18 August 06
Pig 'n' Popcorn
The two odors mingle. Shrieking children on rides and five different loudspeakers with different musics blare as loud as the lights, some of them powered by generators. So diesel fumes are part of the odiferous mix, too.
We just got back from the Yolo County Fair, where we bought some cinammon-roasted almonds, saw pigs being shunted around an arena by children with walking-sticks, and waited in vain for a demonstration of newspaper mulching.
One of my Armenian cucumbers would have given the prize-winners a run for their money, though. And marrows, though I’m getting better at cutting them early…
17 August 06
City Notebook
I have yet to become a member of the cult of Moleskine, but Pica has been looking into these notebooks as a possibility for a journal. On their site today she noticed an upcoming product of theirs that will be very neat. This is their line of City Notebooks. They describe this as “the guidebook you write yourself.” Each of these notebooks has an overview map and a set of street maps together with many blank pages, tabs, and overlays to allow you to write out your own notes about a city. Their line of European city notebooks will be out in the fall, with the United States ones to follow in Spring of 2007.
16 August 06
Days
Nicole of Turning Leaves recently posted about her French diary-journal, her agenda, and how she gets her mother to send her a refill from France every year. It works for her.
I used to have the Economist diary, a slim leather affair my father bought me every year for my birthday. I fell prey to the 1980s Filofax craze in England and loved the modularity of it, how much stuff I could put in one place. I got sent by my work to a Franklin Planner course when I was at Harvard, and got the larger leather case to hold it all. Now I was lugging around four pounds of planning in my bike basket, and when Handspring Visors appeared, I was thrilled to make the transition to a tiny thing.
But it doesn’t work for me, the PDA, because there’s nowhere to write stuff down when you’re on the phone, there’s nowhere to sketch. It’s sterile and, when it goes south (which they inevitably do), you’re stuck. Numenius promises he’ll download all my data onto his Linux box but so far I’m living at the edge of my backup-module. I’d lose all my addresses if my Visor stopped working. The last printout I have is probably from 2001. Almost everyone I know has moved since then.
In any case, I switched back to the Franklin Planner I had in the cupboard, because I like to be able to use a pen. It’s pared down—no address list, for instance—but it still takes up real estate in my bike basket. It’s not something I would take on a trip, for instance.
The perfect diary for me isn’t something you can buy in a store, though it doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking (and I will certainly look when we’re in Spain in a couple of weeks, though how you make that a sustainable thing, I don’t know).
The perfect diary would have room to write and draw and even paint. I think I’m talking myself into making my own. Ideas, anyone?
15 August 06
Noodler's Black
Sunday I picked up a bottle of black Noodler’s Ink and have been playing with it quite a bit. This fountain pen ink has gotten a lot of praise on the net—my interest in it is that it is permanent and waterproof. Most fountain pen inks are quite water-soluble when on the page, which means painting over an ink drawing with watercolors creates a mess. For such pen-and-wash sketches, I’ve generally used either Micron Pigmas or Gelly Roll pens, but neither are as fun to draw with as a fountain pen. I’m pleased with the way the Noodler’s Ink behaves. At right is a drawing of a sunflower in Noodler’s black, painted over with watercolor.
14 August 06
Sketching Around the World
I used to fancy myself quite a photographer when I was in boarding school. I took rolls of Tri-X, developed them myself (in Dektol, a paper developer, much to the bemusement of some pseudo-professional photographers in Madrid), adored the high contrast and mega-grain. And then I got tired of my fingers smelling of stop-bath and switched them for fingers stained in black ink, which they more or less have been since.
I feel I have nothing to add, now, to the deluge of digital photos inundating the blogosphere. But when you draw ten different drawings of the same sunflower, one of them might be interesting. I have learned a lot about myself on Saturday.
Contemplating our trip to Europe, I find I am drawn to blogs that feature a lot of sketching. I have my journal made, though I haven’t pinpricked my grid yet. I’m dying to have at least an hour or two at the aqueduct in Segovia: a structure spanning a city with no mortar, built 2,000 years ago. The press of stone on stone keeping the arches together.
We are out of practice for stone (the Central Valley hasn’t much). We’ll do our best…
13 August 06
Farmers Market Bounty
We don’t go often enough to the Davis Farmers Market, which is on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Yesterday we did though, and returned with maitake mushrooms, white peaches, challah with raisins, yellow tomatoes, cumin gouda cheese, and these very sumptious grapes at left.
12 August 06
12 August 06
Traveling Without Camera
We’re not planning to bring a camera on our upcoming trip to Europe. Or at most, an old point-and-click loaded with Tri-X. The proximate reason for this is that last winter we lost our little digital camera, and haven’t felt the necessity to replace it (we still have a bulkier, older digicam that works quite well). But ultimately for me, it’s a matter of being far more interested in travel sketching than photography. On her trip to New York last March, Pica only took a sketchbook to record her journey, and that was a great success.
Digital photographs seem to build up by the thousands on hard drives and CD-Rs and never see the light of day, but travel sketchbooks actually get looked at.
10 August 06
Ponderings on August 10
So I have to confess the thing that got me the most was the bit about not taking a book on the plane with me, I mean I can live without hairmousse for crissakes but no book? And I just ordered two from Powells, this and this .
But then I remembered what day it was, again, a day when three years ago we danced around a maypole together. It is a day to remember that. And to be thankful that the worst thing that happened at Heathrow today was that people got fed up.
9 August 06
Waterproof Rice
I guess it’s a day for the limelight. Not only did a picture of Pica’s boss make page one of the Davis Enterprise (for his little study about effects of the mosquito spraying on other insects), but a story about a UC Davis research project is now highlighted on the front page of the BBC web site. Scientists at UC Davis together with those at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have identified a gene that can allow rice plants to survive being completely submerged for up to two weeks. This is of global importance because it can potentially provide rice crops with protection from catastrophic flooding.