13 October 05
Office Harvest
It’s a fine fall day when one arrives at work to see bins of purple grapes outside, the laden vines being scooped into the 13-foot tall contraption that separates the stalks from the grapes!
Yes, I share a building with viticulture folks.
9 October 05
Hug Your Local Archivist
This is California Archives Week, an occasion perhaps not on most people’s calendars, but in celebration the California State Archives had an open house today in Sacramento. We went to this event, which featured displays from several of the archives in the vicinity (such as Sacramento State University and UC Davis), and then a behind-the-scenes tour through the state archives. My inner librarian comes out at such moments. Archivists are a bit different than run-of-the-mill librarians. For one thing, they think in terms of cubic feet—as in they just acquired 3500 cubic feet of papers from former governor Pete Wilson, but they’re prohibited from looking at them for another 50 years.
For records concerning juveniles the time period is 75 years. The archivist who lead our tour had on display a volume open to documents concerning a lad who ran away from home in 1923. He fled San Francisco bound for Los Angeles, and before being picked up got as far as San Jose entirely on roller skates!
4 October 05
Viral Notes
It is Pandemic Flu Awareness Week, so now is a good time to look at the Flu Wiki.
Meanwhile, there has been a mysterious viral outbreak at a nursing home in Toronto that has killed 10 residents and hospitalized 40. The virus is not SARS, normal influenza, or avian flu.
1 October 05
A New Department for UC Davis?
We can always dream.
This is in fact an art project by a student here. The sign moves about campus in very anarchist fashion, being tracked currently on the Davis Wiki. It looks in every way like the signs you see ubiquitously on campus (UCD stands, of course, for Under Construction Daily).
Goldman Dance Studio? Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial Learning Center? Kropotkin Cafe? Count me in.
25 September 05
Place Bloggers Meet in Bodega Bay
Today we met up with Tim Lindgren of the Where Project. Tim was over from Boston for a wedding, and we had some work to do on my mother’s computer, so we met up for brunch this morning at the Seaweed Cafe.
Tim always asks interesting questions about blogging place, and it seems that people often ask interesting questions about place themselves when they are somehow in transition. We came up with quite a few blogs between us where this is the case. Being on the edge is what ecotone means, and it’s a challenge to find the edge when you’re feeling settled, of finding the extraordinary (or at least blogworthy) in the everyday. I think one way I’m able to do this is through sketching. (I didn’t do any sketching this morning but we did talk about it.)
Speaking of Ecotone, Tim is heroically moving the spam-beleaguered wiki to a Drupal interface. There should be a skeletal prototype available soon. Please indicate in comments here if you’d like to be involved in testing the new format—we’d love help here! (From highly advanced users to novices, people who have never even left a comment before.)
23 September 05
Alfalfa It Is
They harvested the wheat field outside our house at the beginning of July, and since then they have gone over the barren field many times with the plow. Most recently they plowed it into 15-meter wide rows separated by dirt berms, and then a day or two later flood irrigated the rows. This evening our landlord told me there’d be alfalfa next year, which is what I had figured.
Alfalfa seems like a pretty easy crop to grow. The field right to the south of us has been planted in alfalfa all year. The procedure there is to mow the field and bale the hay, which takes a day, then irrigate the fields, and then several weeks later it has grown back and you have another crop. I’m sure the enterprise uses more than its fair share of water, though.
An alfalfa field in bloom smells very nice, as does the mown hay. The crop supports lots of butterflies: both the orange sulfurs (which are native and a big pest of the crop) and the painted ladies.
21 September 05
Rita Moves West
At the rate this season is progressing, we are going to run out of hurricane names before it is over. After Katrina, I’ve paid a good bit more attention to Atlantic storms, being the latent weather hound that I am. After passing just south of the Florida Keys, Hurricane Rita is tracking westward, is at Category 3 now and soon to strengthen to Category 4, and is expected to make landfall somewhere on the coast of Texas by the end of this week.
California isn’t a great place for exciting weather. We get heavy winter rainstorms, Santa Ana winds, and that’s about it, except for the minor tornado. Here is a list of California’s top 10 weather disasters.
15 September 05
Fanciful Travels
If you are looking for an unusual vacation, you might wish to visit the nation of Breda in the South Pacific, or perhaps the island-continent of Bergonia in the mid-Atlantic, the latter noted for its stable anarcho-syndicalist socialist democracy, a subtropical to temperate climate, and three species of endemic wild cats.
7 September 05
Evening Fascinations
Screen-door dragonfly
Wings beating like shuffling cards
The cats paw and leap.
27 August 05
Mt. Mondavi
It is one of the truths of the universe that if you dig a pit, the dirt has to go somewhere. This is the construction site of the forthcoming Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Studies, just across the way from the Mondavi Center concert hall. It is now the tallest hill in Davis. I expect to see some renegade mountain bikers cruising up and down it any day now.
This institute will be the new home for the Department of Viticulture and Enology. The only claim to fame of Wickson Hall, the building where I work, is that it houses said department. So when they leave to occupy their new digs, I don’t suppose there’s any chance at all I’ll finally get to move to an office with a window?