10 January 07
A Busy Day
I’m back from MacWorld. I thought an Apple phone, long predicted as the feature of this year’s Keynote, was a silly idea.
I can only say I’m really glad they weren’t for sale today, because I’d have gone against all good sense and plopped down a big wad of cash for something I don’t need.
Didn’t stop me salivating, though.
The event was the usual overstimulating paradise for geeks. As usual, there were the obvious tech types and the obvious designer types and the obvious mac nuts. Sometimes all these occurred in the same person, but mostly it was three separate groups.
I went down on the train with the Yolo Designers, a group that meets on the last Friday of every month in downtown Davis. They were able to help me come up with some specs for a new computer I need to order at work “as soon as possible.”
I’m well prepared…
6 January 07
Full of Joy
... is how my friend who is undergoing surgery on Monday described herself this evening on the phone.
So am I. I was full of joy in my encounter with two Jersey heifers across the road whose manure I was nicking for my compost; full of joy as I ate my veggie tamales at lunchtime; full of joy as I watched the killdeer overhead, scolding scolding as I put mulch onto my broccoli and onions, in preparation for the terrifying freeze we’re expecting this week; full of joy as I heard the white-tailed kite calling this morning.
And full of joy at my expanding list of creative projects to undertake sometime soon. I’m bursting with energy. Watch out, world.
[I am especially full of joy that Barbara is feeling so chipper. Thanks for the great conversation, Brabs.]
4 January 07
Continuing
Many thanks to all who commented on my End post or who emailed or who spoke on the phone. (And thank you for all the good wishes for my friend, which I will pass along.)
I am spending a lot of time thinking about this. It is not a bad time nor certainly a waste of time.
Numenius said something the other day that struck me as odd: he wondered why religious ritual needed to be connected inherently with belief. It would never occur to me not to connect them, but that’s not an answer. Look, he said, it’s a good thing, in itself, to observe Shabbat.
I certainly do crave ritual. It’s just that if it’s not backed up by substance, it feels empty to me. But it doesn’t stop me — the font at St. Francis is huge and central; I sloshed my hand in it on the way out to bless myself. Even with these thoughts of emptiness running through my head. The water was cool and, well, blessing. It always is.
2 January 07
End
Death has been much on my mind lately. My father died in December seven years ago; James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein just died. The 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq was just announced, surrounded by scores and scores of Iraqi deaths. The ten thousand candles lit on New Year’s Eve in Davis’ Central Park were a stark reminder of it all. So much death.
I attended a healing ceremony following Mass at a Franciscan church in Sacramento yesterday. A friend is about to undergo surgery. It’s a fourth knee reconstruction (the first, over 30 years ago, was occasioned by a motorcycle accident). But this friend is not well, so very not well that 7-8 hours of anesthesia for the surgery are a real concern. For her, naturally, but also for the medical team and particularly her cardiologist. Her femur is now hollow; if they don’t operate, she’ll lose her leg. If they do, it’s a risk whose odds I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with.
But it’s win-win, said brown-robed birkenstocked Father Anthony, cheerfully. If she dies, she will be with God; if she doesn’t, she gets to be with us.
Yes, he really said that. In exactly that way. You have to hand it to these chaps for not bothering to sugar-coat the issues.
It is so long since I swam in circles of that kind of certainty, though, that I hardly remember what it’s like. They wouldn’t really call it certainty; they’d call it faith.
The prayers yesterday were like a dim echo. I knew them all. I said them. I even said “we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come amen.” I said it. To say it marked me as a member of the Tribe of Catholic. To say it was also meaningless and therefore hypocritical.
To those who operate in this realm of certainty, it wasn’t meaningless, my repeating the words. He’s there even if you don’t believe, they’d say. He hears it anyway.
Which sounds like Pascal’s wager, to me. Operate on the assumption it’s all true and what have you got to lose? Like Thomas, though, I’m after a bit more evidence. There’s an awful lot of evidence against, at the moment…
20 December 06
Solstice
I’ve hurt myself. I slipped yesterday on the plank across the ditch, trying to get Charlie inside before I was late for work. (Ha.) There was frost on the plank, and I came a cropper onto my back. No harm done, thought I after a brief horizontal assessment, but this morning I woke up with a kind of reverse whiplash. Muscle strain, said the doc tonight; it’s going to take about 4 weeks to heal.
!
Anyway, what I wanted to say was this: the best writing I’ve seen for ages and ages is Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, sent to me by my dear friend Joe in Glasgow. There’s a beautiful piece about looking for the darkest dark, failing to find it on a ferry trip to Orkney but finding plenty else to write about. Damn but this gal can write, and as we hunker down before the shortest day the longest night, sucking down anti-inflammatories, it’s a good time to ponder why we’re here. And what we’ll do with the time we have left.
16 December 06
Rocks For Free
This morning we got a free rock pile. Pica has turned into an enthusiastic freecycler and is an alert member of the Davis Freecycle list, which has about 1400 people. One of whom had a pile of 1 to 3 inch landscaping cobbles which had been sitting in his driveway for months on waiting for the next project. He offered them up on Freecycle, and was delighted to help move them 3.3 miles to where they now rest on the tarmac under our almond tree.
6 December 06
What to do When...
I’ve been attending a two-day training on Emergency Communications. It’s been fascinating. I deal with the media as part of my job but usually only tangentiallly; there are professionals on campus whose function it is to do this and we have a truly wonderful person who has been good at getting the word out about the work of the Wildlife Health Center. Since much of it is newsworthy, what with West Nile Virus and oil spill and mountain lion attacks and avian flu, reporters and cameras are part of the horizon.
But the training I’ve just done will equip me, in the event Sylvia is out sick or on vacation or dealing with another emergency or the same emergency if it’s big, to handle the media on my own. In any emergency they’re often on the scene just as the emergency responders are getting there. They need a person to keep them informed, to keep them getting enough so they keep out of the way. I can certainly participate in a large-scale campus or city-wide emergency.
The scenario we were given was that a jet airliner crashed into the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Inside, speaking to a packed house, was Senator John McCain. The building was flattened. Our brief was to set up a Joint Information Center, allocate functions to everyone in our group, and come up with three messages as well as a system of dealing with the converging media city.
Rumor control was obviously a big part of the job, which means someone needs to monitor the news constantly. (I didn’t volunteer for that part. Ugh. Not owning a television almost really disqualififes me from participating in such an exercise…) During the drill we were interrupted constantly by updates and by breaking news flashes alleging terrorist attacks.
The Mondavi Center is about 250 yards from Mrak Hall, where the news service is located. We might have a situation in which the communications efforts for an entire crisis is handled by people who are satellites.
It was interesting, exhausting, and showed up a few gaps in our system. This is why you do drills….
——
On a separate note, Tim Lindgren of The Where Project writes of a fascinating book, The Economics of Attention by Richard Lanham. The idea is that “the new economists are the artists, the designers, the rhetoricians because they are the ones best equipped to deal in the cultivation of human attention.” Tim talks about Darfur and how his attention (and with a few notable exceptions) that of the West is firmly turned elsewhere. A genocide is happening on our watch in Darfur, he says. Are we paying attention?
1 December 06
More Index Cards
The hipsterPDA experiment continues to go well, though I’m behind on doing my weekly review. Here’s a Japanese perspective on index cards as a productivity tool, though apparently index cards are hard to find in Japan.
27 November 06
Eventful Weekend
a) Saw Bobby
b) Saw The Prestige
c) Soaked in the Mud
d) Made pesto with the last of the basil
e) Ate same
f) Yukked it up all weekend with a dear friend
g) Bought two pineapple guava plants
h) Got back to work today to discover that my colleagues at the Oiled Wildlife Care network had their own busy weekend, a mystery spill oiling dozens of gulls with food oil.
They headed up to Arcata on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, spent the next two days finding and collecting birds and then stabilizing them. The birds had apparently gotten into a trailer with discarded cooking oil.
The situation seems under control now with most of the birds either recuperating in recovery pools or waiting to get washed tomorrow.
14 November 06
Don't Waste That Water
When we lived in Santa Barbara, we had the opportunity to rent a cabin in the mountains for a year while Art and Lynn and their daughter Maya travelled in Central America. There were forty fruit trees and numerous other plants and we had strict instructions on how to care for them. (It was a 26-page lease, which was a little excessive for rainbow children, we thought, but we let it go. The year turned into two and a half. It was magical. Even through the rodents. I never expect to be able to share living quarters with a canyon wren again, for instance.)
Water in arid climates is a precious commodity and plants need water; some need lots of water. Art figured he’d let no drop of water get wasted, and reworked the rudimentary plumbing of their cabin so that all water except from the toilet got used at least twice.
There was a shower outside, solar-heated, and it watered the peach tree. The kitchen sink drained onto the kumquat tree. The outflow from the washing machine drained wherever I put the hose that day; sometimes it was avocados, sometimes the chayote tangle, sometimes the passionfruit or papaya. Santa Barbara is just at the northern tip of “subtropical” and some of these plants didn’t thrive, but the chayote wasn’t one of them. We ate chayote in soup the entire time.
Art has just finished revising his graywater book. He sold the manufacturing part of his business (biocompatible soaps) a long time ago and now concentrates on designing for biocompatible living — graywater is a tiny part of that whole endeavor.
It’s an important part, nonetheless: see the new, improved, revised edition of Create an Oasis with Graywater.