17 July 05
Tour de France or Harry Potter?
In July, my mornings tend to go like this: I get up, get the tea on, get online to check on the Tour de France website to see what’s going on. The time lag between California and Europe means that normally I can catch the last hour or so; there are newsflashes every few minutes.
A friend brought over my copy of the Half-Blood Prince last night. She stayed to have a bowl of gazpacho with us. I stopped reading around eleven; got up around 7, intending to intersperse my TdF newsflashes with Harry.
It was not to be; the intense heat has driven a lot of ants indoors. They were swarming over one of the catbowls. This is the hardest day of the Tour, with six brutal Pyrrenean climbs. I caught the end and George Hincapie’s stage win.
I finally finished the book at 2:30 this afternoon. Several readers of Feathers of Hope are reading it too, so I will say nothing except hurry up so we can talk about it…
16 July 05
Reptile Refuge
We went to the Sacramento Zoo today to take a class on drawing animals. Our instructor was Robert Dvorak, who taught the travel sketching course we took here in April. The Sacramento Zoo is a good size for this exercise, it being easy to do the rounds in a half-day. We started at the flamingos, visited the hornbills and griffon vulture, and ended up at the giraffes (a challenge to get all angles and legs on the page, particularly when they move) before breaking for lunch.
By that time I was in my rhythm. We continued on to the zebras, bongo-bongos, orangutans, and chimpanzees. We moved on to the big cats, but they were all in their shelters from the heat. We got the hint and proceeded to take refuge in the coolness of the Reptile House. A wise move, since it got to be 104° F today in Sacramento. The reptiles are fun to draw. They like holding interesting poses, the lizards have great scales, fringes, and eyes, and you can get up close to them. (None of them came through the glass, despite it being Harry Potter day.) At right is a drawing I did of a flat-tailed tortoise from Madagascar, done with a non-waterproof roller ball pen and light wash.
15 July 05
Hot 'n' Harry
It’s hot, the kind of heat that if you go jogging in at six pm you’re risking your life. We are getting the Delta breeze at the moment but it’s still really hot.
But it’s a dry heat.
Barring Alaska, Hawaii, and a few other Pacific islands, the west coast is the last place on the planet to get hold of a copy of Harry Potter legitimately today. There is a free showing of the third film at the Avid Reader which started about 45 minutes ago, and which will end pretty much at midnight in time for readers, young and not so young, to be able to pick up their copies and lug them all over Davis with them all weekend.
We’re off on a drawing class tomorrow at the Sacramento Zoo, and I can’t stay up till midnight tonight. So the earliest I can get my copy is around five tomorrow afternoon.
See you at the other side of this.
14 July 05
Ten Thousand Wins
I turned on the radio earlier this evening when I saw that the Giants had a 4-3 lead over the Dodgers going into the bottom of the ninth. They held on to win the game, a good way to start out the second half of the season. But there was a milestone reached as well. With this win, the Giants are the first North American major league sports team to reach 10,000 wins over the franchise’s history. Granted, I think this dates back to 1885 when the New York Gothams became the New York Giants, and it’s been 51 years since the team has won a World Series, but here’s to the next ten thousand!
13 July 05
Resh
Yesterday afternoon a friend happened to mention she was starting Advanced Beginners Hebrew that night. (Davis is a great place for contradictions in terms.) I decided to join her. No long, thought-out language learning strategy, here. I seem to remember I started classical Greek in much the same impetuous way.
This class is only an hour long, once a week. This means there is lots of work outside, but 8-9 on a Tuesday I can handle.
Aleph. Bet. Gimmel… Mem sofit.
13 July 05
You Know It's Time To Go Home
...when at 5:20 in the afternoon all power to the building goes out and you’re left feeling around the partition in the windowless cave of your office for the emergency flashlight. Meanwhile, all around you UPS battery backups are shrieking insistently, not that they do your own computer any good.
It’s gotten quite hot here—tomorrow it should be in the hundreds.
11 July 05
Bike Helmets
bsag over at But She’s a Girl reports on the current discussions about whether or not to make bicycle helmets compulsory.
In the United States, they are only compulsory for children. Most people wear them wrong (too far back) so they are ineffective. But all I know is when I was biking down our mountain in Santa Barbara, looked back, and the next thing I knew I was seeing stars and a whole, perfect, irretrievable novel flash before my eyes, what got broken was my helmet, not my head.
10 July 05
L'empereur
Waddle or toboggon if you have to, but do make it to see March of the Penguins, now playing on the independent movie theatre circuit. We went to see this documentary today about the breeding cycle of Emperor Penguins and thought it was fantastic.
One question I’m left with though is how did these penguins ever evolve to be laying their single eggs in the dead of the Antarctic winter?
9 July 05
Fetishizing Reading
I’ve never been a big fan of the Levenger catalog. I know many people who read a great deal who are: they get it regularly, look through it (every single page) each time it comes, even though as far as I can tell it doesn’t change a lot from one to the next. Lots of nicely finished cherry book stands, lots of highly laquered fountain pens, lots of lamps you can’t possibly read a book without. It seems to sigh “I’m upper middle class but intellectual too, you wouldn’t catch me hanging around with those C-grade Yalie louts.” Though I fetishize pens myself, I write with them. The better they write, the better the pen. Not the most laquer or gold.
These friends who read a lot rarely buy anything from this catalog: nothing in there turns out to be indispensable to reading. I think it’s a pleasure, a secret pleasure, in its own right, a bit like the late J. Peterman catalog, which was ludicrously over the top but well written and somehow able to convince readers they really were world travellers from the 1930s without the inconvenience of world wars or non-existent air conditioning.
One of these well-read-Levenger-catalog-reading friends sent me a link to a New York Times piece on the Levenger catalog. I think I get it now. This is to books and letters what Martha Stewart Living is to tablecloths and housedecorating.
It’s a good thing, people.
8 July 05
Morning Balloons
On calm clear mornings here we sometimes see hot air balloons off to the west floating above the Central Valley floor. Usually these are 10 or 20 miles off, but yesterday three were fairly close. The one at left was landing in fields about a mile south of our house. The peak in the distance is Mount Diablo.