16 August 05
The Lost Art of the Thank You Note
I have a birthday coming up next week, and my mother sent a card and a gift before she left to visit my brother in Alaska.
We’re in touch a lot, my mother and I: she lives about two hours away. We speak on the phone often, we email. But I don’t write her letters so much anymore. She’s a very thoughtful letter-writer, and whatever awkwardness she might feel socially vanishes when her pen hits the page. Anyway, I picked up my own pen to thank her for my birthday present and suddenly it dawned on me it had been a long time since I had done this for anyone.
She taught us to write thank-you notes growing up. It’s an art, and it follows a very simple formula. The art comes in making it sound less formulaic. It’s not about you, this letter; it’s thanking someone for their thoughtful generosity.
Leslie Harpold of The Morning News has a good column on this (via Rebecca’s Pocket via MakeReady).
10 August 05
Why You Should Pay Attention When Your Mother Says Your Horoscope Sucks
So I get to work on time for once having biked in and I look in my calendar and it says I need to be at the dentist in ten minutes so Kathy says quick take my car so I hop in and get there but my appointment is actually for tomorrow not today but they’ll squeeze me in anyway and the dentist is a kindly tall Swedish endodontist and he explains to me patiently why the root canal I had done in Spain in 1979 is going to need to get redone but that there are Risks like breaking the crown or breaking the tooth and by the way this isn’t cheap and would you like an appointment on Thursday so I think well now that I’m out I’ll just pick up some cat food so I take my keys into Petco because that’s where my Petco discount tag lives and as I’m paying I realize these are my keys not Kathy’s and I don’t have her phone number so I have to call my former office mate whose number I remember to get Kathy’s and then I call the guys to jimmy into the car and the moral is just do one thing at a time like you’re sposed to but to make myself feel better I go to the art store at lunchtime because that always works.
5 August 05
Flu Watchers
The director of the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works, Walter Boyce, was on the radio station KQED this morning in a panel discussion about avian flu. Perhaps it’s time for me to start reading up on this potential pandemic. It turns out bloggers are definitely ahead of the curve in keeping track of avian flu, as this article relates. There’s lots of fine material too at the Flu Wiki.
26 July 05
Aggie In Space
With today’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery, UC Davis has its very own astronaut orbiting the Earth. This would be Stephen Robinson, who got his bachelor’s degree from UC Davis in mechanical and aeronautical engineering in 1978. This is his third flight in space, and will be one of the two space walkers in this mission. He has made his way back to Davis in recent years. A few years ago, he was the grand marshal at the Picnic Day parade, and the year after that I heard him speak about being in space at the Davis Star Party.
21 July 05
Freecycle
Thanks to a post by Chris of Sister Spirit, I’ve finally discovered Freecycle, an organization seeking to redistribute things (okay, junk) according to whoever wants them rather than have them all end up in a landfill. The rules? It’s free, and you pick it up. I’ve joined the Davis group mostly because it’s good to have things go where they’ll be appreciated when you’re decluttering. And you never know: somebody might just have the perfect teapot out there, not sure about what to do with it…
19 July 05
Tomatoes
The tomatoes getting good here. Gazpacho time, cherry tomatoes in salad time, mozarella and basil time.
I’m amazed I like them. My mother tells of the time my father went to England for a week when we were tiny leaving her with no cash; the only thing there was to eat in the house was a box of tomatoes brought over by a neighbor. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. She says there might have been a little cereal, but no milk.
Right now, I can’t get enough of them.
13 July 05
You Know It's Time To Go Home
...when at 5:20 in the afternoon all power to the building goes out and you’re left feeling around the partition in the windowless cave of your office for the emergency flashlight. Meanwhile, all around you UPS battery backups are shrieking insistently, not that they do your own computer any good.
It’s gotten quite hot here—tomorrow it should be in the hundreds.
5 July 05
Imagining Memoirs
Now that my project is put away like the straw bales from our field that got loaded onto tractors today, I’ve been pondering a bit more about Spain.
Specifically, I’m wondering whether the man who was hand-picked by a dictator to be his successor—from tender years, having seen his father exiled, always in the shadow off a minor tyrant, groomed, indoctrinated, cloned—has any plans to write about any of it. Because the minute the tyrant died, against all expectation, the new king called a general election, and when the military rebelled, he calmed them down and nobody died. How refreshing.
Whether he has plans to write about seeing the decades of Doña Carmen terrorizing the jewelers of Madrid as she was driven up in the black Cadillac, terrorizing them so much so they took out insurance policies against her. He was unable to speak up or say much.
Everyone assumed he was stupid; he never said anything at all. Present at minor foreign functions and royal weddings in Europe, diffident, silent, brooding. Turns out he was probably thinking all the time.
2 July 05
Return Of The Solar Cooker
We recently replaced our old CooKit from Solar Cookers International. This is a very simple solar cooker made of foil-coated cardboard which reflects sunlight into a black cooking pot that is placed in a transparent roasting bag. It’s timely having the new cooker, for it’s definitely solar cooking weather—long clear hot Davis summer days.
It’s so convenient. Yesterday I threw some quinoa pilaf into the pot with diced tomatoes and garlic and put it outside when I left for work, orienting the cooker to the southwest, and when I returned late in the afternoon it was ready to eat for dinner! This was good since the house was pretty hot and I didn’t want to cook inside. Today the meal was artichokes—yum.
1 July 05
On Charrette
I feel like one of those legendary Parisian architecture students in the 19th century, finishing drawings right on the cart on the way to the delivery spot. We are now into third and fourth proofs of chapters of this thing. And delivering Part One to Kinko’s this evening, I discovered they’re going to be closed on Monday.
Here’s a wave from the cart…