Light Rain in the Evening

Two successive fronts have come through in the past day. Overnight we had 0.80 inches of rain. No rain throughout the day, though not much in the way of blue sky sky either, and light rain started again late in the afternoon. My bike commute to Spanish (alas no longer conveniently on the UC Davis campus) is maybe a six mile journey all told and so far I have avoided becoming soaked on the ride. It’s mostly a matter of wintertime luck, but it helps that we rarely get soaking showers. Nothing a pair of rain pants and a good rain jacket can’t handle, which I both had tonight.

A Southern Hemisphere Sojourn

The fork-tailed flycatcher, there called tijereta: that’s what I remember most clearly.

And the meat.

I once managed to get myself on a Rotary-funded exchange program from Cambridgeshire in England to Buenos Aires province. This was in 1988, not too long after the Falklands/Malvinas war, and there was a push to improve relations. Young women (25-35) who spoke Spanish and who could take five weeks off at short notice were chosen from each country to visit the other. We were the return trip, so we met the women who had been to England.

I stayed with nine different host families over the course of the five weeks. Every single place we went, without exception, served us an “asado,” which roughly translated means entire cow roast on a spit. It was great… except I was a vegetarian. First course, kidneys and sausages. Second course, steak. Third course, steak. Fourth course, steak. On to about course # 8, which was salad. (I managed courses two and eight. Usually. I muttered simple prayers to the god of vegetarians.)

I learned that the spanish I spoke categorized me as a “gallega,” a person from Galicia but the Argentine term for all Spaniards; I learned to drink mate from a gourd (and essential part of digesting courses 2-7, above); I learned how people cope with 400% annual inflation; I walked on the Plaza de Mayo and thought about the disappeared and tried not to think too much about the disappeared; I pondered on the unseemly Reaganite relish with which Thatcher had taken on the generals, now looking almost quaint in retrospect; I watched argentine films with women my age and twice my age; I flew in a Piper Cessna over flooded ranchland, being careful not to tread on the nest of a black-necked stilt on the way to the plane. Sting was playing in Buenos Aires toward the end of our stay. We all watched it on television, along with healthy dubbed doses of Miami Vice and whatever else our host families tuned into.

I saw a mate gourd for sale at the Co-op the other day. I almost bought it—the one I bought in Tandil started leaking a while a go and I threw it out. Then, yesterday, an argentina commented on a post I had written about Master and Commander. Brings back memories of tijeretas and roasting meat…

Crow Duty

The Wildlife Health Center’s crow monitoring project is going quite well; after weeks of catching none, my colleagues have now caught a total of ten crows (almost all juveniles) and three yellow-billed magpies. Two of the crows managed to ditch their transmitters, somehow, and the third is completely missing, but the remainder are tracked daily.

Numenius has a small ham radio, so we often turn it on in the morning when there are foraging crows on the field to see who’s out there. (It’s usually crow # 594.) But to get them all, we need to go over to the University Mall at nightfall, where an impressive nightly roost yields lots of radio signals and an awful lot more guano. (BAD place to park overnight.)

This evening we volunteered to check, and heard crows #333, 594, 473, 454, 194, 113, and 652. Five minutes of work. This time last year, folks, I was writing articles about nonresident tuition. Now I count crows on Saturday evenings…

The Druids Across The Way

Jim of the acorn grubs held a potting party for his valley oak seedlings at his house this evening, conveniently located on the other side of the street from us. It’s quite a production. The acorns get laid out in flats over vermiculite, as seen at right. Once the acorns germinate, they get placed in pots made of two milk cartons, preferably quart-sized, opened up and duct-taped end-to-end. Meanwhile, folks are scouring Davis cafs for empty dairy cartons, and our office is serving as a waystation for garbage bags full of half-and-half containers coming from the campus Memorial Union coffeehouse.

So far over three hundred acorns have been potted, and a number of flats of these have gone out to various people. A lot of teachers have become interested in the project, and several were at our gathering this evening. The seedlings will be ready to plant once the tap root reaches the bottom of the twinned carton. Jim this will happen some time in mid-January to the beginning of February.

At left we’re happily inspecting seedlings to the music of La Bottine Souriante.

Luring The Wild Entomologist

Simply offer a jar of grubs.

The listserv of the ecology graduate students at UC Davis evidently is a happening place. Recent emails have concerned offers of Swedish massage by a graduate of the ecology group who has since gone on to get massage training, and a note by a visiting Portuguese scholar/rockstar seeking temporary housing for winter quarter—a person with a keen ability to find a party every weekend, but someone who gets grumpy if he runs out of salted codfish.

My officemate, who is in the middle of a project growing valley oak seedlings for restoration plantings, posted the following in response:

Seeing as the list serve themes are eclectic today, I’m offering up
a jar full of grubs. They emerged from the valley oak acorns currently
sprouting all over my house.

While these grubs are not the life of the party, nor do they know Swedish
massage, they still might be of interest to budding entomologists who are
curious about oaks. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

You will have to figure out what they eat, or if they can be salted and
used instead of codfish.

There were no claimants via email, but this morning we got a call from a woman who was quite excited about the grubs. She’s an entomologist, and came over on her bike in a half-hour. She immediately concluded they were lepidopteran larvae, probably some gray moth, and wondered why they hadn’t pupated yet. She took the jar, and would be heading over to the entomology museum tomorrow. This will be fun, she said.

A Wiki For Davis

I learned today that my town now has its own community wiki. The Davis Wiki was started by a number of students and first went live at the end of October. It has grown rapidly, now having well over a hundred contributors and 600 pages. The wiki is particularly strong in describing the town’s eateries, and also has a growing number of pages on quirky features of Davis, such as the building known as the Death Star, Cows, and the Locomotive Hedge. An excellent feature of it is the interactive Davis map that allows you to click on and insert landmarks that link to wiki pages.

Pica and I have both signed up as editors, Pica quickly leaping in to add a page on our favorite Thai restaurant in town, Thai Nakorn.

A Day of Birds and Salmon

Rock wren barn owl burrowing owl bus driver who got out of the bus (to the airport) to see the burrowing owls glaucous-winged gull thousands of chinook salmon breaking themselves apart to get upstream merlin nailing a white-throated swift over the rapids and hauling it off for lunch, when most people were there to see the salmon ferruginous hawk ALBINO red-tailed hawk (this was the magic bird today) Lewis’s woodpecker western bluebird phainopepla FERRUGINOUS HAWK sandhill crane greater yellowlegs lesser yellowlegs snow goose eastern phoebe sunset behind Mt. Diablo sandhill cranes white-fronted geese, v’s in opposite directions veggie lasagne and some central heating, washed down with a pinot gris far above our means donated by someone who’s moving back east…

Almond Butter and Flying Cars

Tucked away on a court in Davis that I pass by twice a week when I go to my Spanish class lies the research facilities of Moller International. Paul Moller, the inventor behind this company, has been developing a flying car called the Skycar. This vehicle is planned to be the size of a large automobile, will have a top speed of 350 mph, will have a maximum range of 750 miles, and will get better than 20 mpg. The list price for the first Skycars to roll off the line is set at a mere $995,000, dropping to $500,000 once 200 are produced. Let’s hope the Skycar fares better than the Flying Pinto.

For those of you who are looking for foods with life extension attributes so as to reach the day when Skycars are commonplace, Mr. Moller also sells organic almond butter from his ranch near Dixon.

Blogging About Place

I was having a conversation this evening with another blogger about why we write about place. It was interesting to rethink this whole question after yesterday’s SketchCrawl.

Blogging is about audience, ultimately, for me, and when you spend a whole day wandering around where you live making sketches of railway crossing warnings and gloves abandoned by the side of the road, of the Tabasco bottle at your breakfast table, of the tall pyrex glass where your Ti Kwan Yin sits steeping, of the people you’re trying to draw surreptitiously but they always KNOW, it’s a different manifestation of this audience thing. Here’s where I live. Here was my day, Sunday November 21, in Davis, California. It was bright but very windy and chilly. We looked for salmon in the creek but didn’t see any. We saw instead the abandoned nests of cliff swallows under the bridge and the floats attached to nylon monofilament line that got caught in the willow, not just any willow but THIS one. We saw the valley oaks and the interior live oaks they planted last year along the road braving the fierce north wind. We saw the sun setting and the high-priority freight train rushing in front of it, eastward.

Look, I say. This was here. This was then.

Hanging on Tules

Mid-November fog—Everything’s muffled and drips.
Late lone cricket-song.