20 September 06
Bound For Rio Vista
We had a big, blustery north wind today. Headed into town after lunch today, we noticed that our cardboard solar cooker, last seen on the plastic chair by our front door, was now about 100 yards into the alfalfa field to the south. I ran after it and jammed it into the shelter of the back seat of the car.
15 September 06
A Fortnight-long Sketchcrawl
Going to Europe—including a wedding—with no camera raised a few eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic. But sketching our way around Madrid, Segovia, from trains, from benches in three countries allowed both of us to connect with our surroundings in a different way than a digital camera would have.
For a start, anything’s fair game, subjects that would not have been “worth” photographing. My new shoes. The top of the head of the balding man in the seat in front of me on the plane. The half-drunk glass of sangria on a table, an old wooden door, Jennifer and Harald’s boots. Sure, we did sketch the grandiose—I did two sketches of the aqueduct in Segovia, for instance—but there is much pleasure to be had in tracing lines that outline the simple, the mundane.
Blogging for us grew out of our log book, a journal with pen and a few sketches about our dwelling-place. Sketching for me at least has in turn been influenced by blogging, in that I chose where to go in, say, London, in part by what sketching opportunities might be had.
(I should probably fess up at this point that I did shell out an enormous sum to go up the London Eye precisely for this reason, only to succumb to vertigo and possibly regret, but then I made up for it in far more prosaic settings along the South Bank, such as the kid who was bungee-trampolining with a grin on his face almost the size of the pods revolving slowly above and to his right.)
We had different trajectories, Numenius and I. We mostly sketched independently. And, at night, we’d look at each other’s books and get peeks into each other’s days and glimpse alternate universes and our courtship from years ago, a slowly unfolding narrative conducted at a slight remove of time and a considerable remove of space…
Try it, I urged a Canadian tourist whose brother-in-law had invited me over to their table across from the Museum of Garden History, having caught a glimpse of the fish-lampost I’d just rendered quickly in pen and ink. Your life will be changed.
She did, right away. She drew a sketch of me. It was rudimentary and she was embarrassed but I urged her on, because this is important.
I really do believe that.
[Postscript: Doc Rock’s comment reminds me that I should add a link to Danny Gregory’s site and urge readers who’d like to find out more about this kind of thing to see his books, Everyday Matters and Creative License. I certainly did end up telling quite a few people about Danny’s books while I was away.]
6 September 06
City Mouse-Country Mouse-City Mouse
I think our plan to recuperate from the rigors of a Madrid wedding by heading to our friends’ 150 year old farmhouse in rural Småland, Sweden, turned out to be wise. At least I’ve had a chance to recover from this cold probably picked up at Gatwick last week (where every variant of the common cold in the known universe passes through) and have had lots of therapeutic sketching sessions in garden, yard, and forest. Today we went on a little outing to Eksjö, famous because a large section of town still survives as all-timber wooden construction. Tomorrow we’ll be ensconsed deep in central London—are we ready for the change of pace?
4 September 06
There, and Here
There was Madrid. Growing fast, unrecognizable, a chaos of consumerism and people coming back from their month at the beach. There was the sun, the fans whipped out the minute any woman over fifty broke a light sweat. There was the metro, now pristine and on time. There was the queue—a queue! in Spain!—at the bus stop.
There was the wedding, chaotic again and multilingual, fans handed out to both men and women and which my goddaughter and I used to scoop up rosepetals. There were the foreigners in Madrid, the ones I grew up around, some still there though creaking now.
There was the new anti-smoking ordinance.
Here is the green. The red barns. The opulence of conifer forests broken by fields with huge granite boulders that would turn a plough into splinters. The wind and the draughts and the need to take your shoes off before going indoors, no matter what.
Here, finally, is some decent tea.
We are filling sketchbooks…
25 August 06
Poor Pluto
At least for the time being, poor Pluto has been demoted from planethood, though not without controversy—there is evidently a large contingent of astronomers that believe that the vote a couple days ago at the International Astronomical Union was “hijacked”. I understand well the classification difficulties the astronomers are getting into, but the demotion is still a bit sad. I’ve never seen Pluto—it’s a 14th-magnitude speck that though well within reach of my 7” telescope, I think I would have to be in a lot better skies than in the soupy air of living at 45 feet elevation in the Sacramento Valley to do so. Planet or not, I’d still like to see that speck someday.
24 August 06
Fall Migration
We’ll be hitting Sweden at a good time. I’m not sure how many birds I’ll be able to identify without my Leica Duovids, which have gone off to be repaired (cracked right eyepice), but I’m taking a small pair of Minoltas that work just fine.
I’m hoping for common choughs outside the Alcázar in Segovia, plus perhaps a black redstart. Maybe long-tailed tits in El Pardo plus green woodpecker and hoopoe. And who knows what on the train to Segovia. The ever-elusive capercaillie will probably not need binoculars, however good or bad.
Travelling with hand-luggage only means severely restricting the number of books that come along, particularly bird books. I picke dup the Pocket Naturalist card of Birds of Britain today. No good for hoopoes or common choughs but some kind of reference for birds we might see on our travels.
17 August 06
City Notebook
I have yet to become a member of the cult of Moleskine, but Pica has been looking into these notebooks as a possibility for a journal. On their site today she noticed an upcoming product of theirs that will be very neat. This is their line of City Notebooks. They describe this as “the guidebook you write yourself.” Each of these notebooks has an overview map and a set of street maps together with many blank pages, tabs, and overlays to allow you to write out your own notes about a city. Their line of European city notebooks will be out in the fall, with the United States ones to follow in Spring of 2007.
13 August 06
Farmers Market Bounty
We don’t go often enough to the Davis Farmers Market, which is on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Yesterday we did though, and returned with maitake mushrooms, white peaches, challah with raisins, yellow tomatoes, cumin gouda cheese, and these very sumptious grapes at left.
9 August 06
Waterproof Rice
I guess it’s a day for the limelight. Not only did a picture of Pica’s boss make page one of the Davis Enterprise (for his little study about effects of the mosquito spraying on other insects), but a story about a UC Davis research project is now highlighted on the front page of the BBC web site. Scientists at UC Davis together with those at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have identified a gene that can allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged for up to two weeks. This is of global importance because it can potentially provide rice crops with protection from catastrophic flooding.
8 August 06
Chasing Dragonflies
Tonight they are spraying mosquitoes in Davis and Woodland to try and halt the spread of West Nile virus. I went out today with some colleagues to try and catch dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders to put in target spraying areas and outside them as a control. It was different than my normal day: running around after insects. They are delicate yet feisty, the dragonflies: one seemed to get a good look at me while I was waving a net around and left….
[Postscript, Wednesday, 9 August, 1:30 pm: All the dragonflies, all the spiders, and all but two of the sulfur butterflies flew off this morning in apparent good health. The butterflies were victims of the City’s exuberant watering system.
It also looks as though about 75% of the resident mosquitoes were killed from trap evidence.
A second spraying is supposed to happen tonight. This time, we’ll be seeing how honeybees fare.]