Champagne Valley

I’m finding discussion of the housing bubble to be quite entertaining. While practically everybody on two feet in California and many other parts of the country has been scheming to get rich through buying a house (or two or three…), we’re happily renting contrarians who think these boom times will not last. A favorite blog of mine nowadays is The Housing Bubble 2, full of housing bear talk.

Nowadays I’ve been looking at housing prices more systematically. A good data source is the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight House Price Index. Above is a graph I made showing the value of this index for the Sacramento metropolitan area. Note how things were comfortably trundling along at a 5% growth rate until the year 2000, at which point house prices take off in this area at about a 15% appreciation rate. To my eye, this looks completely unsustainable and likely to fall back to the historical line of increase.

It is interesting to compare appreciation rates over the past 30 years to recent growth rates, say since 1999. At right is a map I made that depicts this. What is plotted is the growth rate since 1999 divided by the historical growth rate (since 1975). Red is high, a ratio of 3 or above, bright green is a low ratio (between 0 and 1). What was a bit surprising is that the frothiest region in California (by this definition of froth) is not the Bay Area, is not Los Angeles or San Diego, but is in fact the Central Valley. Welcome to my home.

Epsilon

This year’s record Atlantic hurricane season comes to a close with yes, yet another storm. Tropical Storm Epsilon is the 26th named storm of this season, the most ever recorded. It is in the mid-Atlantic and not expected to reach land, unlike Tropical Storm Delta, which last night slammed into the Canary Islands.

Lost In The Rain

We had a nature and culture outing today in Davis and Sacramento with Pica’s mom. Our plan was to go birding in the morning with a field trip starting in southeast Davis at 7:45 AM, and then split off from the trip to go to the Crocker Art Museum and then to a movie. The field trip didn’t quite go as planned. We met the folks at the start of the field trip, headed out of the shopping mall parking lot, and promptly didn’t know who to follow. We thus ended up setting a new record in getting lost during a field trip.

What we had heard was that several folks were interested in going to Slide Hill Park in Davis to look for a stray mountain chickadee. We thought that was where the group was headed, so we birded there for a little bit, with no sign of the group or the chickadee. The most interesting creature there was a small furry dog that looked like a pig. We then went our own way to the Yolo Bypass wildlife refuge.

The shorebirds and waterfowl were quite happy in the rain there. We saw 4 American bitterns there, maybe 20 common snipe, and had a good look at two lovely long-billed curlews. Then we went over the bypass to the Crocker, where there was a exhibition of paintings by the early 20th century American artist Marsden Hartley.

At the end of the day we went to see Good Night, and Good Luck, playing back in Davis. It’s an excellent movie, a focused little vignette on a episode in history I didn’t know much about. But I remembered that I had heard of Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly as a kid because we had several record albums from their Hear It Now radio series—the recording of the radio announcer describing the Hindenberg disaster stands out in my mind.

Little Apples

Every now and then I get to make pretty maps at work. My new computer worked hard today—in a 3 1/2 hour run it produced over 7800 maps of plant species in California. After that I summed together a few of these to make species richness maps for a few favorite genera in the state. This is a map of the number of manzanita species in different parts of the state. Blue is zero species, red is high (about 10 species), and yellow is in between.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, and don’t eat like these folks.

Long Before GIS

People were still making maps. News of the discovery of the oldest map in the Western world was just announced. This map is on a bit of a terracotta vase found in an archeological dig about two years ago in southern Italy. The fragment depicts the region of Apulia, and dates from about 500 BC. The script on it is ancient Greek, and it is the first ancient Greek map predating the Romans that has ever been found.

So Frail a Thing

I heard a scream from my office this morning. A bird had flown into our building. It’s been unseasonably warm and we work with the doors open despite the flies…

I don’t know why some people scream when there is a bird indoors: I think more people have bird phobias than you’d imagine. The screamer was hiding under the desk.

I moved over to the window and easily caught the yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon’s) in my hands; took it out; released it. It flew up in to the pine, scolding loudly.

My hands throbbed, remembering that frenzied frail heartbeat.

A Different Boston

I spent Sunday in Boston with my sister. She is making a career switch from pediatric occupational therapist, a wonderful one who is quite positive she’s never ever going to write one more report about a child, to an interior designer. She’s taking an online course from KLC in London. I saw the course materials and was quite impressed: it looks like fun, too. It seems in the US the options were either 4-year degree or “interior decorator,” neither of which quite matched her means or aptitude, so she’s a British student. Again. Brava, say I.

Since one of her ongoing assignments is to visit houses from earlier eras, sketch them, and compare period decoration, we visited the Paul Revere House in the North End (late Tudor, sparse but not spartan furnishings); the Pierce house next door (early Georgian, fascinating black line running from the fireplace to border sections of the room), and the Otis house just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill, plush Federal.

I lived in Boston for eight years and never went in any of these places. It was interesting to return and see them through this new lens, sketching fireplaces and chairs and wondering how they managed to keep warm through all those freezing winters.

Mostly it was such a treat to spend a WHOLE DAY with my sister, just the two of us. This happens so rarely nowadays. I always return to Davis after having seen her thinking about ways to reinvent ourselves so we could move to some hilltop ramshackle farmstead in the frozen north…

Cali Fuschia

Pica is away in Maine visiting her sister this long weekend. I did a few sketches in the Arboretum today after going to hear a morning talk on campus despite the holiday by Bruce Babbitt. The California fuschias (Epilobum canum) were very much in bloom.

Winter Begins

It looks like the first big rain of the season is coming tomorrow! Here is a view of the sky this afternoon looking south over Putah Creek.

Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style

We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.

The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.

Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)

She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…

Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.

There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.

The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).

Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.