Place Bloggers Meet in Bodega Bay

Today we met up with Tim Lindgren of the Where Project. Tim was over from Boston for a wedding, and we had some work to do on my mother’s computer, so we met up for brunch this morning at the Seaweed Cafe.

Tim always asks interesting questions about blogging place, and it seems that people often ask interesting questions about place themselves when they are somehow in transition. We came up with quite a few blogs between us where this is the case. Being on the edge is what ecotone means, and it’s a challenge to find the edge when you’re feeling settled, of finding the extraordinary (or at least blogworthy) in the everyday. I think one way I’m able to do this is through sketching. (I didn’t do any sketching this morning but we did talk about it.)

Speaking of Ecotone, Tim is heroically moving the spam-beleaguered wiki to a Drupal interface. There should be a skeletal prototype available soon. Please indicate in comments here if you’d like to be involved in testing the new format—we’d love help here! (From highly advanced users to novices, people who have never even left a comment before.)

Alfalfa It Is

They harvested the wheat field outside our house at the beginning of July, and since then they have gone over the barren field many times with the plow. Most recently they plowed it into 15-meter wide rows separated by dirt berms, and then a day or two later flood irrigated the rows. This evening our landlord told me there’d be alfalfa next year, which is what I had figured.

Alfalfa seems like a pretty easy crop to grow. The field right to the south of us has been planted in alfalfa all year. The procedure there is to mow the field and bale the hay, which takes a day, then irrigate the fields, and then several weeks later it has grown back and you have another crop. I’m sure the enterprise uses more than its fair share of water, though.

An alfalfa field in bloom smells very nice, as does the mown hay. The crop supports lots of butterflies: both the orange sulfurs (which are native and a big pest of the crop) and the painted ladies.

Rita Moves West

At the rate this season is progressing, we are going to run out of hurricane names before it is over. After Katrina, I’ve paid a good bit more attention to Atlantic storms, being the latent weather hound that I am. After passing just south of the Florida Keys, Hurricane Rita is tracking westward, is at Category 3 now and soon to strengthen to Category 4, and is expected to make landfall somewhere on the coast of Texas by the end of this week.

California isn’t a great place for exciting weather. We get heavy winter rainstorms, Santa Ana winds, and that’s about it, except for the minor tornado. Here is a list of California’s top 10 weather disasters.

Fanciful Travels

If you are looking for an unusual vacation, you might wish to visit the nation of Breda in the South Pacific, or perhaps the island-continent of Bergonia in the mid-Atlantic, the latter noted for its stable anarcho-syndicalist socialist democracy, a subtropical to temperate climate, and three species of endemic wild cats.

Evening Fascinations

Screen-door dragonfly
Wings beating like shuffling cards
The cats paw and leap.

Mt. Mondavi

It is one of the truths of the universe that if you dig a pit, the dirt has to go somewhere. This is the construction site of the forthcoming Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Studies, just across the way from the Mondavi Center concert hall. It is now the tallest hill in Davis. I expect to see some renegade mountain bikers cruising up and down it any day now.

This institute will be the new home for the Department of Viticulture and Enology. The only claim to fame of Wickson Hall, the building where I work, is that it houses said department. So when they leave to occupy their new digs, I don’t suppose there’s any chance at all I’ll finally get to move to an office with a window?

Monster At The Door

I’ve just finished reading The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, a new book by urban critic Mike Davis. It’s a quick, excellent, and terrifying read. I think it’s the first popular book to focus specifically on the threat of the H5N1 flu virus. A quote that’s a good synopsis of his view:

In the face of the peril of avian influenza, as with HIV/AIDS earlier, world public health resources are organized rather like the lifeboats were on the Titanic: many of the first-class passengers and even some of the crew will drown because of the company’s skinflint lack of foresight; the poor Paddies in steerage, however, do not even have a single lifeboat between them, and thus, they are all doomed to swim in the icy waters.

Squeam

When my sister was about 11, she was bitten in the left leg by a neighbor’s German Shepherd as she dove into a swimming pool. (The dog was trying to “save” her and ripped a nice gash all down her calf muscle.) My mother, superb in any emergency, lashed her leg with a silk dressing gown and drove her to the hospital with a white hanky flying from the window.

I went along a few weeks later to watch them take out the stitches. I fainted dead away. The doctors all left the stitch-removal table and lifted my legs high over my head. I was mortified, of course: I was twelve.

Last night I got a call from the landlady that there was a “sick” magpie in their yard. I went over there with gloves, a box, and a towel, and got the magpie out of the dog-filled yard and over to the Wildlife Health Center.

Magpies have been dying in their hundreds, probably thousands, with this year’s West Nile virus outbreak. My colleague Yvette was still working at 6:30. She wanted to take some samples of the bird before it died. These will help with identifying not just the exact reason for death (it could, after all, have been poisoned) but also can give us important genetic data about this endemic species.

Getting blood from a bird so close to death, where dehydration is a given and there is almost no blood pressure, was a challenge. I held the bird while she tried to draw blood from the jugular, then the leg, then finally the wing.

The wing part did it. Sweat was pouring down my back and although I couldn’t see my face in the mirror I knew I was pale as a ghost.

Guess I didn’t grow out of that one, then. I buried my head between my knees and gave thanks for the life of the magpie (Yvette euthanized it at this point).

Balloon Invasion

While walking the cats this morning, we saw a flotilla of four balloons moving southwards quite nearby. One floated almost overhead on the way to a landing in the field to the south. Alas the propane burners did frighten the kitties: Charlie doesn’t spook easily but he did this time. All four balloons landed within a kilometer of the house.

Waterfall Lost, Waterfall Found

Who’s to say that the era of exploration is over? A 120 meter waterfall was recently brought to light in a remote corner of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California.