19 December 05
Geranium Photography
Geraniums aren’t my favorite plants, but here’s a way to put them to good use when you run out of film.
18 December 05
Christmas Bird Count + 2.35 Inches of Rain = Soggy People
You sort of knew it was going to be one of those kinds of days when the only conceivable footwear was your Bean Boots that had been outside all summer collecting whatever was out there (including, it turned out, a black widow spider I thought was dead but resurrected itself in the sink). The tarps over Johnny’s beekeeping stuff were swirling wildly in the gales. Oh well. At least we didn’t have owling duty. (The folks who did got there at 3 am with howling gales, horizontal rain, and no owls.)
Our portion of the count was actually fairly easy: count all the birds along Putah Creek Road from the diversion dam to Winters, a distance of only about three miles. It was fine when we were walking. When we stopped we all got frozen. One of the walkie-talkies shorted out and started buzzing and carrying on in Numenius’ backpack. We counted surprisingly high numbers of birds considering the weather and the fact that most of the walnut groves were lakes by the end of our stint, including a fox sparrow and a red-breasted sapsucker, as well as a merlin later in the day.
We ended our count at the Putah Creek Cafe, dripping puddles of water all over the floor and removing wallets, binoculars, gloves, and anything else we could wring out or attempt to wring out…
17 December 05
Nooks In High Places
If you ever are needing to find some I know who to call.
16 December 05
Potlucks Versus Cocktail Parties
I haven’t been to a cocktail party since I lived in Spain, which was a very long time ago. I don’t know anyone who throws cocktail parties, nor would I want to. Jut the idea of it gives me hives, people posturing about how much they make and own and stupidies like this. It’s bad enough at the Marxist Cash Bar at MLA, but at least the posturing is backed up by a reasonable amount of measurable (well, maybe not) intelligence, and the conversations certainly are interesting.
I’ve just gotten home from the office holiday party potluck. The food was excellent but even more excellent was the wine. We have a number of vets and peripherals who know wine and share it generously.
I arrived home, as I said. Awaiting me was an invitation to a cocktail party from my British university in Pacific Palisades, of all places. This is about 2-1/2 hours from here.
The only thing that will take me to Monterey toward the end of January is a good bird, so I’ll wait to RSVP…
15 December 05
The Old Ball Game
There’s been frost in the morning here, as well as dense tule fog. This may be nothing compared to the ice and snow elsewhere in the country right now, but it still marks the season to get caught up on baseball literature. I just finished reading The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball, by Frank Deford. Christy Mathewson, the erudite college graduate and star pitcher of his age, is a favorite of mine!
On a more geeky note, I was quite pleased to note that O’Reilly has a book coming out in February entitled Baseball Hacks , by Joseph Adler, all about how to statistically analyze baseball datasets, of which there are many out there on the net.
14 December 05
Poundage
What with reducing my Santa Barbara bike commute from nine miles, the last three of it up a mountain, to three minutes, combined with the enforced inactivity of my achilles rupture, I’ve put on some weight over the past five years. Just how much weight was made searingly obvious when I went to the doctor two weeks ago for my finger tendon and they made me get on the scale.
I joined Weight Watchers the following day. I’ve never done anything like this before. So far so good. I’m enjoying rethinking what we cook, how we eat, specifically what I have grown to consider an adequate portion size.
Stay tuned…
13 December 05
Kiwi Cat
Today we learned that Charlie has a liking for kiwifruit. What will be next, fancying red peppers?
At least he turns up his nose at citrus fruit, like any proper cat should.
12 December 05
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
There are more prisoners on death row in California—specifically, in San Quentin, just down the freeway from here—than in any other state. Tookie Williams is scheduled to be executed in three-and-a-half hours, Schwarzenegger having rejected his appeal for clemency.
Granting clemency wouldn’t have meant overturning Williams’ verdict, or letting him go free, or anything like that: it would simply have sent him to a different prison to serve out a life sentence.
Apart from the terrible chance that this man may not have committed the crimes of which he’s accused—and remember, he wasn’t accused of co-founding the Crips, he was accused of murdering four people—I just have to wonder what good executing him will do. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t make anybody safer. It has cost the California taxpayer hundreds of thousands of dollars to have kept him for 25 years in a maximum security prison designed to hold one-third of its current capacity. The average length of time a death-row inmate has to wait for a lawyer is fifteen years. AVERAGE. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like.
I despair of this, of a culture that can read of this upcoming execution over cornflakes and think nothing of it. It’s a bad night.
11 December 05
Sketchcrawl Sunday
We had good weather today for our first group SketchCrawl—it wasn’t as sunny as yesterday, but no threat of rain. Alas, the day started out with a bit of a calamity. Poor Diego fell out of a tree he had just bounded up during his morning walk! He hurt his rear leg, not very seriously though. (Happily, Pica’s vet coworker Deana very kindly stopped by and checked him out before she settled into a day of office work just up the road from us.) But he doesn’t get to go outside for a little while.
While I was home waiting for Deana, Pica met the sketchcrawlers, about 10 in total, at Mishka’s Café in town and sketched there for a while. She returned home, and after we concluded Diego would be fine we headed out and met up with the sketchcrawlers in the Arboretum. A few had already dispersed, and we ended strolling through campus with just two others, Mike who had come up from Walnut Creek, and Emma who had organized this Davis event.
I did about a dozen sketches total, ranging from one of the egghead sculptures to the impossible angles of the Death Star. Above is a sketch of an acacia in the Arboretum, as well as a bridge over the Arboretum waterway.
Thanks to Emma for organizing this—it was great fun and I’m glad the sketchcrawls are turning into something of a bimonthly event!
10 December 05
Birding and a Potluck
Richard of A Brit Abroad is coming to the end of his two-year postdoc here at UC Davis, and decided to organize a birding trip followed by a potluck at his house. He is unquestionably the person who has seen most birds in Yolo County in the space of two years without knowing how to drive a car, and managed to hit 250 such species this morning with an Eastern Phoebe we all saw along Putah Creek. (Later in the day he finally caught up with a swamp sparrow, but by that point we had come home to make couscous for the potluck.)
Richard then shared some slides of birds he’d seen this year, which ran like some kind of advertisement for the airline industry: UK to Davis to British Columbia to Texas to Australia to Ontario to UK to Oregon to Arizona, etc. (I’m sure I have these in the wrong order but you get the idea.)
He’s been wonderful to have around these past two years. The first bird we shared was the scissor-tailed flycatcher, seen within a week or two of his arrival in Davis; the commotion around that bird slotted him straight into the birding zeitgeist here and it’s going to be tough when he finally heads off to Paris later this month…