3 May 06
Rototilling
The saga of the garden continues. Now we’re going to do the plot behind the almond tree which is out of the way of everything including the currently swarming bees, their accumulated detritus, tires, and whatnot. This is getting to be almost comical. It does seem that you can save a lot of money (if not a lot of time) by getting good advice before you start breaking your back with pickaxes.
A friend called me at six this morning from North Carolina (I was already at work) to ask how to address a vice-chancellor in an email. By their first name, said I. Oh, not chancellor so-and-so? Oh no, I don’t think so. But by the way how should I rototill packed-in Davis clay?
Oh, says she, there’s a man who will come with a tractor and do it for you. Look under rototilling in the yellow pages. And, sure enough, there it was. Greg in Dixon. I left him a message.
Either that or spend a lot to rent one which I have to lug over here. Not sure. But I did also go to Project Compost today to find out how to get yards and cubic yards of compost.
I am so, so in danger of becoming a gardening bore…
2 May 06
Dog Days Arriving
When we were at the Little League game Sunday, this spaniel had had a long day and was content to lie on the lap of the girl sitting in front of us in the bleachers.
1 May 06
Blog Against Disablism Day
Thanks to Diary of a Goldfish for hosting this.
I had a lot of ideas for what to say for this post… to talk about what it was like suddenly to have an injury that required me to navigate the world on crutches, the instant appreciation for the path that is taken not just for two or three months but a lifetime of a lot of people. About how with this same injury, if I had been born in the sixteenth century, it would have become my own lot for a lifetime.
I wanted to talk about my friend Donna who insists that disabled students, if supported, face the same likelihood of success or failure as other students based on their socioeconomic backgrounds. Their disability is not their limiting factor: it’s our ignorance and stupidity.
I wanted to talk about the first time I ever saw a man ski with only one arm. It was in Spain. He was obviously not Spanish. It was a strong contrast to the message of the signs on the metro reserving seats “para mutilados de guerra.” (Not for anyone with a disability, just one acquired on the winning or losing side of a civil war.)
I wanted to enter into a conversation with Jenny and my own relatives who have worked so hard on this issue.
I’m at the end of a day that began yesterday for Jenny and other antipodeans; most bloggers have already said their bit on this. What can I add?
This, I think: owning up to our own disablism is even more unlikely than owning up to our racism, because it’s so plausibly in all our futures. So I’m thankful for everyone who works on this: to stop discriminatory policies, to advocate for equal access to buildings and public transport services, to design better and more ingenious gadgets that seem trivial until you realize that for someone, it can make the difference between browsing the web—this blog, for instance—or having to ask someone to do it for you.
30 April 06
Little League, Davis Style
We went to our first little league game ever today. Our friends Rick and Donna invited us to come watch; Rick is the coach of one of the Davis teams, the Rangers. He is unusual in that he is involved with little league without being a parent. Alas, the Rangers were having a hard time today—when we arrived it was 4-0 White Sox; two hours and three innings later, the score was 23-8 White Sox. Rick attributed this to it being the first hot-weather game. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun. Fly balls are always an adventure; the pitchers are alternately getting shelled or missing the plate; and the spry kid who hit a home run had the biggest grin on his face when he leapt on home plate. At left is a sketch of the Rangers’ catcher during the much-needed pitching change.
29 April 06
Birdathon
Today Numenius and I did a birdathon by bicycle to raise funds for Yolo Audubon Society. We went in different directions: he headed south to do the breeding bird atlas survey I birded along Putah Creek with a friend and colleague on the Audubon Board, headed into west Davis, down to the Arboretum, east to the Yolo Bypass, south to the Yolo Grasslands and Tremont Street Cemetery, and finally home.
We tallied 80 species between us by bicycle, great considering the day started out gray and a bit cold and ended up hot and windy and the flooding is still extensive. Not quite the total someone like Richard might have put together on a day like this, but respectable.
If you’d like to make a contribution of any size—a total amount or an amount per bird—you can mail it to
Yolo Audubon Society (Birdathon)
P.O. Box 886
Davis, CA 95617
28 April 06
The Lure Of Morse
Since we’ve gotten into pandemic preparedness mode here, I’ve renewed my interest in radio. Several years ago, I got my technician class amateur radio license, but haven’t done much at all with it. The next step after the technician class is the general class license, which allows you to transmit on shortwave frequencies. One requirement for this license class is passing a Morse code receiving test, which takes a good bit of study, though the copying rate of the test has been reduced to a very slow 5 words a minute.
Despite its antiquarian aura, Morse code is very practical in the land of ham radio. Basically, it’s an incredibly efficient way of getting a signal out to the world if you don’t have much transmitting power or a good antenna setup. Since we live in a very small house and can’t exactly be erecting a 40’ antenna tower, that kind of describes my situation for the foreseeable future. There’s also the appeal of going lightweight and portable, as the Adventure Radio Society folks do.
5 words a minute may do for passing the test but it is not acceptable for actual communication. I’ve started studying using the Koch Method, where you start out learning two letters at a reasonably fast rate (15 wpm overall, with each character coming in at 20 wpm), and then add another letter when you master the characters you have so far. It’s aural reflex training—you bypass thinking about the letters (“oh, dot-dot-dot, let’s see, that’s ‘S’, right?)
Anyway, good Morse code operators routinely defeat expert texters in text messaging contests. If I ever get a cell phone, it’s going to be a Nokia Series 60 job, which is readily programmed (happily even in my favorite programming language, Python), so somebody has even whipped out a Morse texter for these types of phones.
26 April 06
Blog Against Disablism Day: May 1
Thanks to Chris of Creek Running North for the link to this event. Please join in if you feel so inclined…
I was just at a Code Pink meeting; one of the things we discussed was the fact that a lot of disability attorneys are pushing hard for Debold voter technology for the vision impaired. Natalie says she feels a bit like a traitor to the disabled community in standing up against voter fraud for ALL citizens.
Rock and a hard place: this is why this is an important issue, and why there are no easy answers…
25 April 06
Seeds Of Resistance
I just heard Vandana Shiva give a wonderful talk about sustainable agriculture and globalization in a presentation organized by the California Student Sustainability Coalition. She is a sustainability activist and ecofeminist who has been working on agricultural issues in India for over 25 years, her original field being physics. She described two waves of industrialization in India, the first being the Green Revolution, which left much violence in its wake due to people’s loss of empowerment, particularly in the Punjab, and the second being globalization, exemplified by a recent US-India bilateral agreement rather frighteningly entitled the “Knowledge Initiative On Agriculture”.
Not surprisingly, such knowledge refers mainly to intellectual property (a term, she notes, only came into use after WTO; before then patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. were quite separate concepts) and the most egregious misappropriation here being the patenting of seeds. It is simply morally wrong and ontologically suspect for thousands of years worth of human creativity that has gone into crop selection to be sequestered away in a corporate patent, leading to the absurdity of it being a crime for farmers to save their own seeds.
But such an absurdity has within it an obvious path of resistance. She is the founder of a movement called Navdanya which aims to promote biological and cultural diversity through nonviolent agriculture. One major project of this movement has been saving seeds, and they have established 34 seed banks in 13 different states across the country. Next year, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Revolt of 1857, they will be burning Bt cotton seeds and distributing seeds from their own banks! (She told an enlightening anecdote from the time of the British: it’s curious how all the English names for the pulses of India have to have an animal in them—why, there’s chick peas, pigeon peas, horse gram…The English just couldn’t get their brain around the idea of diverse vegetarian protein crops.)
At the end she quoted Wendell Berry—eating is a political act. My favorite question response concerned how do you keep up hope? By engaging, she said. Be less concerned with brutal dominating power structures, but more with the creative power within each of us.
24 April 06
Doodling in the Morning
Danny Gregory recently did a lot of work on brown paper. I like the middle ground, the fact that this paper is really cheap (so not intimidating), and the fact that you have to find the mid-tone and work up and down from that.
I haven’t done this too successfully, here, but it was fun.
24 April 06
New Medium
Wanting to have a go with painting in a medium other than watercolor, the other day I went to the campus bookstore and picked up the cheapest acrylic set they had there. At left is the first acrylic painting I’ve ever done. The view is looking west from our house, towards Berryessa Gap.