29 November 05
Epsilon
This year’s record Atlantic hurricane season comes to a close with yes, yet another storm. Tropical Storm Epsilon is the 26th named storm of this season, the most ever recorded. It is in the mid-Atlantic and not expected to reach land, unlike Tropical Storm Delta, which last night slammed into the Canary Islands.
28 November 05
Ouch
While changing the 5-gallon water bottle at work today I somehow dropped it onto my hand. I thought it was just going to turn into a spectacular bruise but I suspect, now, I’ve done something to one of the ligaments or tendons between my fore- and middle fingers. I’m off to the doctor in the morning.
So this post will be brief. I can’t even indulge in some pen magic with the shipment of Clairefontaine paper that arrived today…
27 November 05
Art Around Lunch
Conveniently, the art store was right across the street from where we had lunch in Berkeley. This was the Blick Arts store, down near 5th and University. The lunch was at an Indian place. We found the ox gall, but no Derwent Signature watercolor pencils. I still don’t know if this Winsor & Newton ox gall is synthetic or actually made from bile of cow.
Later on the in the afternoon, we went up to the UC Botanical Gardens to sketch a bit. This is definitely one of my favorite spots in Berkeley—I should get there more often.
26 November 05
Galling
While travelling to Boston in May I left a pencil case at an airport gate. Nothing in it was really irreplaceable, and I quickly bought a few pens, pencils, and Caran d’Ache watercolor crayons to replace my Derwent Signatures on an interim basis.
I still haven’t picked up new Derwents but plan to tomorrow on a trip to Berkeley. And as a wetting agent, instead of water, I’m going to try to find ox gall, a medium made from the bile in bovine gall bladders, normally used in marbling and lithography, which supposedly makes a much smoother blend than water.
I’ll let you know how this all goes.
25 November 05
Lost In The Rain
We had a nature and culture outing today in Davis and Sacramento with Pica’s mom. Our plan was to go birding in the morning with a field trip starting in southeast Davis at 7:45 AM, and then split off from the trip to go to the Crocker Art Museum and then to a movie. The field trip didn’t quite go as planned. We met the folks at the start of the field trip, headed out of the shopping mall parking lot, and promptly didn’t know who to follow. We thus ended up setting a new record in getting lost during a field trip.
What we had heard was that several folks were interested in going to Slide Hill Park in Davis to look for a stray mountain chickadee. We thought that was where the group was headed, so we birded there for a little bit, with no sign of the group or the chickadee. The most interesting creature there was a small furry dog that looked like a pig. We then went our own way to the Yolo Bypass wildlife refuge.
The shorebirds and waterfowl were quite happy in the rain there. We saw 4 American bitterns there, maybe 20 common snipe, and had a good look at two lovely long-billed curlews. Then we went over the bypass to the Crocker, where there was a exhibition of paintings by the early 20th century American artist Marsden Hartley.
At the end of the day we went to see Good Night, and Good Luck, playing back in Davis. It’s an excellent movie, a focused little vignette on a episode in history I didn’t know much about. But I remembered that I had heard of Edward Murrow and Fred Friendly as a kid because we had several record albums from their Hear It Now radio series—the recording of the radio announcer describing the Hindenberg disaster stands out in my mind.
24 November 05
Not For Guys
My mother arrived at lunchtime today. We went to the local Nepalese restaurant for a very good thanksgiving lunch and then dropped Numenius back at home before returning to see Pride and Prejudice.
There were three men in the audience, one of whom walked out.
23 November 05
Little Apples
Every now and then I get to make pretty maps at work. My new computer worked hard today—in a 3 1/2 hour run it produced over 7800 maps of plant species in California. After that I summed together a few of these to make species richness maps for a few favorite genera in the state. This is a map of the number of manzanita species in different parts of the state. Blue is zero species, red is high (about 10 species), and yellow is in between.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and don’t eat like these folks.
22 November 05
Language Learning
I’m back in Hebrew. I almost didn’t, because my three classmates were not going to come back, and the opportunity arose to take the same class over again.
Part of me was very weary of the idea but also welcomed the chance to consolidate what I’d learned. It was a huge learning curve at the beginning, there.
I finally feel as though I’m making some real progress: I was able to follow along with a lot of the prayers and readings at a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday. It’s the very best kind of motivation. I know you need to push hard to get anywhere but sometimes it’s nice to get this sense of accomplishment…
21 November 05
Singing For The Brain
Therapists have been finding that group singing sessions can unlock communication blocks in individuals with dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.
20 November 05
Thirty Years Ago Today...
... Franco died. Amnesty International has calculated that about 30,000 people disappeared and were buried in mass graves either during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or under Franco’s long rule.
I was in boarding school in England in 1975. I remember worrying about my family in Madrid, about whether there would be some kind of violence. I remember wondering how many people would emerge from the woodwork, people who had been in hiding pretty much since the War. About who’d return from exile.
The running joke of course was that nobody was ever really sure if Franco was dead, or when he had died, or whether he’d be coming back in some grotesque parody of the resurrection (a book did in fact appear a couple of years later entitled Y el Tercer Año Resucitó.) The war memorial he built (well, his prisoners of war built) into a mountainside northwest of Madrid was his own mausoleum. His tomb lies just below the mosaic image of Christ Triumphant in the cupola, which is a few centimeters smaller in diameter than St. Peter’s (lest the Caudillo be accused of being bigger than his boots).
There was a huge mass yesterday in the Valle de los Caídos for Franco. Hundreds of arms raised in fascist salutes. They are upset, it seems, with the Socialist government’s systematic dismantling of the temporal power of the church in Spain.