Tis The Season

In October I inevitably take lots of photos of Halloween decorations. Here is a photo of a couple of skeletons that I met on a recent walk.

The Call of the Loon

This past week has been very busy with getting things packed up, distributed to various places, visits to lawyers and accountants and funeral homes, all the kinds of things that need to be done and nobody much feels like doing.

We did take a break, though, on Friday morning, to distribute mum’s ashes along with the remaining ones of my father. As we walked silently back to the car, a couple of loons began to call.

Mum kept her sense of humor to the end: writing “sayonara” on her calendar to all future doctor’s appointments, she really left on her terms and on her schedule. I will be making a donation to Maine’s Death With Dignity foundation.

New Water Year

Because most of precipitation in California falls during fall and winter, state hydrologists start the record-keeping for the annual amount of precipitation on October 1st of each year. This past year, the 2025 water year, we got 13.13 inches of rain at our house, which is a pretty dry year. October has started out with a little bit of rain already: yesterday (1 October) we got 0.02 inches of rain and today we got 0.20 inches at our house. I even felt the need to wear my rain jacket and pants for a little walk this morning.

Mantis At Work

Our neighbor Barbara this afternoon showed me this praying mantis in her front yard. It has been hanging out in these lilies for a few days now, and the other day she spotted it devouring a bumblebee attracted to the flowers. It’s a good place to work, I suppose.

One Eagle Hill

I finally finished reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biographical tome about J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. One of the things that draws me into the Oppenheimer story, both this book and the blockbuster movie of a couple years back, is that my family history intersects quite strongly with the places, the people, and the science in the narrative. Both my parents studied chemistry as undergraduates at Ohio State University, and they moved out to the Berkeley area in 1948 when my father started graduate studies in nuclear chemistry at UC Berkeley. His major professor was Glenn T. Seaborg, who in 1940 discovered plutonium and worked on the element’s chemical extraction at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project. Seaborg knew most everyone in the Oppenheimer story, and because Berkeley became the premier center for nuclear chemistry, my father met some of these scientists as well.

Oppenheimer came to UC Berkeley around 1929 to develop a research program in theoretical physics. An article in the magazine Berkeleyside that came out around the movie illustrates the places that figured in Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley. Two of these places I know well. Around 1940 the Oppenheimers rented a house at 10 Kenilworth Court in Kensington. I know this place because it was just around the corner from where chemistry professor Joel Hildebrand lived. Hildebrand lived to be 101, and when I would walk to high school in the late 1970s I would sometimes see Professor Hildebrand ambling about near there. (Also, scholarly longevity can be a family thing I guess. Joel Hildebrand’s son Milton became a distinguished zoologist and professor here at UC Davis. Milton died in 2020 at the age of 102).

The Oppenheimers then bought a house at One Eagle Hill Road in 1941. This house is 75 yards away from the home on Edgecroft Road where I grew up and my sister still lives. My parents bought the Edgecroft house in 1953 by which point the Oppenheimers had already moved away, but it’s fun to think about the coincidence in space if not in time. As a kid I played up and on the hill a stone’s throw away from where the Chevalier incident took place (Oppenheimer’s conversation in 1943 with his close friend Haakon Chevalier that would lead to Oppenheimer’s downfall in the 1954 security clearance hearings).

There’s a detail in the Berkeleyside article is of interest to Davis folks. When Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos in March 1943 to lead the atomic bomb research there, he rented out the Eagle Hill house to a food scientist at UC Berkeley by the name of Emil Mrak. Mrak would go on to start the food science program at UC Davis and then became chancellor in 1959. The administration building at UC Davis is named Mrak Hall after him.

A final astronomical note. I remember looking at Comet Kohoutek through binoculars probably in January 1974 from the top of Eagle Hill. Kohoutek was not the spectacle people hoped for, but it was still fun to see.

September Grapes

The grapes draping our backyard fence are starting to turn color and many of the bunches of grapes becoming raisins. Here is a sketch using De Atramentis Urban Gray ink, Derwent drawing pencils, and Derwent graphitint pan colors.

Storm At Dawn

A monsoonal weather system has come up from the south over California today, and around dawn this morning we had thunder and lightning and a few drops of rain. It cleared up by midday and we were able to set up the solar cooker this afternoon to prepare some lentils. The thunderstorms are now over the northern Sierras bringing with them a risk of wildfires.

Here is a view of the clouds this morning, taken a little after 7 AM from the food coop parking lot.

Metro Systems That Ought To Exist

Metro systems are one of the great urban inventions but unfortunately there seems to be a minimum urban size before they get built. That doesn’t mean they can’t be designed in imagination. A YouTuber by the name of Helio Roque has started a project entitled “planeando metros que no existen” and has designed three of these so far, the cities being Badajoz, Salamanca, and Benidorm. Here he presents the creation of his map for Salamanca.

A Visitor From The Grapevines

Last Wednesday (20 August) we got to admire this moth all day long when Pica discovered it resting on a t-shirt hanging on the laundry line out back. This is an achemon sphinx moth (Eumorpha achemon) in the family Sphingidae. Their caterpillars feed on wild and cultivated grapes. Its presence makes sense because we have grapevines along the fencing on two sides of our yard, though we have never observed a caterpillar in the vines. The moth left the t-shirt some time over the night.

Daily Sketch - Young Oak

For today’s weekend tree sketch I ventured out on bicycle to the local arboretum where to no surprise there are many trees. I sketched this young oak with De Atramentis Urban Gray ink and used Derwent Graphitint pan paints for the wash. I like the Derwent Graphitint pan set a lot. The principle of the Graphitints (both in pencil and pan paint form) is that they are watercolor pigments mixed with graphite particles which mutes the colors a lot. Using the pan set I find I can mix a lot of realistic greens, and muted sketches work well at times.