Eyes On A Comet

At 5:52:12 GMT on July 4th, plus or minus 10 seconds, the space probe Deep Impact will slam into the comet 9P/Tempel 1, currently at a modest 10th magnitude in brightness. No one knows what we’ll see, but it’s possible a flash from the impact may be visible in a medium-sized telescope. It should be worth getting mine out for the event.

Don Gallo

We’re not getting much of a chance to sleep in these days. The chicken who was present upon our return from North Carolina turns out to be a young rooster who has lately learned how to crow. Nowadays he does this outside our bedroom window, bright and early in the morning.

No one is sure where he came from. Not across the street—though they have had chickens there, there’s never been a rooster. Our landlady thinks somebody just dumped him off here. So far he’s survived the trucks zooming by, and the local coyotes (one of whom we saw from the train Sunday running off with a jackrabbit).

He’s pretty to look at, but I could do without the alarm clock!

Davis Dartboard

The new O’Reilly book Mapping Hacks has arrived in the campus bookstore; it looks excellent. I haven’t picked it up yet since supposedly I’ll be getting an email giving me a 30% discount on it and the related book Web Mapping Illustrated by virtue of going to the conference last week. The former book is by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh, who are quite active in the ‘locative media’ movement. Here’s a game which I may play which is very much in this spirit.

I’ll take a city map of Davis and drop down a couple dozen random points on top of it (all in my GIS, of course). Then I will go to each point and sketch/photograph/write about what I see there. The results of this exercise will end up on this blog, on separate web pages, and/or in a physical book.

Thanks to the Davis Wiki, this town is perhaps one of the most extensively annotated-on-the-web places on the planet. And as it turns out, the city has a comprehensive set of GIS layers that are freely downloadable, not to mention a set of detailed aerial photographs dating from a couple of months ago. But GIS layers and imagery only get you so far. I’m sure I’ll learn things about this town through this exercise, and perhaps catch glimpses of deep culture as well.

Solstice

I’ve been thinking a lot about the solstice for the past few weeks; an Artist Trading Card swap for June has this as its theme and I’ve been wondering how to approach it. It’s a bittersweet time: the languor of the longest day combined with the heading back to winter.

We walked up on the levee to watch the sun set and the moon rise. While we were sketching we heard the sounds of bluegrass from Jim’s house (the former artificial insemination barn). We headed down there to make sure they had seen the moon. (They hadn’t, and immediately headed outside to serenade the moon with a stirring rendition of Blackberry something.)

Knackered; Or, Why I'm Behind on Lots of Things But Especially Reading Blogs

December: Maine/Boston
January: Washington/Oregon/British Columbia
February: Texas, San Francisco, Berkeley
March: Palm Desert, Anza Borrego
April/May: Boston
May/June: San Francisco, North Carolina/Virginia, Bodega Bay, Berkeley

[Of special note: we live less than 20 miles from Sacramento, and I’m not sure I’ve been there once this year… just in case you think putting down Berkeley or San Francisco is trivial for a Davisite.]

Numenius left today for Minneapolis and an open source GIS conference. This is the first time he’s gone somewhere without me for ages; I, on the other hand, have been doing some running around, most of it alone. All of it was fun, though. (I’ve seen seventeen new North American birds this year, which is more than in the last ten years put together. Edging toward 700…) What I think I need to acknowledge, though, is that these short trips take me a long time to bounce back from, in terms of retrieving my focus. I can slip back into work, I can slip back into blogging, but I’m not really here yet. The settling takes longer these days. Eh oui.

So today, especially, I’m happy to stay put, having had a massage this evening to deal with sitting on too many planes and not doing enough exercise and generally pampering myself after a physical exam yesterday, of the routine variety but never, ever pleasant…

View From The Train

Today I took the train down to Berkeley to have brunch with my family. (Pica joined us in Berkeley after staying overnight at her mum’s in Bodega Bay—it was something of a family weekend for both of us.) The train ride offers good views of rural Solano County, and to the south Mt. Diablo (3849 feet high) in Contra Costa County is ever present. At left is a sketch of the peak looking over the Suisun Marsh.

Countin’ Churches

We’ve been in the southeast for a week now. A trip to Cape Hatteras and two boat trips, a quick trip to Kitty Hawk, a quick trip to Floyd, a quick trip to Greensboro (John Neal Books), and HUNDREDS of churches later….

Going out on the boat into the Gulf Stream to see unusual seabirds yielded four life birds for both of us: black-capped petrel, Audubon’s shearwater, band-rumped storm-petrel, and bridled tern. There were many Wilson’s storm-petrels and a few Leach’s and a good, close look at two sperm whales, a longer look at Cuvier’s beaked whales. Huge manta rays. The deck hands caught several mahi-mahi and a huge blue marlin.

Numenius had the idea to play a new road game: guess the denomination of the next church. The problem with this is that there are so many, and we quickly realized we had seen more protestant denominations than bird species. So we started to make a list, driving from Cape Hatteras north into Virginia and then basically heading due west; a pretty solid transect. You can do a convincing cultural geography of a place by noticing where, for instance, a presbyterian church makes a sudden entry into the landscape coincidental with well-kept lawns versus a preponderance of churches with the words “apostolic” or “gospel” in their names that tend to concentrate around poor quality bottomland and decaying cars abandoned on overgrown patches of land that is no longer farmed.

We have been so plagued with spam during this past week we’ve had to shut down comments (the server’s been brought down several times, apparently). Sorry. We’ll work to fix this when we get home.

Expanding Vista

There’s been an Airstream trailer outside our back door for the past three months. The landlord’s son who keeps bees has needed a lot of extra help getting new hives built, honey extracted, and bees trucked around the valley (it’s going to be a big year in the bee business, especially for someone who sprayed his bees against mites nobody else believed would be a problem).

The trailer is owned by one Charlie, a laid-back jovial guy who seems curious about everything. He’s not the one who’s been living in it, though: that’s his stepson Taylor, a third-year engineering student who’s been doing the bee work to save up enough money to finish school back in Albuquerque.

Taylor would emerge with a cigarette at roughly the time we were walking the cats on leashes outside. Convention dictates a conversation is required. Nobody really wanted this so early in the morning; normally I still had to get in the shower and eat breakfast.

Charlie picked up the trailer yesterday; Taylor’s gone to Nevada for the next phase of bee work. And our mornings will once again focus exclusively on making sure the cats don’t catch pocket gophers, on the black-crowned night-herons, on the possibly nesting Bullock’s oriole.

Taking Joy in Things of Delight

Today we drove about 45 minutes due west, beyond the hillside where we got married two years ago, and headed into Cold Canyon.

This canyon is part of the UC Reserve System; it’s a creekside hike up a fairly steep trail in places. The rain has made the vegetation very lush; it was warm; I wondered about rattlesnakes a lot but as usual saw nary a one.

You’re encouraged to sign in and are invited to leave an optional comment beyond your name and the number in your party. “Sketching,” said Numenius, below the numerous “hiking” folks that were uphill. (The wags we met on the way out put “trotting” in this category.)

We sketched. We sat by the creek and used pens, pencils, crayons, watercolors, and the new stools I picked up at REI in Boston (okay, Reading) last week.

Feet and Memory

I have small feet. It makes walking hard. I also develop blisters even before I put my shoes/boots/sandals on. It’s genetic.

It’s also ironic, because I love walking.

When I was in Boston last weekend I went to the same usual haunts I somehow always manage to get to when I’m there—Mount Auburn, Harvard Square. It was the first time in probably twelve years I’d been in Central Square, though.

Central Square used to be on the dangerous side of funky. There were gunshots routinely on a Saturday night; walking past the Greek mom and pop greasy spoon would subject you to a cascade of cigarette smoke early in the morning or late at night. I lived down Magazine Street and then down Western Avenue. It didn’t feel very scary, but it should have. It was the kind of place I didn’t give too many details about on the phone to my parents.

Once I got over my stupefaction at seeing the Gap and Starbucks as I made my way from the bus stop to the Cambridge Zen Center last Friday, my feet took over.

They remembered the bricks. The sidewalk on Magazine is mostly brick, with a little cement in front of the Greek Orthodox Church parking lot. All of the eight blocks home were buckled from the roots of sidewalk trees that had grown too big for their housings and eventually been cut down but nobody leveled the sidewalk. I knew all the buckles, or rather my feet did.

I trust my feet. They have memory. Sometimes, as during practice at the Zen Center that evening when they had gone to sleep, they have more memory than sense (try standing up on a leg that is 100% asleep; it doesn’t work). But they took my shivering self through the Dell, down the Harvard Square bus ramp, over the hills and dales of the Magazine Street pavement.

Here’s to feet, and the hard work they do for us…