16 November 06
Cloud Appreciation
I recently read The Cloudspotter’s Guide, by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who is the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society. The book is a humble exhortation to look up every now and then.
The cloud phenomenon of this month for the Society is anti-crepuscular rays. If crepuscular rays are described as “God’s fingers”, perhaps these are Satan’s shadows. They are much rarer, and I don’t recall ever seeing them.
John Ruskin is an honorary member of the Society, having once written —
It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her…The sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not “too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,” it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.
14 November 06
Don't Waste That Water
When we lived in Santa Barbara, we had the opportunity to rent a cabin in the mountains for a year while Art and Lynn and their daughter Maya travelled in Central America. There were forty fruit trees and numerous other plants and we had strict instructions on how to care for them. (It was a 26-page lease, which was a little excessive for rainbow children, we thought, but we let it go. The year turned into two and a half. It was magical. Even through the rodents. I never expect to be able to share living quarters with a canyon wren again, for instance.)
Water in arid climates is a precious commodity and plants need water; some need lots of water. Art figured he’d let no drop of water get wasted, and reworked the rudimentary plumbing of their cabin so that all water except from the toilet got used at least twice.
There was a shower outside, solar-heated, and it watered the peach tree. The kitchen sink drained onto the kumquat tree. The outflow from the washing machine drained wherever I put the hose that day; sometimes it was avocados, sometimes the chayote tangle, sometimes the passionfruit or papaya. Santa Barbara is just at the northern tip of “subtropical” and some of these plants didn’t thrive, but the chayote wasn’t one of them. We ate chayote in soup the entire time.
Art has just finished revising his graywater book. He sold the manufacturing part of his business (biocompatible soaps) a long time ago and now concentrates on designing for biocompatible living — graywater is a tiny part of that whole endeavor.
It’s an important part, nonetheless: see the new, improved, revised edition of Create an Oasis with Graywater.
11 November 06
Astronomy Break
Usually there is not much reason to take a break in the middle of the workday for an astronomical observation. It is, after all, daytime. This past Wednesday was different because in the afternoon there was a transit of Mercury, which is when the innermost planet crosses the disk of the sun. This is a fairly rare event, only occurring 13 or 14 times a century. The next one is on 9 May 2016.
The weather cooperated for us in Davis, and despite the unsettled conditions this week, it was sunny throughout the event. Elsewhere in North America, observers weren’t so fortunate. After lunch, I went to the roof of the physics building where the UC Davis Astronomy Club had set up a telescope with a solar filter. Thanks to them, I saw the speck of a planet, sunspot-sized but perfectly round, against the face of the sun.
In 6 more years (5 June 2012) is a transit of Venus. This is a much rarer event, not to be missed — the next one occurs in 2117.
10 November 06
Soot on the Ceiling
Thank you, everyone, for leaving such wonderful suggestions about what to do with my elongated eggplants.
Today is Veterans’ Day, a new holiday for the State of California, and consequently for those of us who work for the University of California. I decided to tackle the alarmingly aging aubergines.
In the oven. I cut them up, marinated them in olive oil and garlic. Then popped them in the oven at 350. I didn’t have to decide right away what to do with them: I’d just get them cooked and worry about it later.
An odd smell emerged from the oven, but that’s to be expected. We never turn it on in summer. This is the first time the oven’s actually been lit since, oh, maybe April, and then it was just the broiler. Probably.
Went outside to walk the cats.
Came back in. The cobwebs on the ceiling were black. There was black on the stovetop. The cats’ feet were suddenly black. It smelled like walking carcinoma.
I turned off the oven.
About twenty cremated hazelnut corpses lined the broiler tray: they looked like the mummies in Pompeii.
The eggplants are now officially inedible, and I spent a second bout of cleaning the stove, mopping the floor, and washing all the rugs.
Phooey, as they say.
9 November 06
Minority Party
As in “the Republicans are the minority party.” What a sweet sound that has. We had champagne last night, and apple-cranberry sparkly this evening, to celebrate. And Charlie joined in the celebration by breaking into an unopened bag of cat food and having a bit of a feast.
Here in California, two victories were especially significant and gratifying. First, Congressman Richard Pombo, who was in my mind the most vile member of Congress from the environmental point of view — having taken it on as his mission to eviscerate the most important environmental laws of the last half-century — was defeated in an upset by Democrat Jerry McNerney. McNerney’s victory was basically a grass-roots effort, for which we thank a large number of Bay Area activists who travelled over the hills to canvass for him.
The second was the defeat of California’s Proposition 90, which was something of a libertarian stealth bomb that received relatively little attention. It was marketed as a measure to limit the eminent domain rights of government, but it contained provisions that would have effectively made it impossible to do any land use planning in California. The measure didn’t lose by that much (47% to 53%), and California definitely dodged a bullet.
Let us hope this week’s victories really are the turning of the tide.
8 November 06
This Pen is No More
As I’ve said on these pages before, I have many fountain pens; each one is a favorite in its own right. A gunbarrel gray Mont Blanc I bought in Cambridge, Mass, in or around 1993 died today, the victim of negligence as it dropped out of my hand.
I’ve dropped this pen before, always lucky it didn’t fall straight onto the nib. It has a very loose cap, and attempts to fix it have only made it worse. But today, I can only blame my clumsiness.
Oh the agony.
This pen’s qualities: wrote like butter. Nib fine but not scratchy. I had just written about 550 words of my novel with it. It seemed to be liking the voice of Willie, one of the twin brothers in love with my heroine languishing in a Confederate prison in Richmond.
I didn’t take the pen anywhere because of the loose cap, so it became my stay-on-the-counter pen, the one I wrote with in my journal over the years. It paired perfectly with Clairefontaine. We made a morning triad.
In case you’ve been asleep all day, the Democrats took control of the House and, now, the Senate. On a day when I might have been in mourning for a tool I’ve used a great deal over the last fifteen years, a pen so lovely it has felt like an extension of my hand, I’ve felt little but euphoria.
It is a bittersweet day, though, at the end. RIP, dear friend.
7 November 06
Fremont A's?
The Oakland A’s seem eager to move about 20 miles to Fremont, of all places. They are expected to announce next week their intention to acquire the rights to a 143 acre tract currently leased by Cisco Systems.
The A’s would rather move to downtown San Jose, but this is currently politically infeasible, and as columnist Ray Ratto explains, moving to Fremont is a potentially horrific mistake, a third-best alternative chosen simply because A’s managing partner Lew Wolff is in a hurry to be somewhere else. The Oakland Network Associates McAffee Coliseum despite its great many faults as least has the virtue of being on the BART line; the proposed new site would be six miles from the southernmost BART station, off the worst freeway with the most godawful traffic in Northern California, I-880. There are a lot of peeved A’s fans in this thread here.
6 November 06
Eggplants-ho
In between writing a novel, entertaining a Paulist priest, taking the cat to the vet, and getting my new garden in, as well as making sure Numenius is doing his wound care fine on his own (yes, I’m happy to report), I’ve pulled out the summer garden. There are way more eggplants than I thought, lurking about their plants like elongated easter eggs.
I’ve frozen basil, chard, peppers, and chiles. But I hesitate to do the same to these eggplants. Anyone have any idea what I might do with them? There are about 10…
5 November 06
Saint John's Bible Revisited
Our friend Father Ed from our days living in Santa Barbara is visiting here overnight — he flew out from his home now in New York to perform a wedding up in Placerville. After sharing vacation sketches and photos (ours of New York and Europe; his of Alaska and the Boundary Waters) we somehow started talking about the Saint John’s Bible, the amazing calligraphic creation that I was fortunate enough to see in exhibition last summer. So we watched the DVD I got last year about scribe Donald Jackson and the creation of this hand-illuminated bible. Looking at the project’s website, I can’t tell how close the project is to completion, but happily for Father Ed, there is an exhibition of folios of pages from the Prophets volume currently showing in New York. For anybody who is in the area, it is well worth going to — the exhibition runs through November 27.
4 November 06
Not So Fast...
Coming home last night from Sacramento, via the drugstore to order some antibiotics (Numenius had a minor procedure done), we got stuck waiting for the train. This is a normal occurrence for us: pretty much anywhere and home is divided by the train tracks on a very busy line, so we have to stop maybe 10% of the crossings.
This train, though, was a very long freight which slowed to stop right at the crossing. One did this the other day for 40 mintues. I turned around and went back to get the antibiotics and some supper, it now being nearly 7:30.
When we got back in one of the cats had thrown up a frothy mixture all over the house. Diego continued to do this until it was just dry heaving at 2:00 am. Every hour I contemplated taking him to the animal hospital; every hour he seemed to get better.
I finally got some sleep, so did Numenius, so did Diego. But not so many words have been written this morning, and I have some novel catchup to do today… am thinking of going to the library.