15 March 07
Olive Oil Party-Oh
The new crop of UC Davis Olive Oil has arrived. We popped over yesterday afternoon to taste the three varieties, all blends, of Extra Virgin (Wolfskill, Silo, and Gunrock); bought some at a discounted rate; and ran into all kinds of friends, people involved with ecology and agriculture and horticulture and wine and radio and bikes and design and books.
The line to buy oil was long. I found myself standing next to an East-Coast transplant who was enjoying the weather (it was about 80 degrees) but tapping her foot at how slow the line was moving, then berating herself, jokingly, for doing so. Turns out she’s the new humanities and social sciences librarian at the university library. She had previously worked at Northeastern and at Harvard. She told me Widener has been refurbished considerably since I was last there, with the crucial addition of air conditioning (sort of important if you’re housing books that are hundreds of years old.)
We bought oil. We found we had eaten dinner by the end of it all. And we’re glad that UC Davis has found something to do with the olives that used to provide lubrication for bike paths!
More photos of yesterday’s event can be found here.
14 March 07
Snap Cress Weed
Just south of the vegetable garden there is a patch of these weedy crucifers that we don’t believe were here last year. This morning when we stepped through the patch the seed pods were going snap-snap-snap and tiny seeds were flying everywhere. I keyed the plant out in the Jepson Manual today and think it is hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta. This would be interesting because the Jepson treatment of this introduced annual says it’s known to occur in the Klamath Region but not in points south. Hence this occurrence could be a range extension. The reference I’d really like to check is the new Weeds of California and Other Western States. There are many copies of this in the campus bookstore but it is shrinkwrapped in two volumes and I wasn’t peeking.
13 March 07
Gill's Flawed Masterpiece
Ben Archer writes in Singapore’s designer magazine that Eric Gill got it wrong in redesigning Johnson’s typeface for the London Underground.
Eric Gill is one of my heroes so it’s hard to hear this kind of thing but having tried to work extensively with Gill Sans for two large projects over the past year, even I can’t argue that the bolder weights are unproblematic.
Archer puts forward other, in his opinion better, redesigns of Johnson’s typeface, many of which have faded into oblivion.
Stephen Coles in Typographica provides a couple of others. One I’d be particularly interested in trying out is Bliss, clean and “humanistic” without some of the quirks of Frutiger.
12 March 07
Mushrooms In The Straw
Not to be confused with straw mushrooms. We’ve had a straw bale sitting outside the vegetable garden since last summer, and once it got wet this winter, these mushrooms came up and covered the straw bale. We’ve had a heat spell these past few days, and the fruiting bodies have died back, but if we ever get more rain this year, I think we’ll see the mushrooms again. I have no idea what they might be.
11 March 07
Nearly Four Years
Four years ago this month we were housesitting for a friend in Village Homes. While I worked on removing the huge numbers of weeds that had built up over the rainy season, Numenius put Feathers of Hope together.
Since that time a lot of blogging friends have come and gone. It’s a shifting culture. Many people start out not knowing whether they’ll have enough to say; then it turns out they have plenty; then they think they’ve said all they can and stop.
One of these has, I’m really pleased to find out (better late than never), decided to come back. Rana writes about the natural world better than many. What she finds to say about the natural world at her doorstep is so evocative I can smell the wet earth. I can see the small black cat’s pipe-cleaner tail. I can hear the screaming blue jays.
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Today the first of the rough-winged swallows were back. The only one I haven’t seen in Davis yet this spring is the barn swallow, but they should be back any day. On our bike ride into town we had the show of white-throated swifts diving over and under the freeway, chattering madly. I have dirt under my fingernails. The first assassin bug showed up, oddly enough, on Diego’s coat. The insects have started emerging just in time for the swallows. We have leapt almost into summer, here, and it’s only March…
10 March 07
Semantic Magpies
Spring has come along (high in the 70s F today), and I’m back to surveying our grid square for the Solano County Breeding Bird Atlas project. My goal now is to start confirming breeding in species on the grid square that I’ve already observed there. One of today’s targets was the yellow-billed magpie; heading past a ranch house I observed one flying and disappearing into a nest I think carrying an insect. Does that count as a confirmed instance of breeding? Or is it not quite enough evidence?
Meanwhile, several colleagues of mine working on our semantic web project have gotten interested in ‘semantic eco-blogging’, the idea being to supplement blogged nature observations with data that can be interpreted by machines. Their testbed blog for this is FieldMarking. The file here is an example of the data format we’re testing; it describes the magpie observation above.
9 March 07
Trouble
You know there’s a problem when you get home from work and see this truckload of manure in the driveway that TOWERS over your garden deposited there probably under duress by the guy with the tractor from across the road where the horses are and the first thing that runs through your head is “oh no that’s nowhere near enough.”
8 March 07
Treasure Under The Basement
The 1930s was an era when labor was quite available and many public projects got started that called for a lot of handwork. This held true in the field of natural resource management as well as at large. In California, a forester named Albert E. Wieslander began a U.S. Forest Service project to map the vegetation of California. Many teams of botanists hiked ridgeline to ridgeline, pausing to gaze out over the landscape and mark in colored pencil on 30’ USGS quadrangle maps the vegetation patterns they saw. Only a few of these vegetation maps were ever published, and the set of well over a hundred hand-drawn maps of about 40% of the state lay forgotten.
The set of maps was nearly thrown out on two different occasions, when in the 1980s they were rescued by a professor at UC Berkeley and started to be curated and put to use. They are incredibly valuable from the point of view of historical ecology, giving a view of the vegetation of the state 75 years ago. A number of people have been working on the project of digitizing the Wieslander data, including my officemate Jim Thorne who is leading the effort to create GIS data from scans of the original maps.
The Wieslander map set was complete for the Sierra Nevada mountain range except for the Lake Tahoe basin area, where the hand-drawn maps had gone missing for a decade or more. These maps resurfaced Saturday.
Jim had been in touch with an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley by the name of Paul Zinke, who was one of the botanists employed by Wieslander, and was well in his 80s. Jim hoped that the oral history program at Berkeley would interview him, but sadly he died last year before the interview could take place. Jim then got in contact with Zinke’s son Michael, and after a while arranged with him to browse through some of Zinke’s papers. Last weekend, in a crawl space under the basement floor, they struck paydirt. The missing maps were there.
Above is a photo of the happy discoverers — Michael, Sarah, and Jim left to right.
7 March 07
I Remember the Fog
I remember. I was in a daze, weeks of it. The world seemed to move on by without me. I remember the daze, yet I remember also super-heightened awareness of the world, the air, the color of a flower, the smell of the mist over damp earth. The rainbows I saw everywhere.
Recently several friends have lost relatives or close friends. Two people I know have just lost their father. Ron has just lost her sister.
My head remembers the fog, the daze. My heart tells me to remind them to stay in this place, to live it, not to rush.
Ron, Christina, Susan, Barbara: I love you all. I wish the hurt would go away, but I know it’s best to let it weave its way through your souls. I know it.
6 March 07
Felis quiltensis
Charlie finds a good nook under the down comforter while the sheets are washed.