12 June 05
View From The Train
Today I took the train down to Berkeley to have brunch with my family. (Pica joined us in Berkeley after staying overnight at her mum’s in Bodega Bay—it was something of a family weekend for both of us.) The train ride offers good views of rural Solano County, and to the south Mt. Diablo (3849 feet high) in Contra Costa County is ever present. At left is a sketch of the peak looking over the Suisun Marsh.
10 June 05
Migrations
For several months now we’ve planning to move Feathers of Hope off of Movable Type, mostly because of the plague of comment spam, which finally exceeded our system’s capabilities last week, but also because Movable Type isn’t scaling well for us after two plus years worth of posts. Tomorrow I’m going to finally hole up in the office (the land of broadband) and do the migration to Textpattern. There may be a fair bit of sawdust around so please bear with us as I bring the site back into order.
9 June 05
Cars and More
Last fall I took a class through Davis Adult Education on basic auto mechanics. I was driving a new Honda Element that didn’t need an oil change yet or a whole lot else but I spent many evenings hunkered over other people’s engines, holding flashlights while they changed THEIR oil, adjusted timers, and so on.
Our instructor was Dave Egolf, a slight bearded man in a T-shirt whose attitude toward cars was more zen than not. He taught us to keep a car journal, where to buy quality filters for cheap, why you should buy good quality gas, and what an alternator does.
Dave is on the front cover of today’s Davis Enterprise (no online photo available). He’s the principal of the King High School here in Davis. The photo shows him in a suit, handing a white carnation to a graduating senior: sometimes Davis still behaves like a small town.
8 June 05
Umami
During our visit to North Carolina, Nicole taught us about umami. I had no idea that there is now considered to be a fifth primary taste sensation, in addition to the familiar ones of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. This is umami (sometimes spelled umame.) This taste sensation is sometimes described as “savory” and is found particularly in soy sauce, fish sauce, walnuts, mushrooms, and meats.
This fifth taste sensation was first studied nearly 100 years ago by the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda who isolated the flavor from kombu seaweed. What he isolated turned out to be the amino acid glutamate, and this lead him to develop the seasoning agent monosodium glutamate. It wasn’t until the 1980s before the discovery of umami was generally accepted, and in the year 2000 scientists identified umami receptors on the tongue that responded specifically to glutamate.
So that’s why I enjoyed my lunchtime mushroom quiche today!
7 June 05
Point and Click
I’m getting the cats back into clicker training.
It reminds them they’re in charge. It relieves boredom for cats whose world is very small. It incidentally teaches them things like “down” and “up” and “target.” They are very enthusiastic and purr the entire time. We all have a blast.
For me it’s a way of not dealing with the fact that the gray tabby Diego spotted outside is now starving, and that its fate is to die from this, or whatever disease gets it, or the coyote whose sign is now regularly very near the house, or by my catching it and having it euthanized; this one’s not tamable.
I don’t like any of those options…
6 June 05
Dog Days
We’re back from our trip to North Carolina and Virginia. The wheatfield is ready for harvesting: the wheat stalks all bent over. The peaches are nearly ripe. The Bullock’s oriole has stuck around, and there’s now a chicken in residence in the front yard.
It was a wonderful break. We got a good healthy canine fix as well—we spent time with two fine dogs. We met Tsuga, well known to readers of Fragments from Floyd. And we were guests of Emmett, Nicole and Mike’s dog, whom with we played many a game of hedgehog, not to mention sharing several shopping trips to downtown Carrboro. A sketch of Emmett is at right.
1 June 05
Countin’ Churches
We’ve been in the southeast for a week now. A trip to Cape Hatteras and two boat trips, a quick trip to Kitty Hawk, a quick trip to Floyd, a quick trip to Greensboro (John Neal Books), and HUNDREDS of churches later….
Going out on the boat into the Gulf Stream to see unusual seabirds yielded four life birds for both of us: black-capped petrel, Audubon’s shearwater, band-rumped storm-petrel, and bridled tern. There were many Wilson’s storm-petrels and a few Leach’s and a good, close look at two sperm whales, a longer look at Cuvier’s beaked whales. Huge manta rays. The deck hands caught several mahi-mahi and a huge blue marlin.
Numenius had the idea to play a new road game: guess the denomination of the next church. The problem with this is that there are so many, and we quickly realized we had seen more protestant denominations than bird species. So we started to make a list, driving from Cape Hatteras north into Virginia and then basically heading due west; a pretty solid transect. You can do a convincing cultural geography of a place by noticing where, for instance, a presbyterian church makes a sudden entry into the landscape coincidental with well-kept lawns versus a preponderance of churches with the words “apostolic” or “gospel” in their names that tend to concentrate around poor quality bottomland and decaying cars abandoned on overgrown patches of land that is no longer farmed.
We have been so plagued with spam during this past week we’ve had to shut down comments (the server’s been brought down several times, apparently). Sorry. We’ll work to fix this when we get home.
24 May 05
Heading East, Again
We’re off on a trip to the southeast, to see Nicole and Mike and birds and Fred. Blogging will be sporadic. The cats will be left in the wonderful care of Becky, of crow fame, who will now be able to stumble out of bed in her jammies, head over to the roost at 5 am, check on the radiocrows, and stumble back into bed, instead of heading to Davis from Sacramento having at least made coffee and put her contact lenses in.
I don’t know what the cats will make of this routine.
23 May 05
Middle Course
The Senate this afternoon reached a compromise over the filibuster standoff. Hard-liners on both sides are decrying it, which I suppose means it was a good day for moderation. Anyway, how can one not be a little pleased when Michelle Malkin is left sputtering “the GOP parade of pusillanimity marches on. With this pathetic cave-in, the Republicans have sealed their fate as a Majority in Name Only.” And more significantly, James Dobson is saying that the compromise was a “complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats.” (Via Crooks and Liars.)
Frist lost for sure in this turn of events, and by extension so did Bush and the religious Right. The moderate Republicans are asserting themselves: let’s hope this marks the widening of the fissure between the moderates and the radical Right.
One final skirmish remains in this particular battle: it is by no means a sure thing that the three judges that the Democrats agreed not to filibuster are all going to win Senate approval. At least that’s what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is hinting.
22 May 05
Another Blogger Meetup
Today was one of those perfect San Francisco days: warm, sunny, nothing more than a light breeze. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry over. It is such a peaceful way to enter a city, by boat. And affords me lots more opportunities to sketch than sitting clenching my teeth behind the wheel on I-80.
We met Siona and Maria at the Ferry Building; sat outside and talked for some time about a different blogger meetup in Boston just two weeks ago (the narrative was illustrated with sketches); moved out of the shade and into the sun where we sat under a statue of Gandhi and talked about books, authenticity, the French, and cheese. It was a wonderful day and we decided that next time we’ll actually EAT some cheese instead of just talking about it…