9 February 26
A Cooperative Dove
While Pica was sketching yesterday at the Arboretum, I went on a little photo stroll, having packed both my macro lens and my long telephoto lens (an Olympus 75-300mm for micro four-thirds cameras). The macro lens is meant for Arboretum outings, with flowering shrubs everywhere, but I have always found the 75-300mm lens difficult to use, especially when photographing birds. The reach is there, but it is challenging to get sharp pictures.
I’ve resolved to practice more with this lens, and a mourning dove hanging around our backyard this afternoon gave me an opportunity. We often see one or two mourning doves in the backyard, not doing much other than pecking occasionally at the ground. I took a few photos, and was happy with the focus on several of them, including this one. I think the key is to have a fast shutter speed and small aperture — I settled on 1/800th of a second at f/8, with auto ISO. But even at f/8, there is not much depth of field to play with at this magnification, so one really has to nail the focus point (the eye and face is preferred).
8 February 26
Sketch Outing to Arboretum
We went to the Arboretum today. It was packed with people getting a quick walk in before the Superbowl, which we didn’t watch. I heard that the Seahawks have always been to the Superbowl the year a new pope is installed, which who knows, but here at least they were successful.
7 February 26
Dutton Hall
For my urban sketch today I walked over to campus this afternoon and settled in to sketch a tree and the north side of Dutton Hall. I colored the ink sketch at home with Neocolor II aquarelle crayons.
6 February 26
Melt the ICE hats: Update
I wrote in January about the Melt the ICE hats. I’ve now completed two and have cast on a third. The first two are headed today to relatives in cold climes. The past few days have been very mild here and California is heading out of wooly hat weather. No matter: someone’s written a pattern for a wooly hat badge which can be worn whenever, and that takes only a fraction of the time to knit.
The project started by the Needle and Skein yarn store in Minnesota has now raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help organizations defending those targeted by ICE…
5 February 26
A New Tree Arrives
Some twenty months ago, the apricot tree in the southeast corner of our garden collapsed and had to be taken out completely. This left a vacant and unshaded spot in the garden, which was somewhat ameliorated by the placement of a redbud tree by the garden fence. But today a new sapling arrived which was planted in a more central location in the yard. This is a pineapple guava tree and it is pretty tall already. I sketched it with ink and watercolor pencil.
4 February 26
Mail Carrier Appreciation Day
I’ve been making a lot of zines lately, a folded piece of paper that is cut in the central portion to allow the “pages” to wrap into an eight-page booklet. Postcrossing is very good about reminding us about events that have to do with mail (for instance, February is International Letter Writing Month, which I’m following more or less), and I saw a notice about February 4th being Mail Carrier Appreciation Day. All these calendared days seem a bit arbitrary but never mind.
I quickly folded a zine up and made a little narrative about a letter on a journey, flying through the air, and thanking our new mail guy. (Mail carriers are under a tremendous amount of stress at the moment, which is easy to spot but they always seem to have a smile and a kind word, at least here.) This note was inserted into our mailbox today.
3 February 26
Quince With Bee
I snapped this on my early afternoon walk today. The quinces in our neighborhood are flowering and one bush six blocks from here had many honeybees active on it.
2 February 26
Hourly Comics
There is an annual challenge on February 1 to draw a comic for each hour you’re awake. I thought I’d give it a try. It’s hard work, and I didn’t exactly do the things depicted here exactly at the time depicted, but it does give a fairly good glimpse of my/our Sunday.
1 February 26
Central Park Stroll
For today’s urban sketch, I walked a few blocks down to Central Park in Davis and settled down in front of this interesting tree. This was sketched with ink and Neocolor II aquarelle crayons.
31 January 26
Hungering After Nobels
In the 1980s I worked as the secretary of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Though the Centre itself never had more than four students at a time for its M.Phil programme while I was there, it was a lively focus for leftist politics (though my boss, David Brading, a historian of Mexico and devout Catholic, never gave much credence to any of it). The Sandinistas had finally overthrown Somoza in Nicaragua, and it was the early days of the revolution, before the levels of corruption and power grabs had tainted it. I was immersed in socialism and joined my academic and administrative colleagues in marches against Thatcher during the Miners Strike. It was when I first became interested in Liberation Theology.
The Centre had an endowed Chair funded by Venezuelan oil money, the Simón Bolívar professorship, which hosted Latin American men of letters (they were all men up until 2008). While I was there, the professor was Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist.
Fuentes was born in Panama to Mexican diplomats and lived in various different Latin American cities and in Washington, DC, where he was educated (his English was much better than that of most other holders of this Chair). He was handsome and debonair. My colleague Ana was his dedicated secretary. He had an office at the Centre which he almost never used, though he did hide a letter from his Venezuelan mistress in there once, a fact we discovered when Fuentes’ wife asked to be allowed into the office (how could Ana refuse?). We giggled about the imagined sparks at the dinner table that night.
Fuentes would come into the office I shared with Ana and dictate letters (he never learned to type and wrote all his novels longhand). Many of these letters were addressed to members of the Nobel literature committee, enclosing copies of translations. One of his predecessors as SB Chair was Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, who was in 2010 awarded this pinnacle, and who was obviously a source of great jealousy to Carlitos.
Fuentes died in 2012. All his courting of Nobel committee members was for naught. Remind you of anyone?