21 August 05
Contentment
Let it never be said Charlie doesn’t know how to relax.
20 August 05
Gadding Round the Getty
I’m in Los Angeles for the weekend, seeing a dear friend. We hit the book arts show at the Getty today. It was fun to see recent Russian homages to early Soviet book arts, El Lissitsky’s One Only Kid, and a fabulous silk spool construction. A favorite was a single page printed 184 times, torn at a slightly further away spot each time, so the book formed a triangular wedge and the page was just legible.
Christina is a print artist of extraordinary talent and we have spent much of the day in breathless conversations about the possible. (And dreaming about unlimited studio space.)
20 August 05
All Ready To Go
Last Saturday we took Diego to the vet for a checkup and shots (he didn’t like the experience one bit). This meant getting the cat carrier out from its storage place disassembled in my closet. Upon its return Charlie decided the carrier was a nice place to hang out and he has taken to dozing inside, as shown at right. Diego ventures inside it too, though he usually doesn’t stay as long.
18 August 05
Squeam
When my sister was about 11, she was bitten in the left leg by a neighbor’s German Shepherd as she dove into a swimming pool. (The dog was trying to “save” her and ripped a nice gash all down her calf muscle.) My mother, superb in any emergency, lashed her leg with a silk dressing gown and drove her to the hospital with a white hanky flying from the window.
I went along a few weeks later to watch them take out the stitches. I fainted dead away. The doctors all left the stitch-removal table and lifted my legs high over my head. I was mortified, of course: I was twelve.
Last night I got a call from the landlady that there was a “sick” magpie in their yard. I went over there with gloves, a box, and a towel, and got the magpie out of the dog-filled yard and over to the Wildlife Health Center.
Magpies have been dying in their hundreds, probably thousands, with this year’s West Nile virus outbreak. My colleague Yvette was still working at 6:30. She wanted to take some samples of the bird before it died. These will help with identifying not just the exact reason for death (it could, after all, have been poisoned) but also can give us important genetic data about this endemic species.
Getting blood from a bird so close to death, where dehydration is a given and there is almost no blood pressure, was a challenge. I held the bird while she tried to draw blood from the jugular, then the leg, then finally the wing.
The wing part did it. Sweat was pouring down my back and although I couldn’t see my face in the mirror I knew I was pale as a ghost.
Guess I didn’t grow out of that one, then. I buried my head between my knees and gave thanks for the life of the magpie (Yvette euthanized it at this point).
18 August 05
Balloon Invasion
While walking the cats this morning, we saw a flotilla of four balloons moving southwards quite nearby. One floated almost overhead on the way to a landing in the field to the south. Alas the propane burners did frighten the kitties: Charlie doesn’t spook easily but he did this time. All four balloons landed within a kilometer of the house.
16 August 05
The Lost Art of the Thank You Note
I have a birthday coming up next week, and my mother sent a card and a gift before she left to visit my brother in Alaska.
We’re in touch a lot, my mother and I: she lives about two hours away. We speak on the phone often, we email. But I don’t write her letters so much anymore. She’s a very thoughtful letter-writer, and whatever awkwardness she might feel socially vanishes when her pen hits the page. Anyway, I picked up my own pen to thank her for my birthday present and suddenly it dawned on me it had been a long time since I had done this for anyone.
She taught us to write thank-you notes growing up. It’s an art, and it follows a very simple formula. The art comes in making it sound less formulaic. It’s not about you, this letter; it’s thanking someone for their thoughtful generosity.
Leslie Harpold of The Morning News has a good column on this (via Rebecca’s Pocket via MakeReady).
15 August 05
Calligraphy Into Font II
I’m now well underway with the project of turning my foundational hand into a font. It’s extremely slow work, of course, though now that I’m getting the workflow down, things will move ahead more quickly. At right are the first four glyphs I’m happy with. Ninety-five more to go after that, and then comes setting the character widths, kerning, and finally hinting!
14 August 05
The "M" Word
One of the advantages of working in academia, which I’ve done most of my professional life, is that you get quite insulated from corporate doublespeak, the scarily surreal world of Dilbert. This is changing, though. Universities in the U.S. are facing budget cuts and all compete for the best students. In upper levels of university administration this means that eyes are ever more fixed on the bottom line, and how to improve it. Strategic plans and mission statements pop up like Hello Kitty banners all over the place. Nobody ever pays any attention to them, but it’s important to be seen to be “doing” something. Style, not substance. Slick, not sweaty. Fluff.
And then, suddenly, right out of the blue, everyone’s a goddam marketing expert. Oh, but you have to have branding, a veterinary epidemiologist tells me. We need a logo, says another one, never mind that this contradicts university policy (there is already a UC Davis logo and an illegitimate Vet Med logo, and we need a third on top of that? Oy.). I’m a communications specialist and I agree, the message needs to get out there, but I get very weary of these pushes to corporateness when underneath it all it’s not about being better or more effective, it’s about looking good and staying on message.
Weary, and also suspicious. If we have an undergraduate drinking problem—which we do—surely the way to address it is not by marketing and advertising to the students but by trying to understand exactly what it is that makes them want to drink 21 shots on their 21st birthday (hint: it’s not because they’re a member of the “Millennial Generation,” a term coined by a clever dick marketing whizz). I wish more emphasis were placed on learning around here rather than how to attract more dollars. It’s rule by committee taken to glossy, ludicrous extremes.
Everyone protests that more dollars will lead to better learning, but I’m seeing that this marketing drive has taken on a life of its own, has become its own end.
Which, if you think about the most successful marketing campaign in history, is just about on the mark. It was a few unsavory characters in Germany in the 1930s who got it so very right, where the logo became the vortex leading to a hell never before seen. Logo? Check. Strategic plan? Check. Staying on message? Check, check, check mate.
If you need a marketing campaign to be so successful, though, where’s Osama Bin Laden’s? Where’s the logo? Where’s the strategic plan? Where’s the mission statement? Where are the ubiquitous ineffectual committees? Oh. Right. In Washington.
14 August 05
Waterfall Lost, Waterfall Found
Who’s to say that the era of exploration is over? A 120 meter waterfall was recently brought to light in a remote corner of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California.
12 August 05
Soundscape
Karen of Not Native Fruit has come up with ten sounds from her immediate surroundings.
Here are some from here, at this time of year:
1) Crickets. Fewer than other years, because they’ve disced the field recently. At least two species, as I’m hearing them now.
2) A train across the field: a freight, a commuter, a first-class freight. They all sound different, have different whistles.
3) Coyotes howling, almost always at the train, always at night.
4) The sound of lightly pouring water. This is the cats’ drinking fountain.
5) The screech of a barn owl, eerie, ghoulish. It makes my heart sing every time, though.
6) The clatter of a trailer-truck laden with tomatoes as it gears down to get over the tiny bridge over the creek.
7) The snuffling of a raccoon outside. He’s taken to sitting in the walnut tree.
8) The chatter of cyclists as they barrel down from the bridge, faster than the truck went up. (Both these sounds make the cats growl, or at least look.)
9) The sound of the landlord lovingly chastising his dogs.
10) The hum of the fridge, omnipresent, unoticeable till it stops.