22 October 06
Puncturevine
Yesterday I finally fixed the flat in the rear tire of my road bike. Feeling down the inner surface of the tire, I noticed two tiny embedded thorns, each capable of producing a leak in the tire. I gently worked these out of the tire and installed the new tube.
On page one of today’s Davis Enterprise, the paper ran a story on the bane of cyclists that gave me the flat, puncturevine. According to one bike mechanic, most of the flats in the Davis area are now due to this plant. The lentil-sized seeds of this weed have hard stout spines for dispersal, whether via fur or tires. The common names for the weed are somewhat ominous—caltrop, tackweed, goathead, Texas sandbur—and its scientific name is the alliterative Tribulus terrestris. But I never seem to see the actual plant, instead just finding the seeds in unfortunate places.
21 October 06
A Very Warm Saturday
This morning I joined twelve or so people in our first guide training at Cold Canyon. It was hot by eleven, the kind of hot that makes you sweat in a T-shirt walking slowly up a slight incline. We saw blooming California fuchsias and the Anna’s hummingbirds that guarded them ferociously; I learned to tell the difference between poison oak and skunk bush (really really important); we divvied up our mini-presentations (I’m doing mine next week). It was a good day to be out in the sunshine.
This evening was a chili cookoff with bluegrass by Chicken Tractor (a friend and neighbor plays mandolin in this band). It was punctuated by checkins of the first World Series game. (Cards were winning 7-1 when we left.)
A normal, sort of, Saturday.
But when (I’m a when not if person) the flu pandemic hits, we won’t be doing any of this. No doing out, no mingling, no shopping, not any of it.
Maybe a lot more gardening?
20 October 06
Back In 1934
The World Series begins this weekend, the St. Louis Cardinals taking on the Detroit Tigers. The teams have met twice before in the World Series, once in 1968, and once in 1934.
The 1934 series went the full seven games, the Cardinals winning 4 games to 3. The last game turned out to be a laugher, the Cardinals winning 11-0 behind the pitching of Dizzy Dean. It was a tense contest for all of two innings. In the top of the 3rd, all hell breaks loose, and the Cardinals bring up 13 batters to the plate, scoring 7 runs, Dizzy Dean helping his own cause with a double and a single. The Tigers went through four pitchers in the inning.
More antics were to come at the top of the 6th inning. The Cards’ Joe Medwick slid hard into third base following his triple, and got into a tiff with the third baseman. Whe Medwick took the field at the bottom of the inning the Detroit fans started pelting him with fruit, vegetables, and anything else they could throw. By order of the Commissioner, Medwick was removed from the game for his own safety. Even with their best hitter thus taken out, the Cards had no trouble finishing off the Tigers. Dizzy Dean was the MVP of the series, winning two games, and losing one.
19 October 06
Two Days Late
Inspired by the Day in History project (thanks Richard), where British bloggers were encouraged to produce an account of their day on October 17th, and amazed at the few accounts I’ve seen so far (humdrum isn’t uninteresting, it turns out), I thought I’d try my hand at one myself.
17 October 2006
Charlie-Cat woke me up well before dawn, kneading me for breakfast and attention (Diego, his brother, waits patiently). I get the kettle on for tea after giving them food, leaving Numenius to doze for another hour and a half. I get online (we’re still on dialup) and check the baseball score from the NLCS of the previous night. I do my round of email (two accounts) and RSS feeds, look at the BBC news site and Google news. It’s dark these days until about seven, and I drink lots of tea before sunrise. It’s Lipton loose-leaf tea, strong, with lots of milk.
We have indoor cats but we take them outside on a leash. They’re interested in the white-crowned sparrows that have been back for about a month. There’s a fairly strong north wind and the “gate” (held in place with a straw bale) has blown over at my vegetable garden. Charlie drags me in there after a sparrow and ends up grazing on grass, growing from the discarded straw which must still have some wheat in it. I need to spread the pine needles I gathered from work to discourage the weeds…
I’m always late for work. ALWAYS. This is bonkers because I live within five minutes of my workplace. I have a short shower today thinking I really need to scrub the shower (we’re on a well here; our water is even harder than tapwater in Davis, and it makes for a disgusting grunge on the walls and chrome). Breakfast is, as always, cooked nine-grain cereal with dried fruit and nuts, which I eat with non-fat yoghurt (Numenius has his with milk).
I hop on my bike (a green Giant Iguana mountain bike with front shocks, ludicrous overkill for flat Davis but essential when my bike commute included a three-mile downhill dash in Santa Barbara), having put my bike-basket on the rack, and pedal into the wind over the bridge and in to work.
Work, today, is mostly about reformatting a bunch of modules for a training course on how to deal with Avian Flu. It’s tedious but oddly satisfying, transforming ugly Word files into something more useable and graceful. They are going to be available online and should have been there a month ago, so it’s a mad dash as usual. I’m trying to wean myself off web and email at work but I’m addicted and in particular I find myself checking on baseball news, even though I know there won’t be any. I have an RSS feed set up at work for blogs that are image-heavy (we’re on dialup at home, as I said). I try to scan them before I’m ready to settle in for the day, having made my cup of green tea (loose leaf straight into my mug, which I top up all day with hot water).
I bike home for lunch (which I rarely do) and get a load of whites done and hung. It’s great drying weather.
I get home around 5:45 pm, feed the cats, get frustrated by my inability to find a lid for a container for the stock I made on Monday. Numenius gets home half an hour later and we head out to buy some more tape for the labeller (we’re on a huge organizing binge), catfood, and groceries at the Co-op. We don’t buy much because the 11% sale is coming up this weekend, meaning we’ll be stocking up on 25 pound bags of things, cans of tomatoes, olive oil, and toilet paper.
Dinner is salad with leftover brown rice, a yummy black tomato I found at the Coop, an avocado, a vinaigrette I made with mustard, olive oil and balsamic vinegar, some jalapeño-cheese bread, and a glass or two of a cheap Argentine Cab. We have no TV and radio reception of the Mets-Cards game is poor after dark, so Numenius keeps me up to date with check-ins on the Web. I go to bed early as usual (around nine) and read a few pages of Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done before turning off the light.
17 October 06
hipsterPDA
I’m in the midst of moving offices at work—just across the hall, but this is to finally get a window after six years in a windowless cave. I’m seeing this as a good opportunity to fashion a new organized self and have been discarding recycling barrels full of paper these past few days.
As Pica related, last week we discovered the hipsterPDA and the Getting Things Done (GTD) system for productivity. It’s too early to say if the hipsterPDA is a personal reform that will be long lasting, but all signs are good. There are three reasons why I think this is working for me. The first is that it is small and very easy to carry. Any binder-based organizer however compact gets bulky quickly—it’s not something you’ll bring to the ballpark or many other places. The second is that the system is analog. I’ve done enough time with a Handspring Visor PDA to realized that there is a lot of overhead with digital organizers. Finally, the GTD system makes a lot of sense to me. Pica has worked with Franklin Planners on and off for many years and I just can’t see using one. There is too much emphasis on priority setting within a daily calendar. The GTD system is by contrast bottom up—you track projects and next actions, and the calendar is reserved for actual appointments. I’m having fun with all this, which is very promising.
16 October 06
Malthus' Ghost
Tonight, at some point, the 300 millionth “American” will be born.
The population of the United States hit 100 million in 1915; 200 million in 1967. It wouldn’t matter so much, really, if we didn’t consume at the frenzied rate we do. Our footprint is out of proportion to our size, geographically and in terms of population. By the time the 400 millionth person is born here, water will be as precious a resource as oil now is.
Who are the breeders these days? Republicans, natch. We childless progressives are painting ourselves into a corner. But this in itself does not constitute a good reason to have children, people. We can rant and rave and shake our fists but the future and what a mess we’re making of the planet will have to depend on the children and grandchildren of those who insist global warming’s a figment of Gore’s imagination…
16 October 06
There And Back Again
Yesterday evening I went to my 25th high school reunion, which was held at a Livermore Valley winery owned by one of my old classmates, not that I knew the lad—it was a high school class of around 400. I have never been to one of my class reunions, but 25 is a good number, and I currently live in reasonable hailing distance.
(There is definitely a geographical bias to who attends these things).
I was quite glad I went—it’s just fun to see all these familiar names and faces again, and to know that this bunch at least is okay. The neatest aspect of the event was seeing folks I knew not just in high school, but in elementary school too. Third grade is a long time ago.
14 October 06
Turkeys 1, Coyote 0
This morning as I was digging outside (I’m considering digging for a morning activity even when there’s no good reason to do it, so much time to ponder plus you get to say hello to so many earthworms) I heard a soft cluck, cluck. The turkey flock was moving south across the alfalfa field that got mowed three days ago, pecking and scratching as they went.
Out of frisbee range; I went back to my digging.
Alarm clucks raised my head again: a coyote was approaching the flock. But with no alfalfa he had no chance at a surprise attack. Two turkeys flew, laboring, into the top of the osage orange, to be scolded by crows; the coyote couldn’t decide which way to look, and eventually slunk off, presumably to wait for a better chance.
We’re off to Numenius’ 25th High School Reunion (his idea, don’t faint folks). The Tigers just won the American League pennant, and we’ll catch the Mets-Cardinals game in the car.
13 October 06
Calendrical Ponderings
We went this evening to the sixth annual Davis community iftar, which has by now grown to be the largest such interfaith community iftar in California, with well over seven hundred people there today. The keynote speaker gave an introduction to Ramadan, and one thing she noted is that the month of Ramadan shifts throughout the solar year, it cycling through the seasons on a 33-year basis, since the Islamic calendar is strictly a lunar calendar, and the lunar year is about 11 days short of the solar year.
This year the start of Ramadan coincided with Rosh Hashanah, which is not that unlikely an occurrence since both events are keyed to the new moon, Rosh Hashanah occurring on the first of the month of Tishri. But the Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar—every couple of years they stick in an extra month into the calendar, presumably so the holidays don’t migrate throughout the solar year (leading to problems like the harvest festival Sukkot being celebrated in the dead of winter). So I wonder how often does the start of Ramadan coincide with Rosh Hashanah? It does next year as well. My guess is that it usually occurs twice each 33-year cycle, but sometimes only once, and rarely three times.
All these mysteries and many more can be revealed through study of this Gregorian-Julian-Islamic-Persian-Hebrew-Mayan calendar converter.
12 October 06
Stebbins Cold Canyon: Training
Last night I attended an introductory training session to lead trips at Stebbins Cold Canyon, a UC Reserve just west of Winters. I am interested in how Jeff Falyn is organizing how he encourages people of this region to connect with place, with this place in particular, and nothing is considered too off-the-wall. (See here and here for accounts of our trips to this reserve.)
We were asked to consider what the focus of our walks might be. A sixth grader is interested in maps and has discovered trails and tunnels nobody else knew, wants to share them; a retired Iranian professor of engineering wanted to lead walks focusing on poetry and nature in the great Persian tradition. I immediately put down birds and sketching, but this is a place that invites multiple prisms, and I got to thinking it might be fun to have some calligraphic doodling with reed pens I’m going to try and make from one of our noxious riparian invasives, Arundo donax, giant reed, which grows in a mild-mannered way in the Mediterranean basin but which is good for nothing here.
Except making pens and, I’ve decided, a bunch of fences to protect my new garden against the wind (Jennifer, thanks for showing me how to do this).
There’s a stand of Arundo just down below our bridge. I might see if I can’t get a stack this weekend…