6 January 07
Full of Joy
... is how my friend who is undergoing surgery on Monday described herself this evening on the phone.
So am I. I was full of joy in my encounter with two Jersey heifers across the road whose manure I was nicking for my compost; full of joy as I ate my veggie tamales at lunchtime; full of joy as I watched the killdeer overhead, scolding scolding as I put mulch onto my broccoli and onions, in preparation for the terrifying freeze we’re expecting this week; full of joy as I heard the white-tailed kite calling this morning.
And full of joy at my expanding list of creative projects to undertake sometime soon. I’m bursting with energy. Watch out, world.
[I am especially full of joy that Barbara is feeling so chipper. Thanks for the great conversation, Brabs.]
5 January 07
Beetles Among Us
Thankfully the stinky beetles that were invading our house this fall have become scarce (though they have been replaced for now in the household insect pest department by Argentine ants). I never did take one into the Bohart Museum of Entomology for positive identification, but my best guess is that they are Nomius pygmaeus, based on appearance and that this species has been described as a stinky occasional household pest.
Happily, would-be California coleopterists have two new resources to call upon. The first is the website of the California Beetle Project at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. This is an online checklist and database describing the more than 7500 species of beetles in California. The second is that UC Press has just published the Field Guide to Beetles of California. I haven’t seen this book yet but judging by the many others in the California Natural History Guide series it should be very good.
4 January 07
Continuing
Many thanks to all who commented on my End post or who emailed or who spoke on the phone. (And thank you for all the good wishes for my friend, which I will pass along.)
I am spending a lot of time thinking about this. It is not a bad time nor certainly a waste of time.
Numenius said something the other day that struck me as odd: he wondered why religious ritual needed to be connected inherently with belief. It would never occur to me not to connect them, but that’s not an answer. Look, he said, it’s a good thing, in itself, to observe Shabbat.
I certainly do crave ritual. It’s just that if it’s not backed up by substance, it feels empty to me. But it doesn’t stop me — the font at St. Francis is huge and central; I sloshed my hand in it on the way out to bless myself. Even with these thoughts of emptiness running through my head. The water was cool and, well, blessing. It always is.
3 January 07
Place Blogging Directory
Lisa Williams of Watertown, Mass. has just launched a directory and aggregation site for place blogging called, appropriately enough, Placeblogger. She has been populating the directory with catalog entries these past several months but ever since the site’s public launch at midnight of this new year visitors have been adding entries at a reasonable clip. I added one for Feathers of Hope this evening.
2 January 07
End
Death has been much on my mind lately. My father died in December seven years ago; James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein just died. The 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq was just announced, surrounded by scores and scores of Iraqi deaths. The ten thousand candles lit on New Year’s Eve in Davis’ Central Park were a stark reminder of it all. So much death.
I attended a healing ceremony following Mass at a Franciscan church in Sacramento yesterday. A friend is about to undergo surgery. It’s a fourth knee reconstruction (the first, over 30 years ago, was occasioned by a motorcycle accident). But this friend is not well, so very not well that 7-8 hours of anesthesia for the surgery are a real concern. For her, naturally, but also for the medical team and particularly her cardiologist. Her femur is now hollow; if they don’t operate, she’ll lose her leg. If they do, it’s a risk whose odds I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with.
But it’s win-win, said brown-robed birkenstocked Father Anthony, cheerfully. If she dies, she will be with God; if she doesn’t, she gets to be with us.
Yes, he really said that. In exactly that way. You have to hand it to these chaps for not bothering to sugar-coat the issues.
It is so long since I swam in circles of that kind of certainty, though, that I hardly remember what it’s like. They wouldn’t really call it certainty; they’d call it faith.
The prayers yesterday were like a dim echo. I knew them all. I said them. I even said “we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come amen.” I said it. To say it marked me as a member of the Tribe of Catholic. To say it was also meaningless and therefore hypocritical.
To those who operate in this realm of certainty, it wasn’t meaningless, my repeating the words. He’s there even if you don’t believe, they’d say. He hears it anyway.
Which sounds like Pascal’s wager, to me. Operate on the assumption it’s all true and what have you got to lose? Like Thomas, though, I’m after a bit more evidence. There’s an awful lot of evidence against, at the moment…
31 December 06
J Street Venture
The Yolo Bypass is an imposing barrier. It’s about 15 miles from our house to Sacramento, but taking the trek over the causeway is not something we do very often, and we don’t know our way around that city very well. But we do have a beat — we head over to Midtown and J Street.
Yesterday it turned wasn’t a very good day to head over there — two of the stores we wanted to go to were closed on account of the holidays. That would Art Ellis, a small family-run art store, and Metro Electronics, something of a rarity, an actual electronics parts store. All was not lost, as there is another art store a couple blocks up, and Pica was able to get her printmaking paper.
After that, we tried the Thai restaurant across the street from Art Ellis, Thai Basil — it was very good. So we have the basis of a good Saturday outing, followed by lunch, and maybe a trip to the Crocker Art Museum near the river. Sundays don’t work though — neither Metro Electronics or Art Ellis are open.
30 December 06
Freezers in the Loo
I’ve written here before about the fact that a freezer containing cheetah and island fox samples sits in the women’s room at work. Today Numenius and I stopped by to pick up some newspapers I’d been soaking for a compost layer and I heard beeping. The freezer had gone from its normal -79°C to -25°C and was alarmed! alarmed! We lost power on Thursday night and I assumed this was somehow related.
This is a long weekend, New Year’s Eve weekend. I tried five numbers before I reached a person, who said he’d get his wife to call me back on her cell. More logistics. She asked me to look into the other freezers, one a -80° freezer and two -40°s. They were all full of pelican and elk bits; no room for spare fox carcasses, alas….
Eventually the professor in charge of the island fox project was reached; eventually she cleared out a bunch of other samples from some coolers, and eventually I met her and a student at the Wildlife Health Center to transfer this critical material to a separate place where it can be kept frozen.
Revco. The freezer company. It turns out there are hundreds of these stories, of freezers going on the fritz over holiday weekends. There are two kinds of freezers, apparently: the ones that have failed and the ones that are going to fail. (ALWAYS on a holiday weekend.)
Good thing I was looking in on the compost. By Tuesday, that freezer would have been stinking and the loo would have been flooded with fetid canid bodily fluids.
28 December 06
Difficult Connection
My efforts at receiving digital keyboarding modes such as PSK31 have hit a technical snag in that far too much noise from the computer is propagating back into the receiver along the audio cable that I use to connect the two. Yesterday I picked up a snap-on ferrite choke from Radio Shack to try to alleviate the noise problem, but that didn’t help, so I returned it. The next step is to try putting in a 1:1 isolation transformer into the cable somewhere between the computer and the radio, but a) generally useless Radio Shack didn’t seem to have that part in the store today though it shows up on their website and b) I would actually have to do some real wiring — scary! So I’m stymied.
27 December 06
Dark
I write this by candlelight and a failing laptop battery, owing to a strong north wind… we did get to go out today and see the northern shrike, however:
23 December 06
Weather Faxes
I realize I can download practically any weather chart I might dream of from the National Weather Service websites, but somehow it’s just neat to pull the weather fax transmissions for mariners over shortwave and look at those. The transmissions I was picking up originate from a station at Point Reyes and cover the North Pacific. Admittedly, I’m glad I didn’t need to actually read these faxes for nautical purposes: there was too much noise in the transmission for them to be legible. But I’m working on that.