16 November 05
A Different Boston
I spent Sunday in Boston with my sister. She is making a career switch from pediatric occupational therapist, a wonderful one who is quite positive she’s never ever going to write one more report about a child, to an interior designer. She’s taking an online course from KLC in London. I saw the course materials and was quite impressed: it looks like fun, too. It seems in the US the options were either 4-year degree or “interior decorator,” neither of which quite matched her means or aptitude, so she’s a British student. Again. Brava, say I.
Since one of her ongoing assignments is to visit houses from earlier eras, sketch them, and compare period decoration, we visited the Paul Revere House in the North End (late Tudor, sparse but not spartan furnishings); the Pierce house next door (early Georgian, fascinating black line running from the fireplace to border sections of the room), and the Otis house just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill, plush Federal.
I lived in Boston for eight years and never went in any of these places. It was interesting to return and see them through this new lens, sketching fireplaces and chairs and wondering how they managed to keep warm through all those freezing winters.
Mostly it was such a treat to spend a WHOLE DAY with my sister, just the two of us. This happens so rarely nowadays. I always return to Davis after having seen her thinking about ways to reinvent ourselves so we could move to some hilltop ramshackle farmstead in the frozen north…
11 November 05
Cali Fuschia
Pica is away in Maine visiting her sister this long weekend. I did a few sketches in the Arboretum today after going to hear a morning talk on campus despite the holiday by Bruce Babbitt. The California fuschias (Epilobum canum) were very much in bloom.
6 November 05
Winter Begins
It looks like the first big rain of the season is coming tomorrow! Here is a view of the sky this afternoon looking south over Putah Creek.
5 November 05
Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style
We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.
The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.
Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)
She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…
Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.
There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.
The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).
Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.
4 November 05
Pepperoni Ballots
The Davis Enterprise isn’t hurting for advertising these days. Next Tuesday in a local election the town of Davis will decide whether to allow a 1,864-unit housing development called Covell Village on the north side of town to go forward or not. Voices are running high, to say the least. Today’s headlines read “Tactics assailed: Covell Village criticized for ‘smear’ campaign”. The article goes on to describe events in this past week of early voting:
In the past week, Yes on X [the Covell Village project] was stopped from passing out free pizza coupons on the UC Davis Quad to students who gave proof they had voted; a Yes on X campaigner was asked to remove himself from working at the campus polling station; and a complaint was filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission alleging that Yes on X is underreporting its campaign expenditures.
Not that the No on X folks are exactly innocent. There are a couple of entries in today’s two-page spread of letters to the editor from people who were either for Measure X or undecided on the project who were shocked and dismayed to see their names used in an anti-Measure X advertisement.
Opinions on the project range from it being sensible New Urbanist development to something that will cause horrible traffic problems and will bankrupt the city. Personally, I don’t believe that the housing mix will be very affordable, despite proponents’ claims to the contrary.
Not that we get to vote on the matter, living on the other side of the county border. At least this means we can courteously avoid engaging with those who will accost us tomorrow for votes at the Farmers’ Market.
1 November 05
Sharp-tailed Surprise
I got up this morning and did my usual rounds of blogs, email, work email, news, etc.
My work email is where I get local bird reports. Mostly these are about the arrival or departure of our regular birds.
Not today. A sharp-tailed sandpiper was reported late yesterday afternoon at the Yolo Bypass. This is an Asian species, well off-course. They are known in birding circles as one-day wonders; they usually spend a day somewhere and then move on. It’s not wise to dally if one’s been reported in your backyard…
I duly headed over there at around 7:15, had seen the bird by 7:40. I told the folks who were there I’d report it to the list as having been refound by Michael Perrone.
Tonight, I get home from Hebrew class, and find there is a SECOND sharp-tailed sandpiper at this spot.
29 October 05
Valles Caldera
During my conference in Albuquerque, we went on a field trip to the Jemez Mountains and the Valles Caldera National Preserve. This is the best preserved location of a caldera complex volcano in the world, about 30 miles in diameter. This is a view of one of the volcanic domes in the caldera, Cerro La Jara, which is visible from NM Highway 4.
28 October 05
Rain
I hesitate to celebrate the arrival of rain when it’s such a problem for others, but, well, the rain’s arrived.
The smell of damp earth. Gone are those hot dusty days when you could hardly breathe. The grass alfalfa field has a few rogue sprouts of wheat that have gone bananas.
I got Numenius from the airport this evening. He has many sketches from the Jemez mountains, a place where there’s also very low rainfall.
It feels like time to snuggle and give thanks for the rain.
20 October 05
Tagging the Bay Area
The website Urbanitic provides a setting to tag in a manner similar to del.icio.us your favorite places in the Bay Area and comment on other peoples’ contributions. Tags range from burritos to gentrification. And this being the last half of 2005, there is of course a Google Maps interface to the site.
18 October 05
Urban Spheres of Influence
The CommonCity Map Project is an interesting endeavor to map the cultural boundaries of the United States. There’s a survey on the site which asks what cities both in your local area and in the greater region, you most identify with. The project then uses these survey results to make a map of the boundaries of influences between the major cities of the United States.
A variation of this is to map the boundaries for fans of sports teams, such as for Major League Baseball.