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.
1 August 05
Refuge By The Sea
I’ve been down at a conference at Asilomar near Monterey the past couple of days. It’s been blessedly foggy here, following the days of 100 degree heat in Davis. Asilomar is a famous lovely conference site, started almost a hundred years ago amidst a native Monterey pine forest just upslope from sand dunes, a white sandy beach, and the Pacific Ocean. In terms of wildlife, I’ve seen a fawn outside my room window, a young deer with antlers just outside the dining hall, Heermann’s gulls on the beach, acorn woodpeckers, and raccoons. They say a there’s a local mountain lion with Asilomar on his beat as well. The big meeting room in which I’m writing this was built in 1915, designed by Bay Area architect Julia Morgan and is an exemplar of Arts and Crafts style, complete with lettering in versals on the horizontal beams halfway up to the ceiling.
Very nice. Let’s not forget my favorite sound here—the bell rung from the top of the social hall announcing meal times!
31 July 05
30 July 05
Calligraphy Into Font
Perhaps it’s a midsummer thing but once again I’m interested in the project of turning our calligraphy hands into fonts. Regardless of how these work as typefaces, having a digital representation of a calligraphy hand will be extremely useful in solving calligraphic layout and design problems. Luckily, there’s a good freeware font design program to get started with this task—namely FontForge.
29 July 05
Clicker Training Squirrels
The new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features forty trained squirrels, all opening walnuts with their teeth, sitting in a pristine room. Tim Burton was adamant about using live squirrels rather than computer graphics (fur looks cheesy in CG).
According to this article, many of the squirrels were bottle fed from babies and then trained using the standard operand conditioning.
I’m trying to teach our cats to come when called. This is difficult because they come anyway if they think there’s a treat in it for them, but it does seem to be working. I can get them to come from another room now.
A woman on the cat clicker list is training a bobcat kitten that has suffered head trauma and is not releasable. Within one minute, this biting, unhappy feline was putting nose to target. Within three minutes, it was jumping over a log.
For animals that are confined, this is not a circus trick. It gets them to exercise their minds and their bodies and to communicate with humans. Wilbur the bobcat can do a tremendous amount of good in captivity if he can be used for education purposes—which he can, once he stops biting.
28 July 05
Long Road Out of the Cabinets
There is a huge amount of information in the world’s natural history museums that is languishing in drawers and cabinets which are rarely seen. Slowly some of this material is being made accessible via the Web, but it’s a long haul, especially with current funding priorities. Here is a story about the hopes of the Florida Museum of Natural History to create a national butterfly database out of their immense collection of some 3.5 million specimens.