11 June 06
Waylaid
I was heading over to my friend Barbara’s this morning to watch the Mexico-Iran match. Barbara was in Southern California seeing family and Numenius was off doing his breeding bird atlas.
My ride took me past Ali Baba. Open, it said, at 8:50 am. I stopped my bike with a screech and got off. Watching a match in a room full of Iranians was too good an opportunity to miss! (I go to Ali Baba for lunch every Thursday: spinach special.)
The match ended badly for them, 3-1, but it was a wonderful time. The first half was excellent. Wouldn’t it be good, said a student, if these commentators knew anything about Iran.
I almost said, but bit my tongue, wouldn’t it be good if they knew anything about soccer. (It was televised on ABC, which, contrary to my expectations, did NOT interrupt play with advertising. But the commentary was still, predictably, horrendous.)
There was one other person in there besides me who was not obviously Iranian: a woman whose boyfriend was. She was bug-eyed. Welcome to the world cup, lass.
10 June 06
New Kitty Mueble
Last weekend we bought our kitties a new piece of cat furniture, a three-story setup handmade by somebody in the eastern Sacramento area. We’ve placed it in our bedroom, and it’s high enough so they have a good view out the back window. They’ve taken to it quite well.
Diego today was pleased that his team beat the Ivory Coast 2-1 in World Cup action.
9 June 06
Self?
Me, today, in the garden with Charlie
Me, today, in the mirror. I don’t look like this at all. The face is too long.
Me, today, in the mirror again. I look my maternal grandmother and my father.
Blaugustine and crackskullbob are encouraging us all to do self-portraits, at least one a week for the next month.
9 June 06
Footie Here We Come
As everybody in the civilized world is aware (the United States on the other hand remains largely ignorant), the World Cup begins in about 10 hours (0 days 9 hours 53 minutes according to the countdown on the BBC World Cup site. ) Pica gets quite excited about the event, although with neither telly nor broadband it’s hard for us to follow the matches live here. We may end up watching some of the matches at the several restaurants here that promise to show them on their TV. Does this mean we’re headed to Little Prague at 5 in morning Saturday to see England-Paraguay? Maybe.
7 June 06
Portrait
Every day
I draw
my left hand
the lines
get deeper
the knuckles
grow rounder
the nails
still strong
at forty-seven
Clutching at
illusion
foreshortened globs
my hand says
no hiding
The women
south of here
pay millions for
young faces
but you can’t
botox
a hand…
Paired journey:
one records
the other
is
Submitted for Illustration Friday’s theme: Portrait and prompted by Leslee’s musing on her age today
6 June 06
Parakeet Of Putah Creek
This morning when we were out in the yard with the cats we heard a strident ‘keeew’ that I thought was an oriole and Pica thought was a northern flicker. A few minutes later, I spotted the bird: it was a beautiful psittacid, with a long tail and a reddish bill. Pica saw the collar on him, and in Sibley we identified him as a Rose-ringed Parakeet. He flew off over the field towards the creek.
On the way home this afternoon, riding through the Arboretum, a couple of kilometers off from here, I heard a similar call, and had the briefest glimpse of a yellowish bird in flight. Maybe it was our parakeet.
5 June 06
Guano
I went over this afternoon next door to find out exactly when Dave needed his eight copies of the long-ago-finished-but-now-once-again-draft of the California Wildlife Action Plan.
Walter stopped me on the way in. What do you know about Sue Greenwald? Oh. She’s fey. (She’s also our next mayor.) Could I work with her? he asked. Possibly, I said. It depends. She’s been picking up fallen-out-of-the-nest baby herons at Shields Oak Grove in the Arboretum, he said. Oh. That’s illegal…
The heron rookery is sooner or later going to kill a bunch of heritage oak trees in the Arboretum. All kinds of people are concerned about this including our fey mayor-to-be. People seem to take sides.
You on your bike today? he said. Yes. Want to come with me and lay some guano traps? Sure. I have to go to the printer anyway. We biked in the heat of the day over to the Arboretum and laid out what essentially were diapers under oak trees…*
Sampling egret and heron poop for West Nile virus and avian flu is easy, non-invasive, and will perhaps give us some kind of additional input into the problem of ordinary citizens taking heron chicks home.
Even if they are future mayors.
*Just in case you weren’t sure: this is NOT in my job description.
4 June 06
The Letter G, The Number 5
I’m a little bit more than halfway through the project of learning the 43 main characters in the Morse code set. I’m now working on adding the number 5. In the Koch method which I’m using, you add a character at a time to the set you already know and practice with the new set until you reach an accuracy of 90%. It’s interesting how adding just a single character causes my overall accuracy to drop and I have to go through a whole new round of practice, rewiring a few neurons.
It is now worthwhile for me to listen to and try to copy real live Morse code conversations. It has to be pretty slow code for me to have any success at all, and since I have many more characters to learn I expect a lot of trouble. It is good practice though. Today on 10 meters I was hearing a couple of operators having a good long ragchew sending slow code. It was heartening—they must both be beginners.
2 June 06
Tomato Flashback
Back in the early 1980s I got a job in the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University. It was on the top floor of the History Faculty building, one of James Stirling’s better-known flops. It was an L-shaped building with a half pyramid of glass leading up to my office door—single-paned glass, in a part of the world that was damp and cold in winter but whose gardeners could grow prize cucumbers in greenhouses in summer. (Air conditioning was not on anyone’s radar in those days.) We froze in winter but in summer I grew tomatoes outside my office on the south-facing windowsill.
I had no idea what I was doing so I asked one of the library assistants, a great gardener, for help. (The Centre at the time was a hotbed of Marxism and Phil was a Thatcherite, through-and-through; it made for interesting interactions.) Phil suggested a Growbag. This was a bag of peat you simply cut into and planted your tomatoes. Pick off the growth at leaf intersections, he said; tie the plants to canes; and pinch out all growth past the fourth set of flowers.
Tomatoes in this hemisphere seem to be grown much more anarchically. You encourage multiple, out-of-control, growths at leaf intersections. No canes, here: cages. Tame the anarchic beasts. I’ve been told to plant them in VERY deep holes because tomatoes put out deep, deep roots.
Some of my planted tomatoes have their first flowers now. I’ve never done the anarchic thing before, tomato-wise, but Johnny the Beekeeper says it’s really hard to kill tomatoes, especially in this climate…
30 May 06
Mallards In The Hay
I’ve been doing the breeding bird atlas survey now for a couple of months, trying to head out to our assigned 5 square kilometer block of farmland just south of here at least once a week. It is turning out to be challenging to come up with confirmations of breeding activity, and so far I’ve only confirmed two species. The first is the ubiquitous red-winged blackbird, where several weeks back I saw a female carrying nesting materials near a wheat field. The second confirmation came yesterday, and wasn’t a species I ordinarily associated with the landscape of wheat and alfalfa fields. Mallards. I scared up a female in an irrigation ditch with a dozen ducklings in tow.
The kites we saw at the outset still haven’t definitively nested. They worried me because I didn’t see them in my visits the prior two weeks. Yesterday they were back, together with an interloper, a third adult.