8 August 06
Chasing Dragonflies
Tonight they are spraying mosquitoes in Davis and Woodland to try and halt the spread of West Nile virus. I went out today with some colleagues to try and catch dragonflies, butterflies, and spiders to put in target spraying areas and outside them as a control. It was different than my normal day: running around after insects. They are delicate yet feisty, the dragonflies: one seemed to get a good look at me while I was waving a net around and left….
[Postscript, Wednesday, 9 August, 1:30 pm: All the dragonflies, all the spiders, and all but two of the sulfur butterflies flew off this morning in apparent good health. The butterflies were victims of the City’s exuberant watering system.
It also looks as though about 75% of the resident mosquitoes were killed from trap evidence.
A second spraying is supposed to happen tonight. This time, we’ll be seeing how honeybees fare.]
7 August 06
Sunflower Cheer
In addition to the smaller reddish-black ones, we have two bright yellow ones in the garden now, the taller one being about 9 feet tall.
6 August 06
Return -- of a Kind
When I was in boarding school (late 19th century progressive) in the East Midlands in the 70s, and my siblings in boarding school (Quaker) in Cumbria, my father joined a London club in Sloane Square so we could rendezvous before catching a flight out of Heathrow to Madrid the following day. It wasn’t very London-clublike, whatever that is, and it wasn’t very hotel-like, and we were definitely fish out of water in that Laura Ashley dining room, but we managed to establish a London beat. It included the National Gallery and Selfridges and John Lewis and good off-beat theatre but never, I’m ashamed to say, the British Museum or the V&A.
My focus after boarding school was definitely the Midlands. I’ve neglected London for a long time. So much has changed since 1979: there is good food, and lots of varieties of it; entire areas that were then pretty rough are now London’s pride and joy; and my tastes have changed too.
So in early September, after a jaunt to Madrid for a wedding and a jaunt to rural Sweden to recover from it, I’m getting ready to rediscover London. This rediscovery will not include Harrod’s or Selfridges. It has been a complete blast to tell certain people about this and have them tell me what I absolutely shouldn’t miss (in five days). Ha.
But go ahead: why not suggest your own unmissable London haunts? At some point I’ll publish a compilation. It will say a lot about my friends, that they suggest these things to us…
6 August 06
Fragments of Dreams
This evening I walked out the levee, taking my Sony 7600G radio to do a bit of AM band DX fishing, eventually tuning some station at 750 kHz broadcasting sports talk from the Sports Byline network. (They started out with an interview with Larry Dirker, who was talking a bit about the great hitters Rod Carew and Tony Gwynn. The radio station turned out to be in Price, Utah.) Along the way, I heard some musical fragment which put to mind a different musical fragment, kind of melancholic, that I knew was from some movie, but couldn’t place it. It’s always annoying when that happens.
Happily, a few minutes later, I figured it out. It was from Field of Dreams.
4 August 06
Rhode Island Reds and Governors Mansions
With DocRock visiting I took the day off today (well, I needed to make up for Avian Flu hours from last weekend, dang). After a leisurely morning we ambled to Vacaville on a fruitless expedition for shorts, to Higby’s the feed store in Dixon (26 Rhode Island Red chicks were for sale) for three straw bales for mulch for my garden; and to Sacramento where we took a tour of the Old Governors’ mansion.
1950s formica mixed with 1880s velvet. Water balloons hoisted on trick-or-treaters mixed with First Lady teas. Dynamite attacks in the pantry mixed with claw-foot bathtubs. No wonder the Reagans decided to abandon the mansion, originally in the “country” but now on a truck route, for a ranch-style house that could accommodate adequate Cold War security. It was wacky. The weirdest thing was Maria Shriver narrating the tour on the video in the gift shop, showing footage of her uncle John F. visiting the mansion, with no mention of where she and the current governor live.
Sacramento has its charms. I tend not to look into them much, but am glad of the opportunity of an interested visitor to explore.
4 August 06
Life In Lower Divisions
We just went to see the River Cats rout the Memphis Redbirds 15-1. Doc Rock, up here for a brief visit, went to the game with us; we picked her up at the airport and went straight to the ballpark. She’s never been to a minor league game before, and had a good baseball experience tonight. Minor league games have an enchanting mixture of occasional high-caliber play and constant between-inning campiness. There is also the undercurrent of the stories of the careers of the players: who is bound for stardom in a year or two, and who is on their way down, or out.
It’s been almost four weeks now since the end of the World Cup and I am still keen on following soccer. I’ve read three books on the sport since then—National Pastime, a comparison of the business aspects of both baseball and soccer, Fever Pitch, the classic account of an obsessed Arsenal fan in London, which eventually turned into a movie about a Red Sox fan, and The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, about a team in a tiny village in the Abruzzo region that manages to get promoted to the second-tier league in Italy one year. We’re visiting Europe in several weeks and I might just take myself to a match to find out what the sport is really all about. Not the top-flight teams—it’s too hard and expensive to get tickets for those matches—but rather the middling teams. It will be very different from sport over here, but how?
1 August 06
Avian Flu Redux
While Natalie may have inadvertently conflated West Nile with Avian Flu (see comments, last post), my time since I got back from Philadelphia and genealogical interludes has pretty much been taken up with the H5N1 story and how to deal with it once it gets here (or Tanzania or South America). My colleagues at the Wildlife Health Center are conducting Flu School this week, a train-the-trainers program which may take off fast, hopefully faster than the spread of the virus and its transgenic mutation to a strain that spreads easily among humans.
We had to get all the materials together by this morning, which was a huge undertaking given that a) the illustrator (who at this point I’m promoting to goddess) didn’t know exactly what illustrations were needed or what order they went in or what their context was; b) ditto for the syllabus compilers; c) ditto for me, the apparent queen of xeroxing (well, okay, layout and design too). At 10:45 last night I really hoped this was all worth it, having inhaled miles of xerox-ozone and snapped hundreds of binder fasteners together. And opened them. And snapped them. (I really really hate binders but some people unaccountably love them; the director of this project is one of them. We joke. But he orders the binders, so I snapped away.)
I haven’t actually bled a chicken or vaccinated one. But I think I could, based on what I’ve been looking at for the past week. I could probably slaughter one, though this wouldn’t be my first choice of activity on a Monday evening. I might be able to pass the fluorescent powder test of Personal Protective Equipment on and off, showing no flourescent on my person afterwards under black light. I know now you’re not supposed to drive a truck from farm A to farm B without disinfecting it first.
And I offer up to whatever deity is listening that none of this proves necessary, because if it does, we’re in the deep cack. Chicken cack. It will reach, dear readers, to the ozone layer.
31 July 06
Epidemic
West Nile virus is back in full swing here. For awhile it looked like we’d be spared a bad season. It was very wet early in the spring—lots of spots for the mosquitos—but in May it quickly dried out, and of course we’ve had our heat wave in July. But birds are dying now, and a few people are falling sick. In town they are planning to spray for mosquitos, which predictably for Davis is drawing protests from a small but ardent crowd that is constitutionally incapable of doing risk-benefit calculations. Around our house these past several days we’ve had two dead crows, and more sadly this evening, we saw a fledgling Swainson’s hawk in the field to the south who was lacking the energy to get airborne, though not for lack of trying.
29 July 06
An Afternoon With Escher
The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento currently is hosting an Escher show that is visiting from the Portland Museum of Art.
Escher was everywhere male when I was in boarding school, along with Tolkien. Posters were hung in the boys’ studies, much like Mucha and Monet were hung in ours; the appeal was both cerebral and “difficult,” portending more meaning than was perhaps there.
Today I found an artist who was a master printmaker. His “space perception” pieces were very late and followed extensive architectural, landscape, and life studies. He lived in Italy for a while and was mesmerized by the Alhambra and the intricate moorish tiling.
The best thing, I thought, were the book plates he designed for people: linocuts in black and white, distilling down a person’s essence into what they’d want thought about them on the endpages of their books. This design format went the way of the dodo just like the album cover but gosh I’d like to see it reclaimed… just as it was wonderful to see Escher today being enjoyed by women as well as men.
28 July 06
Layer of Fog
Looking to the south this morning, we saw Mt. Diablo poking out of a layer of fog in the interior of the East Bay. This is wonderful to see after our heat wave since it means we’re back to the normal summer weather pattern here. The fog comes in during the late afternoon in the Bay Area, and at the same time the Delta breeze comes up from south here, cooling us off rapidly. We have a good breeze tonight, and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees F by now from today’s high of 91 degrees F.