11 August 05
Those Amazin' A's
Don’t believe my baseball prognostications. Towards the end of June we went down to Oakland to watch the A’s play the Giants. Since both teams were well below .500 at that point I figured the game didn’t have much significance, since it seemed highly unlikely either team would be making the playoffs.
Ah, but the Oakland A’s have been on an amazing tear since the closing weeks of May. Today they moved into first place in their division, beating in a game at home their rival for that spot the L.A. Angels 5-4. I checked on the score during the 7th inning, saw that the A’s were down 4-0, and thought oh well. Later in the afternoon I looked again, and saw that the A’s had won on the strangest of plays.
The A’s had tied it up 4-4 in the 7th, and the game stayed tied until the bottom of the 9th. Two outs, the A’s had runners on 1st and 3rd, and Eric Chavez was at the plate. After the first pitch was called a ball, the catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher Francisco Rodriguez. The pitcher failed to catch it. Seeing the ball glance off his glove, the runner on third, Jason Kendall, alertly broke for the plate and scored. End of game. The A’s take over the division lead. Wow.
10 August 05
Why You Should Pay Attention When Your Mother Says Your Horoscope Sucks
So I get to work on time for once having biked in and I look in my calendar and it says I need to be at the dentist in ten minutes so Kathy says quick take my car so I hop in and get there but my appointment is actually for tomorrow not today but they’ll squeeze me in anyway and the dentist is a kindly tall Swedish endodontist and he explains to me patiently why the root canal I had done in Spain in 1979 is going to need to get redone but that there are Risks like breaking the crown or breaking the tooth and by the way this isn’t cheap and would you like an appointment on Thursday so I think well now that I’m out I’ll just pick up some cat food so I take my keys into Petco because that’s where my Petco discount tag lives and as I’m paying I realize these are my keys not Kathy’s and I don’t have her phone number so I have to call my former office mate whose number I remember to get Kathy’s and then I call the guys to jimmy into the car and the moral is just do one thing at a time like you’re sposed to but to make myself feel better I go to the art store at lunchtime because that always works.
9 August 05
Psittacine In The Morning
Another exotic bird has joined Don Gallo about our homestead. For the past two mornings, we’ve heard and seen some sort of parakeet up in our nectarine tree and flying over from the osage orange a hundred meters distant. I don’t know of any psittacine colonies in Davis, though there are plenty in California. Pica saw some red about his face on an overall green body, which points toward him being a red-masked parakeet or a mitred parakeet, but as a likely escapee, he really could be anything. We won’t know until we get a better look.
8 August 05
Lunchtime
Riding home at lunch, which is absurd since it’s really only a seven minute walk, doesn’t give me time for much musing or anything else; occasionally a three-line poem will flash into my head and the key then is to make sure I remember it when I get to where I’m going.
On Friday, though, I rode into campus. It was very hot. The smell of the California bay trees mixed with warm pine needles. It’s so intoxicating I almost forget where I’m going and keep on the bike path that will give me more of this.
A juvenile ground squirrel darts in front of me, tail high in a warning banner. The horses in the field are clustered in the shade of the lone cottonwood. The wild grapes are opulent lime green this year. Four plum tomatoes, spilled from a truck that was taking the corner too fast, lie in the bike path like poison easter-eggs. The slow freight train creaks over the tracks, in less of a hurry than I. The smell of trains—wood and oil and smoke and timber and—what—iron? rust?—clatters southwest.
I see fewer magpies now.
7 August 05
Omniglot
This site is a guide to written language which seems pretty comprehensive. All manner of scripts are covered, everything from Glagolitic to Tengwar. The multilingual tongue-twisters are quite fun as well.
6 August 05
Cleaning House
Before we got cats, cleaning the house was something that happened sporadically and usually in a flurry before someone came over. I fess up to having had completely unpredictable (and terrifying to Numenius) fits of cleaning here and there when the piles got too big or the dust bunnies got too invasive, but mostly it was pretty lackadaisical.
Cat hair makes this kind of housekeeping no longer viable. Parts of the house get cleaned (quickly) every day; the whole house gets tidied and cleaned (again, quickly) every week.
The colonies of spiders that used to thrive high in the rafters of the living room and in the bathrom and in the bedroom are definite victims to this new houseproud regime. If the duster doesn’t get them, the cats do. They are slowly migrating back outside.
5 August 05
Flu Watchers
The director of the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works, Walter Boyce, was on the radio station KQED this morning in a panel discussion about avian flu. Perhaps it’s time for me to start reading up on this potential pandemic. It turns out bloggers are definitely ahead of the curve in keeping track of avian flu, as this article relates. There’s lots of fine material too at the Flu Wiki.
4 August 05
A Baseball Outing
Today we took the day off and went to San Francisco with two Brazilian friends (her blog, the Chatterbox, is in Portuguese; less frequently-updated but in English is Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town). We were going to see the Giants play the Rockies. The Giants have been miserable of late and seemed to be continuing in the same funk until the bottom of the eighth where they looked almost like the Oakland A’s, who are charging into the end of the season in the most amazing fashion after an indifferent start, featuring a lot of young, exciting players.
It’s been said a lot, but it bears repeating: this is one of the most beautiful sports venues anywhere. We sat high in the nosebleed section, overlooking the bay, looking down on barn swallows and rough-winged swallows and an awful lot of people who were goofing off work like us. We got buzzed by an Anna’s hummingbird and on the way to the park from the ferry saw a peregrine falcon overhead, possibly one of the young from this year’s successful nest on the PG&E building…
4 August 05
Walks With Cats
Our kitties are indoors cats, but not wanting to deprive them utterly of outdoors life, early on we got them used to being on a leash and harness and started going for strolls with them outside. This has become a twice-daily routine, and they are very insistent especially in the morning that they get their little stroll.
As Pica illustrates here, such an outing is really a two-person job. The kitties are wont to go their own directions. Most of the duration we let them wander about without holding on to their leashes, and since they cut down the wheat, they have a large open field in which to romp.
2 August 05
Fun Package in the Mail
A wonderful thing! A package arrived from Japan today with many pens, none of which you can get here. There are also two Pentel waterbrushes (at least I think that’s what they are; my Japanese isn’t so hot).
Thanks, Butuki. I’ll post a sketch the minute I get to it. (By the way: how exactly do you make a riceball?)
I returned from my Hebrew class tonight with the sense of triumph appropriate to having composed my first sentence.