcrawls)
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (No, but having just seen Ninotchka for the first time, I regret it)
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud (YEAH!)
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business (Nearly. Glad I avoided that one.)
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar (Ugh.)
72. Pieced a quilt (No, but crocheted a bedspread, thin cotton, which was enough of piecing thank you)
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades (If you’re a birder, you have no choice but to run the gauntlet of mosquitoes on Snake Bight Trail if you want to see the flamingoes out in the shimmer. Every North American lister I know who has been to Florida has done this. Each of them has their own “the mosquitoes were the size of B52s” story.)
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone (Nah, but ruptured my achilles tendon, which was quite as dramatic)
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (Many, but none written by me. On the other hand, I’ve made lots of books, which I suppose counts as “publishing.”)
81. Visited the Vatican (School trip. We misbehaved.)
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life (No, but we apparently saved the feral kitten we trapped a couple of weeks ago)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous (This was not all it’s cracked up to be.)
92. Joined a book club (Never, ever again.)
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby (No thanks)
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone (Don’t know the number, don’t really know how to get the messages off it, but it’s useful when I’m being picked up at an airport. I think.)
99. Been stung by a bee (Had a major allergic reaction back in the 70s. This ought to make me paranoid about living in a house surrounded by thousands of milling bees, but we’ve lived there for nearly ten years and so far, so good. They’re well-behaved.)
100. Ridden an elephant
21 November 08
Badge of the Trade
When I worked for an architect in Cambridge, Mass., many of my coworkers had a thin slice taken off their left forefinger, the result of a dull exacto blade during a late-night charrette (deadline). I went through graphic design school, went through countless Exacto blades. I always, somehow, avoided this injury.
Until today. I stuck my finger in my mouth so I wouldn’t a) swear b) see c) bleed my guts out, ran into the main office, whimpered, grabbed some paper towel, then fessed that I might need to go to the hospital. But for what? There’s nothing to stitch, it got sliced off. I got chastised, rightly, by our front desk gal, who accused me of using a razor to cut card (she’s Italian), then ran next door to the vets.
“Do I put anything on this before a bandaid?” said I, bravely, to the first wildlife vet I found — she works on lead intoxication in condors but she used to be an equine vet. “Let me see.” (They’re ghoulish, veterinarians.)
“No. You weren’t around any animals, right? Clean blade? OK, bandaid now, tight but not too tight the blood has to clot, wash it when you get home then antiseptics, another bandaid. It’s going to hurt, later.”
“You’re letting a horse doc touch your finger?” asks the biodiversity/avian flu guy who is not a vet but might as well be at this point. “Better that than most doctors,” I say, and head back to the stash of bandaids.
Badged.
Update, 11/22/08: The cats were either super solicitous or cold in our first real tule fog of the fall (they almost never come onto a lap together). My PT sister-in-law whose specialty is wound care has given sound advice and asked for progress photos (on their way.)
!
26 August 08
Lunchtime, Yesterday
My sketching buddy Claire’s partner’s had the twins so no Raptor Center for us today at lunch so I went home to load the solar cooker having run out of time before work but there in the field were about 200 white-faced ibis so I sat on the kitchen stool and peered through the scope and these outlandish schnozzes and wild colors pink green copper red blue and drew and drew and then it was time to leave so I got on my bike and heading north under the walnut tree a refuge from the heat for panting crows a plonk onto my helmet that oozed through the vents warm and slightly sticky and I said to the gals as I hosed myself and my helmet down back at work it could have been worse at least it wasn’t a condor — that could have killed me.
24 August 08
Take Me Out To The Wedding
Back just now from Karen and Chris’s wedding, a wonderful event ending a long day — Pica’s birthday — which we celebrated by going to San Francisco to take a course at the San Francisco Center for the Book on making the ideal sketchbook (patterned after a creation of Dorothy Wordsworth) taught by master bookbinder Dominic Riley. The drive back from SF took longer than usual because we got stuck in traffic from the Giants’ game but that was in keeping with there turning out to be a baseball motif in the wedding, the ceremony ending with a chorus of “Take me out to the ballgame”.
Congratulations, Chris and Karen!
18 August 08
11 August 08
How to Cover the Olympics on Television
Yesterday as we congregated at 7 am for our birding outing the mother of one of our younger participants said, bleary-eyed, how hard it was for her to get up because she was hooked on the Olympics. “But it would go much faster if they cut out the advertising,” she said in her sleepy Kiwi accent.
Well, yes, it would. Numenius and I don’t have a TV and regularly deplore American coverage of, say, soccer events where the actual match is interrupted for ads. I don’t think this happens as much as it used to but it’s irritating to the point of madness and we watch Univisión, in Spanish, for soccer, at one of the local Mexican restaurants. (I notice ESPN has at least hired British commentators for soccer, who discuss the match and not which high school the striker’s grandmother attended, a clear improvement.)
Our dinner at Fuzio’s last night was outdoors, but the TV was on inside and featured nonstop non-coverage of the Olympics. This is more or less how it goes:
a) Only ever show events in which Americans are predicted to win a medal. (You don’t want to embarrass those predicted to do less well by showing their failure on primetime. The thought that people might be interested in the sport inherently—gasp—never occurs to the programmers, apparently.)
b) Only ever show the performances of these predicted American medal winners and at most their two closest rivals (you want to be “fair and balanced,” after all). The exception to this is when more than one American is predicted to win a medal, in which case you show their “interaction,” taking pains to elaborate on their team spirit or their rivalry, depending.
c) Only ever allow 15 seconds out of every 15 minutes to show an actual “event” (well, the tiny piece of it featuring the performances as outlined in [b], above). The remainder of the 15-minute chunk is broken down as follows:
- Advertising.
- Fancy Olympics swirling golden graphics that wrap around before and after anything else, such as advertising.
- A talking head, either in the studio (male, in a somber suit) surrounded by golden swirling graphics, or in the sweltering Beijing smog (female, in a pretty printed suit), giving their no doubt finest insights into the event that has just been or is just about to be shown for 15 seconds.
- The sob story. The athlete, the athlete’s grandmother’s corns that prevented her from getting gold in 1948, the fact that the athlete was dropped on the head as a small child. The sob story can last way beyond 15 seconds: some last even 5 minutes, an apparent lifetime in TV. The sob story can be repeated many times over the course of a day’s Olympic “coverage.” It is of far greater importance than the event itself, even when the gold medal is won by an American, who is then shown welling up as the stars and stripes are raised (with the voiceover repeating the sob story). (The sob story can be extended to any athlete of any nationality who doesn’t win his or her event and can be captured on camera crying, whether or not they had a difficult childhood. Since most athletes don’t, in fact, win, the number of sob stories available increases exponentially over the course of two weeks, leading to a scheduling crisis and the emergency hiring of a sob-story über-editor who overdoses on pizza and Red Bull and who needs, and gets, some quiet time at the end of August.)
- The raising of the aforementioned stars and stripes.
- More advertising, bracketed by golden swirling graphics. The advertising can and frequently does pick up on a sob story or on a pseudo-sob-story, the raising of the stars and stripes, and the teared-up athlete on the podium. (It never focuses on the losing kind of sob story, however.)
- Irrelevant local color, such as footage of the Great Wall, zooming in on white people buying, you guessed it, Coca Cola: see, they’re capitalists like us really.
I am at an absolute loss to see how people who are avid Olympics followers—and it seems there are a lot of them—can keep their sanity or even their dinner when pelted with this insulting cack. Even more mystifying is how the athletes themselves can tolerate the inane interview questions or the fact that they don’t stage a massive Free-Tibet-Style Protest against NBC (or CBS or ABC in other years; let’s be fair and balanced, here). The athletes love their sports — revere them, respect their rivals, have trained their entire lives for this moment — and it must be infuriating to watch their work being trivialized so moronically, or even worse, to be forced to participate in the trivialization. I’d go nuts.
The sad thing, folks, is this: there are some really superb sports commentators in the United States. Some of them are even still alive. They must watch this dreck and weep, providing yet more material for the ravenous sob-story writers. You can just see it now: “Jon Miller, forced to watch twenty minutes of Olympics coverage, collapsed in a tearful heap and required sedation. He used to be a much-admired baseball commentator…”
11 August 08
Anniversary
Our fifth wedding anniversary was today! We celebrated by cycling into town for pasta and salad dinner at the Fuzio bistro, followed by ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s. I had mint chocolate chunk, Pica had coffee chunk.
2 August 08
1 August 08
28 July 08
Summer Doesn't Wait
The beans the earwigs the ground squirrels the almonds the squashed plums the parched lilies the flooded field the half-drowned gophers the bunnies the mockingbird the Swainson’s hawks the moon the swallow brood the laundry the clutter the cooking the pickling the biking the daydreams the not enough sketching.
The nearly August. Gulp.