31 May 07
Bear at Bandelier
I’ve been immersed in the Santa Fe Science Writers workshop this week. It’s intense and I’ve learned a lot.
This afternoon we went to Bandelier National Monument, our first extramural excursion. Poking around the petroglyphs was a black bear cub. His mother was nowhere to be seen but later on we learned from the rangers that he’s alone — and though he’s thin he’s managing to find food, of sorts.
I made some sketches I’ll post when I get home…
30 May 07
Google May Be Spying On Your Cat
Their new street-level mapping view is clearly a threat to felinity, as this poor tabby discovered.
(From Boing Boing.)
27 May 07
Red Sox Nation: Davis
There are lots of Red Sox fans in the Bay Area. This shouldn’t be too surprising: whenever New Englanders decide to escape their winter slush and summer mugginess, a destination of choice is San Francisco or nearby, because of plentiful work (often tech-related) and compatible politics. Whenever the Red Sox are in town to play the A’s, an avalanche of blue caps with red “B’s” on them converges on the Coliseum. We unite with A’s fans and Giants fans (and just about everyone else) in our hatred of the New York Yankees, in much the same way the rest of the world… oh, never mind.
More surprising, perhaps, is the high incidence of Boston fans here in Davis. Yet hardly a day goes by when I don’t see the familiar cap, blue long faded to gray, which gives me an immediate (and never unwelcome) opportunity to say “Go Red Sox” and launch into an immediate enthusiastic exchange of pleasantries with a perfect stranger about how the Yankees are now 12-1/2 games back.
(That’s twelve-and-a-half games back, people. It’s already Memorial Day. If they keep this up they’ll miss the playoffs. For the first time in a very great while. It’s delicious. We Red Sox Nation folks have been known to dance jigs in parking lots over this, gingerly in some cases.)
Yolo County residents have a new reason to cheer the Sox, now: 23-year-old Dustin Pedroia, the star of nearby Woodland High, hit another home run today for Beantown in the ninth inning and is distinguishing himself handily at second base. The guy who delivers the mail at work, a longtime Yankees fan but born and raised in Woodland, is having to reconsider his loyalties…
I’ll be heading to Santa Fe tomorrow for a week-long workshop. I have no idea how easy it will be for me to blog, so I’ll leave you in Numenius’ capable hands (which I have overburdened already with gardening duties) till I get back, unless you hear otherwise.
25 May 07
Here Come The Triffids
Pica’s zucchinis are starting to bear fruit.
23 May 07
Four More Feral Kittens
As Numenius said, we ended up catching four kitttens outside the Wildlife Health Center on Friday evening. They are staying in the office, where they are being socialized, fed, pampered, and getting ready for their new homes.
Feline Lifeline has put out a plea for kitten foster homes — it’s the season. So if you feel like a mega kitten fix for about three weeks or so, please leave a comment, and we’ll put you in touch. Or contact a similar organization in your area. Let’s get these guys out of the ecosystem…
22 May 07
Fire Season
It has come early here, it would seem. In addition to the fire downstream from Lake Berryessa on Saturday that changed the route of the Double Century, today there was at least three grass fires around the Davis area. One was to the west of Pica’s office, somewhere near I-80, which drew a fairly massive response but was quickly contained. Another was to the north of town — I saw the smoke plume being blown south. We are now in a period where we will have several days of strong warm breezes from the north.
21 May 07
States I've Visited
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Oklahoma doesn’t really count but we did drive over the line into the northwest panhandle from Kansas last month and started keeping note of the birds we saw there, so if I technically have a (small) Oklahoma bird list (it contains two species of grackle, burrrowing owl, horned lark, and starling), I’ve been there.
The gaps look strange. Indiana was missed because my mother and I went north in Michigan for the Kirtland’s warbler while we were driving across the country in 1996 and took the ferry to Wisconsin in the pouring rain with a bunch of Mennonites who looked bemused at the karaoke spectacle. Utah? that’s a different kind of trip, and will be undertaken when we’re ready for serious immersion in genealogical records…
Thanks to Steve Rubio for this link.
21 May 07
Davis Double Century 2007
Yesterday we spent the entire day providing radio support for the Davis Double Century, a 200-mile bicycling event. Here is an account. (Photo at left is by Dutch Martinich.)
Prelude: Friday evening proved to be more hectic than planned. In the afternoon, one of Pica’s coworkers spotted some kittens under a trailer building near where Pica works. They proceeded to try to catch them. By the time Pica left work, three of the four were in captivity, with a live trap set out for the fourth. We returned after dinner to find the fourth kitten in the trap. The kittens went off to the house of Pica’s boss for over the weekend, and happily it looks like all four will find homes. But the episode with the kittens delays our packing for the day by a bit, adding to our usual disorganization.
2 AM. Pica notices that the dome light in Nellie, our Honda Element, is on. It would be seriously bad news if the car doesn’t start, and she goes out to check. It’s okay.
4 AM It’s time to get up. Charlie nudges me awake (it’s breakfast time, silly human) ahead of the alarm. We need to head out early because we are the radio support at the first rest stop.
Crisis. We set out for Rest Stop 1 at 5 AM, powering on the mobile transceiver in Nellie. At 5:15 AM, we hear over the radio a report from the ham operators heading up to Rest Stop 2 which is at Monticello Dam on Lake Berryessa. There is a fire in the canyon, and no traffic being allowed through. Our 750 riders on the road suddenly have no place to go. We know the ride director back at start/finish is now in high decision-making mode, and we await instructions. At 5:32 we are approaching Rest Stop 1, and we get the announcement over the air all riders are to halt at that stop. At the moment we arrive the folks at RS 1 know none of this, and we immediately leap into informing them. A few riders have already passed the rest stop, but not many, and the rest stop soon fills up with impatient and chilly cyclists.
The word comes of the alternative plan, reverse the route. This followed by the adopted variant — turn the ride from a loop into an out-and-back ride, heading north up the Capay Valley, ending up in the hills of Lake County, and then returning the same way. There are massive amounts of logistics to sort out to accomplish this shift, and the riders are still instructed to hold.
An hour later the riders are released, and the rest stop soon clears out. Once everyone is out we change our mission and start driving north as a sag support vehicle.
Tail-end Charlie. Since we were at the rest stop until it closed, all the riders are now in front of us, and it is now our lot to keep track of the final rider. This is rider number 181, who seems particularly geographically challenged, and we have to redirect him twice to get him up to the highway headed up the Capay Valley. He would get lost at least one more time over the course of the ride.
Personal Mishap. We drive up the Capay Valley looking for stray riders, and arrive at the now-relocated Rest Stop 2. Very few riders need a sag at this point, but we see one rider who has enough and decides to ride back to Davis. What’s his rider number? I chase after him on foot, shouting. Then running to the rest stop over uneven but flat ground I somehow lose my balance and fall, but wind up in a quite well-executed roll. (When I was a little kid I took some tumbling classes and practiced those sorts of falls. I must have retained the muscle memory.) I am unhurt except for tweaking my side a bit.
Extremely Bad Karma. We continue to sag northward. Over the radio we hear that a tandem is getting a privately-provided sag further up the course by a black Honda. Private sags are absolutely not allowed on this double century because of the potential for confusion and traffic hazards, and when one of our patrol vehicles catches up with them, they are disqualified.
Nevertheless, they continue to ride from rest stop to rest stop, refueling themselves on the way. Pica later in the afternoon glares at them, says “oh, you’re the renegade tandem couple”.
As it turns out that not only are they having private sag support, only one of them has registered for the ride, thus cheating the bike club out of $120, the per-person entry fee. They get their comeuppance at the very end. Pica recognizes them as they try to get their ride dinner at the finish point, fetches the ride director, who promptly chews them out and boots them out of the building.
[Not] In The Air. Our radio support task is greatly facilitated by having an airplane (“Air One”) flying up about 5000’ serving as an airborne repeater. In the deeper canyons of the ride there is no other way to get a decent radio signal to the sag vehicles. Several of the local hams are pilots and take turns flying. We are headed south towards Davis with a couple of sagged passengers, and drive past the county airport, just after when Air One has set down for refuelling. Pica notices a plane landing funny. She doesn’t see this, but in fact this plane goes off the end of the runway. Nobody is hurt, but flight operations at the airport are halted for 45 minutes, and our airborne repeater is stuck on the ground for that time.
Wedding. We find out that there is another bicycle event going on that is sharing part of the course and even a rest stop. This is the Northern California AIDS Challenge, whose 60 riders have raised $120,000. Since our double century has turned into an out-and-back ride, our old friend Rest Stop 1 is also the penultimate Rest Stop 9. On our second trip out this day we stop there and see a mock wedding party going on at Rest Stop 9, with three guys in white wedding dresses behind a nice-looking cake. This is part of the festivities for the AIDS challenge ride. In fact we run into a friend of ours, Joaquin, at the stop who is riding that ride.
Heartfelt Sag. It 5 PM and we are at Rest Stop 7, 65 miles from the finish. We want to start making our way back to Davis — we are tired and have kitties to feed. The thought is that we can sag in riders further along the course as we head “Davisly” (using the term coined by one of the net control operators). We head south, and are in the Cache Creek canyon area when we get a call from net control asking if we can sag a tandem that is on the other side of Rest Stop 7. It is not the direction we want to be going, but okay. There is no other vehicle that can sag a tandem in the vicinity.
Our Honda Element has two nice tricks — the rear seats can fold up against the walls and the gear shift is mounted on the front panel rather than the floor. Amazingly, this allows one to fit a tandem entirely inside if one takes the front wheel off and slides the front of the bike between the front seats, the fork just touching the front of the interior. One can’t carry the tandem’s passengers that way, but another sag can and would take them.
Several miles west of Rest Stop 7 we spot the tandem, with the other sag already there. It’s the little girl. At the beginning of the day at Rest Stop 1 we were endeared to see a dad captaining a tandem with his seven-year old daughter as the stoker. She was delighted to be on the bike.
But she had gotten tired. By that point they had just finished a metric double century — 200 kilometers. The girl was quite chipper though, and still wanted to finish the ride under their own power, so the plan was to take them to Rest Stop 9 and see how they felt then. The photo at top shows us all on the trunk of Nellie.
We reconvene at Rest Stop 9. Still tired, they stop to grab munchies, and we start sagging them the twenty miles left to Davis. At the first turn, the other sag vehicle honks us over. The girl wants to ride the final mile into the finish line. Well, we can arrange that, and once in Davis, I locate a suitable spot for them, and we stop. They reassemble the tandem, and ride off, arriving at the finish line to considerable applause.
Bird list. Pica contributes the following list of birds seen throughout the day:
Canada goose
mallard
wild turkey
California quail
great egret
cattle egret
black crowned night-heron
white-faced ibis
turkey vulture
white-tailed kite
northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Swainson’s hawk
red-tailed hawk
American kestrel
American coot
killdeer
black-necked stilt
American avocet
gull sp.
rock pigeon
mourning dove
Eurasian collared dove
barn owl
great-horned owl
black swift
Anna’s hummingbird
Nuttall’s woodpecker
northern flicker
black phoebe
western scrub-jay
yellow-billed magpie
American crow
common raven
rough-winged swallow
cliff swallow
barn swallow
American robin
northern mockingbird
European starling
western tanager
lazuli bunting
red-winged blackbird
tricolored blackbird
western meadowlark
brewer’s blackbird
Bullock’s oriole
house finch
house sparrow
18 May 07
Invaded by Lagomorphs
My three-sisters garden is chomped to the ground. The corn has no chance: the second it peeks out, the cottontails are on it. They take bites out of the squashes and spit them out, but tell that to the poor squashes. I can’t plant beans till the corn’s four inches high, etc. Oh woe is me.
I sound like Fred. I may start sounding like Mr. Macgregor.
This is my entry for Illustration Friday’s theme, Signs. It’s far more polite than what I originally had in mind: let’s just leave it at that.
17 May 07
Pitcher's Duel
We listened to the Giants game this evening in and about picking up our packets, t-shirts, and gear for assisting at the Double Century this Saturday. The Giants were playing the Houston Astros on the road. On the mound for the Giants was Tim Lincecum making his third major league start; pitching for the Astros was their ace Roy Oswalt. The Giants ended up winning 2-1 in the 12th inning. Lincecum was outstanding; he went 7 innings, had one walk, gave up one unearned run, and struck out 10. Oswalt went 7 innings as well, gave up no runs, walked 2, and struck out 4. The Giants have a decision to make when Russ Ortiz, whom Lincecum is substituting for, comes off the disabled list!