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.
5 March 07
Plans for a Yakkety-Yak?
Temple Grandin’s talk a couple of weeks ago referred to people like me as Yakkety-yaks: we can’t stop talking. Now it seems I have a new way to do just that.
It’s not like I needed another hobby, folks. After some months of sparse activity, our warm weather has brought all kinds of action into the garden, and I will need to get working hard to transition from winter to summer with a minor spring garden in between, quite apart from planting ceanothus while blocking weeds in the space under the plum and nectarine trees. I’ve been working on more quince drawings. Let’s not even get started on what I need to be doing at work…
And yet, there’s something so appealing about the idea of volunteering a skill not held by many for the cause of supporting a long bike ride or endurance horse race: not to mention being of service in an emergency. Ham radio is not something I ever dreamed of getting into. It’s very male, for one thing (I was the only woman at my class on Saturday and at the exam, which more than doubled the number of people in the room). But I can yak it up with the best of them, and I just might…
4 March 07
Day Of Accomplishments
Yesterday we were busy — I helped break a world record and Pica passed her ham radio licensing exam! The world record was for the longest bicycle parade. The previous record was 614 bikes; we ended up with 913 bikes in the parade. The parade was organized by the UC Davis undergrads on the occasion of the final home basketball game of the season. It started off at the track and old football stadium on the east edge campus and wended its way a couple of miles through campus to end up at the basketball pavilion. It took us about a half-hour to get us out of the track leaving single file, and we moseyed along at maybe 7 miles per hour. The mayor of Davis officiated at both the start and finish, and there were cheerleaders en route.
Meanwhile, Pica was taking a one-day ham radio class sponsored by the Yolo Amateur Radio Society with a licensing test at the very end of the day. The class consisted of a grueling series of videos, and the exam was 35 questions multiple-choice. She passed, and in a week or so will receive her official call sign from the FCC!
3 March 07
Ekphrasis
I’ll be co-editing qarrtsiluni with Lori Witzel of Chatoyance for the next couple of months.
The full description of the theme and how to submit is here, but here’s a short version:
This qarrtsiluni theme pairs submissions in poetry, or poetic prose, with a form of visual art. Ideally they need not be by the same person: this is a collaborative experiment. Non-bloggers are particularly encouraged to participate. Find a partner whose work you admire and have at it!
The visual art contributions will be posted in our gallery awaiting writers – check back often over the next two weeks, as we will have more to share.
All work, visual and otherwise, will be reviewed and juried by the editors before publishing. Poems should be no longer than 30 lines; prose pieces should be no longer than 500 words. Image files should be a maximum of 500 pixels in width.
Please take a look, and consider partnering with someone (they can be dead: if you’d like to write a poem about or inspired by Las Meninas, please feel free), or if you’d like to send in a photo or a piece of art you think might lend itself to poetry, send them in!
2 March 07
Prosthetics For Bicycles
One of the local bike shops we frequent was running a special on tuneups, so we both took our commute bikes in a couple weeks ago for the work. No problem, but I quickly learned that my bike needed a whole lot of parts to be replaced, and the whole enterprise cost me about 5 times as much as I was expecting.
This of course begs the question — at what point when you replace part after part, do you have a different bicycle than when you started? I think the answer is when you swap out the frame.
28 February 07
Farewell to Ernie
Ernie’s gone. We had wonderful times taking care of him while Barbara was away. I’ve never heard such a loud purr, or seen an animal like such a vigorous brushing. We’ll miss him.
Phil Gross kindly compiled the following tributes:
Ernie was a hard hard hard working cat. He worked real hard at that, and it’s a hard job. We won’t forget what his loss means to the country.
— George Bush
The wanker was a complete fun loving goofball. He did cat very very well.
— Mick Jagger
I would have given him the locker next to me… he meant that much.
— Barry Bonds/Barry Zito
For people on E street, it won’t be the same now that he is gone. I think people will notice his passing more than they noticed my leaving. That goes doubly for the rat population… you know who I’m talking about.
— Suzy Boyd
Margaret Thatcher… a focking focker. Ronald Reagan, a total focker. George Bush, a silly little focker. Ernie Anderson, a very nice cat.
— Bob Geldoff
Ernie was a beautiful vacillating mixture of indoor/ outdoor cat. When he was indoors, he’d scratch at the door to go out… soon as you let him out he was scratching at the door to get in. We have all felt that way at times… but no one was more honest in expressing that feeling publicly… and loudly. Kudos
— Robert Bly
Barb, you picked such a serious professorial picture of Ernie, I fear some will be misled who didn’t know him well.
— Phil Gross
Always the most fun person to visit at that address.
— E Street neighbors
27 February 07
Methuselah the Date Sapling
Two years ago Dr. Elaine Soloway germinated a 2000-year date seed found at Masada in Israel. This was the oldest seed ever to germinate. The seedling survived, and now Dr. Soloway is planning to transplant it. If the sapling, named Methuselah, continues to flourish and is female, in several years time we may find what the dates of Judea tasted like — according to Pliny the Elder they were renowned for their succulence and sweetness.
26 February 07
Davis: Whither Cycling?
We just got back from a presentation and panel discussion on the history of Davis as Cycling Capital of America, and of the fact that its status as such is in doubt — unless we do something about it.
There are over 95 miles of bikeways in this town of 65,000. That’s impressive. Yet fewer people are choosing to ride their bikes into town to shop; fewer students ride their bikes to school. A well-subsidized bus system ferries students into campus and back out, at the cost of about $350 per student; considerably less would be needed to increase the quality of bike facilities and routes per person.
The event has made me determined to make more grocery runs by bike. I’ve become a fair-weather cyclist, a far cry from my Boston snow bike-commutes. We’ll be watching what this new grouping comes up with in terms of solutions and suggestions. It’s easy, and it really makes a difference…