27 October 06
Falcon in my Office
I’ve had this really big critical push at work to get a project finished, but yesterday at three we were lured out into the sunshine by shrieks of delight. A falcon with jesses, a bell and a transmitter had just wandered on into the student lab, and Tamara had scooped it up and was looking like something out of a fantasy story set in Scotland. 
Except we’re in Davis, not Scotland, and this weird looking bird was not a peregrine, not a kestrel, not anything like anything I’d ever seen.
The falcon belongs to a falconer who had lost it in the huge windstorm we had on Wednesday. He had posted flyers all over the place, never really expecting to see the bird again. (It’s a hybrid cross between a Barbary and Taita falcon: falconers do barbaric things in their spare time. But as such, the only one like it certainly in the United States, it’s probably worth a bit of money.)
Santiago the farmworker guy was hanging out when the falcon landed in his truck. He brought it over to us, not sure of where he was going (he was heading for the Raptor Center but was unsure of his way). He called the owner, who dropped to his knees when he saw the bird on Tamara’s wrist. He calls the bird “Bird.”
A different kind of excitement than the red-breasted or taiga flycatcher, which hasn’t been seen since Wednesday evening…
26 October 06
Inbox Zero
In the fit of organization that has overtaken me as a result of my office move, I’ve been inspired to tackle my email box. Merlin Mann’s series Inbox Zero has proved very helpful. One day into the experiment, my inbox is indeed at zero, and life is good. You just have to be drastic, and make liberal use of the delete key. And most importantly, keep on doing that.
Besides, email may be dying off as a medium anyway.
25 October 06
Things to do
1) Come up with a workable “class” to teach on Saturday at Cold Canyon as part of our training. It’s only 20-30 minutes. I am wavering between birds (hard to see in the canyon for anyone, frustrating for novices), sketching, or calligraphic gesturing of plants that they will have had a good chance to look at by the time it’s my turn. Any ideas?
2) Finish laying mulch on the gardens, such as they are. The flagstones are nearly in.
3) Make fences for both gardens. (It’s blowing very hard outside now and I wish I had gotten to this earlier. However, the plants seem to be establishing well so maybe it’s alright.)
4) Come up with a Christmas card idea before November 1. I know I should call it a holiday card but if I did I wouldn’t make one, simple as that. (It has to be easy to produce because of 7, below. I am thinking of a linocut print this year.)
5) Defer my copperplate learning to the spring. My online teacher is very unresponsive and has never given me information about how to pay her, so I’m going to bow out of this one easily.
6) Persevere with my urging of coworkers to stop leaving candy on counters at work, which has started to creep back with Halloween approaching and threatens not to depart until well into the New Year. A distressing encounter with a bowl of Candy Corn (which I don’t even like!) on Monday triggered a grovelling plea from me yesterday. They seem to have taken it well enough. When you have a sugar addiction, it’s probably best to be very clear about it.
7) Write a 50,000 page novel during the month of November as part of National Novel Writing Month. (It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to get done.) I’m doing this to try and get a big monkey off my back. I have the suspicion it doesn’t do that; the monkey just gets more clingy, but I have to try.
There, see now. If I start to seem a little crazy be sure to let me know.
Things to check off:
The red-breasted flycatcher, this evening on Putah Creek. First lower-48 record. [John Sterling’s photos of this bird can be found here
[PS: Make that a taiga flycatcher (split from red-breasted), first mainland North America record. It wasn’t seen today, as far as I know.]
25 October 06
Lap Kitties
Diego is turning into a regular lap cat, often seeking Pica’s lap when she does her rounds on the web early in the morning. Charlie is much less so inclined, but one day last week he joined his brother.
23 October 06
Stink
October’s the month where we get infested with beetles that fly, crash into the light, and then emit a stench which is like concentrated smelly feet squared.
They’re small beetles, small and long. They look like a shortened earwig without the pincers, innocuous really.
They live in leaf litter and make all efforts to get indoors, where they then hide under anything there is to hide under. If they’re disturbed, they freeze, then scuttle in all directions. Like miniature cockroaches that smell.
Efforts to come up with an ID have so far met with failure. It’s in the Carabidae, is all we know for now. We may scan one for all you carabid experts out there…
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.