Horoscope Reading: A Short Play

M: D, Scorpio, here’s yours: you need a break. [Laughter]

M: A, Virgo: get ready to roll up your sleeves… [interrupted by howls of laughter]

M: Me, Capricorn: get out. [Laughter so loud tears stream down faces]

L'Shana Tovah!

Apples and honey for a sweet new year 5786.

In addition to being Erev Rosh Hashana, today also was the autumnal equinox. This combination seems like a pretty rare event, seeing as how Rosh Hashana moves around from being as early as 5 September to as late as 5 October. I did a little research and found no reliable source to tell me when was the last time this occurred.

Back From Boston

I came back this afternoon from my short Boston outing on the train. Yesterday I took a ferry trip with a friend from the North Shore to the North End, Boston’s original neighborhood whose ethnic identity has changed from settler to wealthy Bostonian to red light district to Irish to Italian, though I doubt that many or even half of the people who live there now are of Italian descent: it’s turned into boojie wealthy, though unwise to own a car if you live here.

This morning my friend Linda and I went birding on Plum Island, where we saw a lot of migrating songbirds (including some warblers I haven’t seen for a while). Batteries? recharged!

New Daily Sketchbook

I started my new daily sketchbook today. For my weekend sketching outings using this sketchbook I’m going to be doing general urban sketching. Today’s sketch was of a house on G Street not far from the food coop.

My new sketchbook is a 7”×7” softcover Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook. My previous square sketchbooks were 5 1/2” × 5 1/2”, so there’s a bit more area to cover in each sketch. In today’s sketch I used my gray Pentel brush pen for accents; maybe I’ll be doing more of that in this sketchbook.

A Trip to Boston

I lived in Boston for eight years before I moved to California. I’ve been back to the east coast many times over the past 30 years but rarely to Boston proper. Today I went south on the train and took myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the Museum of Fine Arts where I found a lot of old friends and at the latter saw the astonishing Rachel Rausch exhibit. Recharged the batteries for sure, maybe at the cost of sore feet.

Save Our Signs

I went to a Zoom session yesterday for the Data Rescue Project that featured a presentation by organizers of an effort entitled Save Our Signs. On 27 March 2025 Trump issued an executive order (“Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History”) that directed the National Park Service and other land management agencies to remove and replace content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), or, with respect to content describing natural features, that emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur of said natural feature.” A subsequent order gave the park administrators 120 days to remove and replace such content, which worked out to the date of 17 September 2025.

The organizers of Save Our Signs, who are librarians and public historians at the University of Minnesota, realized something had to be done, and launched a crowdsourced effort to photograph as many of the signs in the National Park System possible. By September 15 they have received 8070 photographs from well over 300 parks. They have already documented some alterations for instance to signage in Muir Woods.

I am appalled and horrified by the wholesale erasure of history that is underway, but at the same time I am inspired by Save Our Signs and related efforts to keep history and memory alive, and hope to find my own niche in this domain.

Footnote: in my YouTube feed there just appeared a news story from WBOY 12 in West Virginia entitled Certain exhibits being removed from Harpers Ferry under Trump administration order which says that they “are removing references to slavery” in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Harpers Ferry is the site of John Brown’s famous raid: it’s kind of hard to tell its story without mentioning slavery!

Dried Plants

I’m visiting Maine with minimal art supplies… and that’s great.

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.

River Lighthouse

A lot of the people I send postcards to request postcards of lighthouses, and it’s easy to see why: essential features of 19th century coastal navigation, they are now quaint relics in an era of GPS and accurate weather forecasting. But today we chanced upon a singularly rare lightouse: a river lighthouse near Bath, Maine, tiny compared to coastal ones but evidently helping ships across a sandbar.

Pendulous Oak

I am nearly to the end of my current daily sketchbook and will be moving on from sketching only trees on weekends. So I’ve finally sketched this handsome oak in our neighborhood — I think it is a cork oak. I’ve sketched it with Derwent drawing pencils, a fountain pen filled with De Atramentis urban gray ink, and watercolor wash, the greens being Daniel Smith green apatite genuine.