10 February 06
Vanishing Winter
I actually have a hankering to watch some of the Winter Olympics. Since I always ignore the Olympics, there must be some explanation for this, and probably it has to do with the fact that winter seems very far away here, with it being clear and the temperature reaching the low 70s. But we don’t have a telly, so the hankering will have to pass, though the kitties are a bit disappointed they won’t get to see any of the cat skating.
9 February 06
Not Reading, Still
The Creative License by Danny Gregory arrived today. It made a cross-country trip to the Davis Post Office, was returned to New York, and finally arrived today at my office.
The bummer is, I can’t read it. Not till Tuesday. (The delight is I can already see I need to buy a few copies and distribute them around the planet…)
This Reading Deprivation Week is doing weird things to me. I’m realizing, for instance, how email and reading blogs are a narcotic for me. I must check both emails—work and home—at least 30 times a day.
Nobody needs an answer that fast.
Ever.
If they did, they’d call.
I am not reading the paper. I’m barely reading comments on blog posts of mine, something I normally pounce on like a cat onto a lurking mouse. I’m not reading for pleasure. I AM reading for work, but it’s editing, it’s almost like connecting the dots. I’m restricting my home email to once a day, which I’m sure is breaking the rules.
It’s amazing how simultaneously liberating and freakish this is.
8 February 06
Cell Phones For Moose
If Nokia et al. ever run out of humans as a market for their wares, they might try large ungulates. Moose in Sweden are being equipped with GPS collars hooked up to GSM cell phones for tracking purposes. I think this implies that the Swedes have their rural cell phone coverage more sorted out than we do here in the United States.
7 February 06
Zen Beekeeping
The almond tree is in full blossom. We’re having some unseasonably warm weather here and the fruit trees are responding vigorously.
The landlord’s son’s beekeeping business is now headquartered in Nevada, but he seems to spend a lot of time down here, trucking bees around the Central Valley to pollinate fruit trees. Today the bees were busy—and angry. He got stung several times.
He’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy, young Johnny, but he took the stings with a stoic smile. I don’t know why I was so impressed by this, but I was. No sound from his lips. His life’s mission seems to be keeping his bees happy.
I will be doing fewer blog rounds over the next week. I’ve reached the dreaded week 4 of the Artist’s Way, Reading Deprivation Week. Yikes. I’ve read very little today and it was terrifying and quite liberating. I have yet to check my email, may wait until the morning…
6 February 06
Reference Point
I finally took down the coordinates stamped in a benchmark set by UCD in 1991 on the northwest side of the bridge of Putah Creek and converted them to latitude and longitude values. This is so I can do GPS accuracy experiments—it’s a difficult thing to know precisely where you are on this planet!
5 February 06
Boots
I’ve been wearing my new hiking boots in the house to try and break them in. I’ve never done this thoroughly before… I think it may have made all the difference in my blisterability.
Yesterday it was gorgeous despite warnings of rain. We hiked up Cold Canyon to sketch Gray Pines. I wore my sister’s old hiking boots, not wanting to push it too hard with the new ones. I have high hopes though.
The shooting stars were in bloom, there was coyote sign everywhere, and the grayghost pines grew out of the hillside at odd angles…
I’ve made some prints of the needles as well as some sketches. I’ll try and upload these tomorrow.
Later: uploading prints of gray pine needles
4 February 06
Why We Like Shopping At The Coop -- Part 2
After returning late this afternoon from a sketching hike up Cold Canyon, we stopped by the coop to pick up salad for dinner, and ran into Fernanda near the checkout stand. We took our groceries out to our car, and saw that there was a silver Honda Element parked next to our green one. The license plate on the silver Element read “CMPGNLO”, and it had a license plate frame labeled “Campagnolo”. On the back window, there was a sticker saying “Aerodynamics is overrated”. Not surprisingly, there was a bike inside.
3 February 06
Mugged by a Rooster
Our landlords are getting back tonight after a week away. Their idea about how to tend to the dogs during a Hawaii vacation (three pound large dogs plus Sadie their son’s pound terrier) is to leave a 50-lb bag of food, opened, outside along with gallons and gallons of water. We’re to check them every so often, make sure there are four, and maybe refill the water containers.
Don Gallo the feral bantam rooster has grown used to his morning walnuts cracked by the landlord outside their front door. (The entryway’s a MESS.) He’s been crowing more and more insistently all week.
I went out to get the paper yesterday morning. He followed me—stalked would be a more appropriate verb—all the way there and back, getting ready to pounce in some roosterish attempt to wrest walnuts from my person. We had a face-off; I had a large box and the newspaper; he wasn’t fazed off at all. He dances on his toes and scrapes his wings on the ground noisily in threat. I escaped with my life, locking the door behind me.
Reminds me of when Bsag was mugged by a duck.
[Addendum, Feb. 4th:: Bingo one of the large pound dogs showed up last night barking. We put him in with the others. This morning we discovered a half-gnawed jackrabbit paw outside our front door. Bingo would be hard pressed to catch one of these hares but someone else might have and he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth…]
2 February 06
Blogging For Pigeons
A group of scientifically-inclined pigeons in San Jose will be starting their own blog this August 5th.
1 February 06
Why I Like Shopping at the Coop
Because a third of the way through your list which you left on the counter but can pretty much remember you run into Susan who messed up her knee but still wants to go for a bike ride and by the way could you please send me any info on the wildlife programs she says and we yuk it up and then up shows Warren the Arboretum Superintendent and Susan says hi Warren and I say Warren I was just going to call you to ask you about gray pines like specifically how did the Native Americans use them and he says oh have you seen the painting of them on the wall over here and we all say botany botany here in the coop and he says they ate the seeds but you’d need exactly the right kind of groove on a rock so they don’t smash and then they cooked the whole cone when it was green but then his cellphone goes off and he says they didn’t use them as cellphones and then in the checkout line there’s Julie and she says you didn’t come to my chocolate tasting event tonight and I say well no I’m doing Weightwatchers but just then Numenius slaps down a Chocolove Dark with Orange Peel on the belt and we all laugh and complain how after forty nothing quite works right but chocolate makes it better.