20 January 06
Cat Blogging Illustrated
Today’s Illustration Friday theme is cats. Diego and Charlie insisted I participate.
19 January 06
A Swearing-In
I went because I hadn’t been before. I went because she didn’t have anyone going with her. I went because I was curious. I went because of my ambivalence about my own American citizenship. I went to stand in line and stand in line again and watch Bureaucracy in Action.
What I saw was this: generations. I saw the generations of people, alive and present and dead and gone, who waited for this moment. My forebears (well, some of them). Numenius’ forebears. Generations from around the globe. Diversity is what makes us be our very best, said the judge swearing everyone in. It’s what Dr. King taught us.
The oath they swore is one I wouldn’t take: but my privilege is having been born here. So I needn’t worry about oaths. It was something, seeing 400 people suddenly becoming American, laboring through the difficult consonants. It was something, this evidence always around me, suddenly concentrated, of how this is a culture of immigrants.
We had lunch, I the English/American designer and she the Russian soil scientist, at an Afghan restaurant, representing a culture none of the three of ours has ever managed to subdue. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do.
Today, as I went to lunch at the Iranian restaurant just up the street, I saw the man we had been standing behind in line. He became a citizen yesterday also. I crossed the street to shake his hand, congratulate him. He looked like a French lefty from the 80s, which probably makes him a Bulgarian economist from the 00s. His name, he said, was David. He was very touched I had bothered…
18 January 06
Ivory-Billed Tale
We just got from the presentation at this month’s meeting of the Yolo Audubon Society. John Trochet, a Sacramento area birder and a meticulous field surveyor, gave a riveting account of how he came to see the recently rediscovered Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. He has been a long-time explorer of the swamps of the Southeast and an occasional ivory-billed searcher. Last April, he went on his own little expedition into the Arkansas swamps with another ivory-billed seeker. After running into the official Cornell Lab and Nature Conservancy search teams and dancing around the question of what they were both doing in the woods, they were invited to the private home of one of the researchers, made to sign non-disclosure agreements (this was before the public announcement of the resighting), and were told the whole tale. Two days later, John and his two companions, now coordinating with the Cornell/TNC folks, had the great good fortune to get a three-second glimpse of an ivory-billed, not far from where they put in with the canoe that day.
17 January 06
16 January 06
New Pencils
Before we spent a couple of hours yesterday standing in line at the Oakland Museum, we stopped off at the art store at the foot of University Street in Berkeley, where I picked up a set of the new Derwent Graphitint pencils. These are water-soluble graphite pencils that have some colored pigments thrown into the mix. They’re intriguing pencils, with a subtle color range, good for landscapes, with the colors becoming more vivid when wetted with a brush. Above is a sketch of Charlie and Diego snoozing on their kitchen countertop mat.
15 January 06
Standing in Line
I’d have done so for even longer for the privilege of seeing Don Larsen’s perfect game ball and Yogi Berra’s mitt behind it, but that was a LOT of waiting around. A word to the wise: order your tickets online ahead of time…
14 January 06
Hedwig Visits Davis
The snowy owl, first spotted yesterday about 12 miles south of our house by local birder Joan Humphrey, has stuck around for another day. I saw the bird yesterday, heading to the spot with four other folks from my lab, and this morning I returned with Pica. The bird was eventually refound a couple miles north of the original spot and was hunkering near a white motorhome amidst some farm equipment. Above is my sketch of the scene; it was pouring rain so I sketched from within the car. Since our outing was successful, Pica called her Mum who came out here from Bodega Bay for the owl. They saw it this afternoon, a life bird for Pica’s Mum!
13 January 06
A full day
I’m just back from a day of a) Macworld b) going to the SF Center for the Book on the bus (plus very long walk) to retrieve my Art Bin I left there on Saturday, only to find it closed c) Macworld d) SFCB again, got bin, minus camera which has mysteriously disappeared in the interim e) sharing a bustop session with a Peruvian con artist on the way back from SFCB f) sharing train seats with two furniture buyers for some unspecified department chain, probably Neiman Marcus (GOD how boring AND stressful their lives are) f) a rejuvenating visit to the Coop g) arriving home and finding that Numenius had gone looking for a frickin’ snowy owl without me (he does NOT chase birds so this is something of a first).
I did take my sketch book and will post a sketch once I’ve gone for the snowy owl myself tomorrow.
12 January 06
Green Eggs and Ham
Or at least the green ham bit. Taiwanese scientists have bred several pigs that glow in the dark and whose skin has a greenish tinge. They accomplished this trick by introducing jellyfish genetic material into the pig’s embryo.
The aim of this research is not improved forest camouflage for the hogs, but rather to aid in tracking pig genetic material when their cells are introduced into other animals, for instance in stem cell research.
11 January 06
Memed
I was reading this over at Sister Spirit and was thinking about doing it even before I knew I’d been tagged by Chris, so here goes:
Four Jobs You’ve Had
1. Interpreter for a project of hail suppression in southeast Spain
2. Bilingual secretary (yes, that was shorthand in FRENCH) in a reinsurance office in Paris
3. Clerk in the electoral offices of Santa Barbara County
4. Administrative assistant in the liver transplant section of the UC Davis Medical Center
Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over
1. Casablanca
2. The Rookie
3. The Singing Detective (I know this was made for TV but I saw it on the big screen)
4. Lord of the Rings
Four Places You’ve Lived
1. Madrid, Spain
2. Montpellier, France
3. Cambridge, UK
4. Cambridge, Mass
Four TV Shows You Love to Watch
I don’t have a TV…
Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation
1. Barrow, Alaska (life yellow-throated loon)
2. Bisbee, Arizona (on the way to life buff-breasted flycatcher)
3. Gibraltar (yep, it really is one of the craziest places in the world.)
4. Opatija, Croatia (I think; it was Yugoslavia then)
Four Blogs You Visit Daily
1. Via Negativa
2. Toad in the Hole
3. A Brit Abroad, though he’s in a different abroad now and doesn’t post as much, are you listening, Richard?
4. Fezoca’s Blurbs
Four of Your Favorite Foods
1. tofu cilantro
2. the veggie soft tacos at Mariachi in Davis
3. the veggie soft tacos at the roach coach on the UCSB campus
4. Jefferson Davis pie
Four Places You’d Rather Be
1. anywhere in Sweden, anytime
2. at the dinner table with good friends
3. a baseball game
4. with my sleeves rolled up, making mudpies (literal and metaphorical)
Four Albums You Can’t Live Without
I can and do live without lots of albums. I think as a couple we need music therapy. But I seem to be recreating some kind of iTunes collection which is in process and I’ll report back at a later date.
Four Vehicles You’ve Owned
1. Subaru GL hatchback (my first car I got at 37)
2. Honda Element (bought two years ago when I donated the Subie to a coworker in great need)
Four people I’m tagging
I’m not tagging anyone. Whoever would like to take this on, please do. Jenny ? Fer ?