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.
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?