19 February 26
Urban Rabbit
I am continuing to practice a bit of bird photography by strolling around the neighborhood with my 75-300mm lens. But not all urban wildlife are birds. This is a cottontail rabbit that likes to hide under the shrubbery near the Davis Senior Center. He clearly is finding plenty to eat there.
18 February 26
In Praise of the Encyclopedia
My mother was a great believer in the Encyclopedia Britannica, that multi-tome set that was moved from California to Spain and then back to California again when my parents moved to Bodega Bay in 1989. By then it was of course very out of date: scientific advances alone in the intervening 25 years made much of it basically useless. But she hauled the set with her from California to Maine when she moved there five years after my father died, and it remained in her apartment until her death last September. There was no way anyone would take it (we did try) and my only hope is that it got recycled. I do make a small monthly donation to Wikipedia, which I use almost daily and find to be a great consolation in this era of monetized information transfer.
Encyclopedias — print encyclopedias — are wonderful because they are arbitrarily arranged alphabetically, which means you can find stuff you were interested in looking up next to something you never knew you needed to know, but which is fascinating. I picked up Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets last week and am fascinated by the entries, but more so by the juxtapositions:
Hades, then Hag (originally Holy Woman, cognate of Egyptian heq), then Hair (a four-page entry that includes Isis, Berenice, the Compendium Maleficarum, St. Paul, Homer, Tantric sadhakas, and the old Maundy Thursday command that men shave their heads and beards in Britain so that the day came to be described as “Shear Thursday”).
If we kept books in the bathroom this would be an obvious one, but we don’t, which will probably preserve it for longer from the humidity we’re now getting in the form of a very rainy week.
17 February 26
Delicata Squash
Sketched today before it got chopped up for our weekly soup. I drew it with ink and Neocolor II watercolor crayons.
16 February 26
Sketchcrawl in the Rain
Yesterday was our February Let’s Draw Davis outing, not quite beating the front that is going to deliver a lot of rain (and snow!) to northern California.
While I was sketching the band my friend Pete sketched me. We were under the awning at the Creator Space, so sheltered from the weather.
15 February 26
Enric the Adventurer
Thanks to the vicissitudes of the YouTube algorithm, I have discovered the channel Enric Adventures which has the possibility of entertaining me with Catalan language content for years into the future. This is the channel of a 37-year-old civil engineer named Enric Luzán Pi who as of 30 November 2025 started the grand adventure of walking around the world (La Volta al Món a Peu), beginning in Barcelona and walking west to east. His long distance walks started in 2022 with a circumambulation of Andorra, and continued with traversing the Pyrenees, traversing the Swiss Alps via the Via Alpina Green, and crossing the Caucasus range in Georgia. He is trying to vlog his adventure daily. The channel provides subtitles in Catalan which is good for my language learning input.
Enric is presently on day 77 of his adventure and is now in the middle of Croatia. I only started watching him five days ago beginning at his Day 1 departure point at the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona, so I have catching up to do. His daily videos are about 15 minutes each so if I watch two a day I should converge on following in real time in a month-and-a-half or so. These are a lot of fun to watch because one gets to see the landscape at a slow pace, and I like following his route with OpenStreetMap displayed in a separate window.
Enric has a video on his potential route around the world. Traversing Europe seems easy; going across Asia definitely is not, given geopolitical instability.
14 February 26
Blurred Borders
I’ve been watching the Olympics sporadically on Spanish television with the help of a VPN. What has become clear is that there is an awful lot of nationality-switching. A Norwegian snowboarder couldn’t compete because his Finnish nationality hadn’t cleared yet. Of the four Spanish ice-dancers to reach the final, none was actually born in Spain, and none spoke Spanish with a convincing Spanish accent.
I’m all for this — nation-states are an imperial fiction, after all — but it does seem like events like the Olympic Games are predicated on perpetuating the fiction, with flags, processions, national anthems, and what not. Scooching yourself two countries over in order to have a better chance at a podium place does smack of cheating, however.
13 February 26
Douglass Day
Thanks to running across a post on BlueSky this afternoon, I ended up doing a bit of crowdsourced history this afternoon. When Frederick Douglass passed away in 1895, an activist named Mary Church Terrell led a effort to create a holiday celebrating Douglass’s birthday every February 14th. This holiday eventually grew into Black History Month. Starting in 2017, Douglass Day was revived as a way to bring participation into the Colored Conventions Project, a collaborative effort to surface the 19th century history of Black political organizing conventions.
One of the ways this effort is participatory is by running transcribe-a-thons of documents from the Colored Conventions during Douglass Day. This years’ effort was coordinated by the UC Santa Barbara Department of English and the UCSB Library. They are running this effort through Zooniverse, which is a platform famous for hosting crowdsourced research projects. As of this writing they’ve had 964 volunteers for the 2026 effort. I signed up on Zooniverse and transcribed five documents this afternoon. I’ll be doing more over the rest of this month.
12 February 26
International Letter-Writing Month: A Zine
I’m kind of keeping up with a letter, or at least a card, every day in February. The recipient is almost random. This one’s for Richard, who has the sense of humor to appreciate it.
Zines are hard to photograph in their entirety…
11 February 26
Unsettling Memoryscapes
I have just finished taking notes on a couple of books I recently read to understand more of the context of my ancestral entanglements with Native Americans of the northeast. The books are Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779 , by A. Lynn Smith (2023) and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast by Christine DeLucia (2018). Both books examine place, memory, and commemoration following two distinct violent events, namely the scorched-earth campaign in 1779 ordered by Washington against the Haudenosaunee peoples of Western New York, and the hugely destructive King Philip’s War in 1675 in New England. Memory Wars focuses on the monuments that were placed throughout Pennsylvania and New York starting in the late 19th century to commemorate the Sullivan Expedition. Memory Lands considers local history and memory of several sites of trauma from the war, namely Deer Island in Boston Harbor, the Great Swamp in Rhode Island, the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, and Bermuda. The two books treat place and memory from the perspectives of both the white settlers and Native Americans.
A couple thoughts from reading these books. Memoryscapes operate in parallel and different people in different communities will bring different meanings to a place and its history. And there is always a history behind monuments and markers. Who were the people who placed them? What were their values, and what sort of power was behind them?
(The photo shows a marker from the Native American Contemplative Garden in the UC Davis Arboretum.)
10 February 26
Explaining a Cascading Metabolic Failure
Working on a drawing for a piece I’m writing… the trick is to be as clear as possible without being wordy. Not quite there…