27 November 06
Eventful Weekend
a) Saw Bobby
b) Saw The Prestige
c) Soaked in the Mud
d) Made pesto with the last of the basil
e) Ate same
f) Yukked it up all weekend with a dear friend
g) Bought two pineapple guava plants
h) Got back to work today to discover that my colleagues at the Oiled Wildlife Care network had their own busy weekend, a mystery spill oiling dozens of gulls with food oil.
They headed up to Arcata on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, spent the next two days finding and collecting birds and then stabilizing them. The birds had apparently gotten into a trailer with discarded cooking oil.
The situation seems under control now with most of the birds either recuperating in recovery pools or waiting to get washed tomorrow.
23 November 06
Happy Thanksgiving
Unlike in this photo from yesterday, the kitties were fiesty today — Charlie went up a tree and Diego insisted on jumping on the clean sheets of our cat-allergic guest. I meanwhile dropped the ‘e’ from ‘Thanksgiving feast’ and didn’t eat all day.
21 November 06
Kitty Playdate
Quina from across the road came over tonight. It was a short meeting, during which she rarely left Mary’s shoulders, but there was no hissing, and if this works out, it might be a good solution to alternate cat-sitting ventures.
A friend is coming this weekend who is allergic to cats; I have lots of cleaning to do to get the house as mellow as possible, though it will be the tent for sleeping, I think…
19 November 06
Home Ground
I haven’t seen this new book yet but it’s on my to read list: Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney.
From the publisher’s blurb for it on the book’s website:
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape brings together forty-five poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters—terms like flatiron, bayou, monadnock, kiss tank, meander bar, and everglade. The writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Krakauer, Charles Frazier, Antonya Nelson, and Samantha Chang, draw from careful research as well as on their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit, from Missouri’s woody draws to Virginia’s runs, from the desire paths of cities to the rondes of Midwestern farmlands, from California’s bajadas to Alaska’s pingos and Hawai`i’s shield volcanoes. An advisory board has ensured the scientific accuracy of the prose. Included are one hundred black-and-white drawings by Molly O’Halloran and an introductory essay by Barry Lopez.
Not that I ever listen to All Things Considered but they did a piece on the book a couple of days ago — on that page there are also some excerpted definitions from the book.
18 November 06
A Really Stinking Compost
These days are full. I’ve been seeing dear friends, enjoying the wonders of Cold Canyon again with other dear friends, getting things done. But one of those is not, alas, my novel. I have felt discouraged since the demise of my pen and while that might seem to be just an excuse, I’ve written little since. I’m not giving up, but I can’t get 50,000 words written by the end of November…
Mary dragged over two months’ worth of kitchen scraps from across the street, fetid and rank. She kindly dumped them on my compost pile, where they have attracted so many flies that the black phoebe sitting on the edge needn’t even take wing to get her fill. For a compost maniac such as I’ve turned out to be, this was like winning the lottery.
I turned the compost this evening in the dark, a stinky job, pondering on pens (it’s my niece’s birthday and my present to her was her first fountain pen, a pink girlie job made by Kukuxumusu in Spain, along with purple cartridges and a purple Clairefontaine notebook) and on the World Bank (o evil institution) and on manzanita bark and on small falcons.
A stench like this gets you right in touch with what’s really going on. In your head and otherwise…
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.