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.
27 July 06
Morphologies
One of the most interesting things about this past weekend and my enounters with distant cousins was a kind of horror in recognition. Yes, those are my earlobes. Yes, lots of other women in this family went gray at 28 and some of them, like me, stopped dyeing their hair a while ago. Yes, lots of us have crooked lower front teeth despite the best efforts of orthodontists to convince the world to the contrary.
Kinship systems are a field of anthropology and often include, by definition, systems of taboo. What, then, to make of the disowned sisters, one of whom was my grandmother, who each married “wrong” and who caused great scandal, some of it still the subject 70 years later of whispered giggles (hardly so weird; an allegation of an affair between my grandmother and her brother-in-law). But his son, the great sire: 8 children in wedlock, at least another three, but who knows in fact how many else, out of it. And, ladies and gentlemen, some of them were there, along with both ex-wives. It was an amazing gathering, with the backdrop of the hurricane outside.
Genealogy programs tend to be written by and for mormons and exclude gedcom categories like “natural daughter” or “lesbian couple with three children, all with same biological father from sperm bank.” Kinship systems need to catch up, and so do the genealogy codewriters. Those of us needing to record such kinship systems must muddle through on our own, but I guess for the first time I’ve felt really proud to be part of this family. And this, from my mother, walking barefoot through St. David’s cemetery on Sunday: “I think I’ve finally trampled out the terror of this family.” (That, alone, was worth the trip for me.)
I arrived home to a blistering heatwave and some interesting vegetables. I have no idea what this is. It’s in the Armenian cucumber patch but it looks like it got crossed with a honeydew melon.
25 July 06
Saskatchewan to Lake Elsinore
It’s been too hot to play with radios outside (Saturday it got up to 44 degrees C) so I have been doing some AM broadcast band DXing with my little Sony 7600G world band receiver. In radio parlance DXing means to try to listen to distant signals for their own sake. At nighttime AM band signals can carry quite far because they bounce off the ionosphere. So tuning around with even an ordinary AM radio can pull in some surprises. The best catches so far have been CBC Radio One at 540 kHz coming from Saskatchewan (the program at the time was “Northern Lights”) and XEPE (“Cash 1700”) broadcasting at 1700 kHz from Tijuana (though aimed at Southern California). The latter is the broadcaster for the Lake Elsinore Storm, the Single-A minor league team in the California League for the San Diego Padres. As I write this they are losing 3-2 to the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.
24 July 06
My First Cousin Ate My Ethernet Cable...
... and my thirty or so second cousins introduced themselves in phases, like the “1955 model”—one of my mother’s first cousins was especially prolific.
I was in Philadelphia over the weekend, attending a “symposium” on the family (this couldn’t just be a family reunion; it had to involve papers, poster sessions, name tags, and a list of materials for purchase). There was a lot about boats, which surprisingly didn’t bore this non-sailor. Hemingway rubbing shoulders with Dr. Beebe of the bathysphere fame. (Uncle Edwin didn’t believe in the depression and saw no reason why it should interfere with summer cruises to the Caribbean.)
I’m tired. I’ll say more later. But for now, it is good to be home, even though it’s sweltering in the Central Valley. (But it’s a dry heat…)
23 July 06
Whence the Tour of California
Floyd Landis won the Tour de France today. It’s been a wild three weeks, it being the most open Tour in ages. Landis and Oscar Pereiro exchanged the lead several times over the past week. Most dramatically, Landis recaptured the yellow jersey in the first stage in the Alps, and then collapsed on the final hill of the second Alpine stage to fall to 11th place. All seemed lost for him, but on the third and final Alpine stage, he went on an incredible solo run of the sort not seen since the days of Eddy Merckx to win the stage by over 5 minutes This brought him in striking distance of taking the lead in the race in Saturday’s time trial, which he proceeded to do. He ended up winning the Tour by 57 seconds over Pereiro. On top of all this, a couple weeks ago he reveals that he has an incredibly painful arthritic hip as the result of a crash a few years ago, and is in need of a hip replacement.
Back in February, Landis won the inaugural edition of the Tour of California, an eight-day stage race through the state. Maybe there’s a new rule here—whoever wins the Tour of California will win the Tour de France. Even if not, next year’s Tour of California will be fun to follow, especially since the stage on 20 February 2007 is going to run from Santa Rosa to Sacramento. I plan to catch that one in person!
20 July 06
Triangulating San Francisco
This week I’ve been taking a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book entitled “Mapping as a Creative Strategy”. The first half of the class was a look at traditions of mapping, including a field trip to the maritime library at the National Maritime Historical Park to look at many old maps of the California coast, North America, and San Francisco Bay. This latter half we’ve been working on our own projects. Most of the other students are San Francisco residents, and it was interesting for me to try to work with the perspective of being a visitor to the city, and not being intimately familiar with its neighborhoods.
I started out by making a list of the dozen places I’ve been to in San Francisco these past few years, and penciled these in on my street map. One of the themes that came up in discussion was making a map of places you’ve never been. So I came up with the idea of triangulating several of these places to wind up in spots I’ve never been before. The familiar landmarks were the San Francisco Center for the Book, the S.F. Public Library, the Maritime Library, and the Sutro Library (a bookish selection, to be sure). Finding the midpoints between these landmarks, I came up with a set of 4 new locations to go to.
Today I did my grand tour of the city. At each stop I made a sketch on bristol board. I started out north of the Civic Center, headed west to Haight and Lyon, circled Buena Vista Park to Roosevelt Way, then wound up at Noe and 20th. It was a long outing, but it was wonderful to explore the city this way!
19 July 06
Pen With Attitude
(The result of a conversation with a new pen in the afternoon)