28 June 05
Don Gallo
We’re not getting much of a chance to sleep in these days. The chicken who was present upon our return from North Carolina turns out to be a young rooster who has lately learned how to crow. Nowadays he does this outside our bedroom window, bright and early in the morning.
No one is sure where he came from. Not across the street—though they have had chickens there, there’s never been a rooster. Our landlady thinks somebody just dumped him off here. So far he’s survived the trucks zooming by, and the local coyotes (one of whom we saw from the train Sunday running off with a jackrabbit).
He’s pretty to look at, but I could do without the alarm clock!
27 June 05
From the Trenches
If typefaces were colors, Perpetua would sing quinacridone magenta, then shift up an italic octave to California sunrises. I am swimming in Perpetua these days, which is slightly decadent, slightly not quite anybody’s mandated style, slightly involves flying under the radar of the various style dictators. I have no business having this much fun on a project that is so big, so consuming, so apparently stressful. I’m not stressed. Milagro.
Sabon would be blue, dark blue, but not quite Prussian. Garamond would also be blue but lighter. Cochin would surely be cochineal, ludicrous, outlandish, especially with that italic “n,” dancing on a page like a medieval tumbler.
Berkeley, my bread-and-butter, would bear the golden crust of homemade loaves.
Helvetica, of course, black. And Futura. And Gill Sans. Hmm. Something about those sans-serifs, lining up behind the Trajan column again. Perhaps they are only slate gray, perhaps tinged with light green, like smooth serpentine slopes with a red splash of Clarkia.
Arial is not a typeface. It’s a bastardized corporate THING. It is gray-brown, not organic soil, not the beautiful shiny chestnut of a buckeye or loquat seed, not the textured beauty of walnut desks, not the gold on an eagle’s coverts, but sludge.
26 June 05
Battered in Oakland
The San Francisco Giants are not a pretty sight right now. We went to their game against the A’s in Oakland to witness a 16-nothing drubbing. The Giants’ pitching staff looked like they had stayed out far too late last night, their hitters were completely lost at the the plate, and the A’s young pitcher, Rich Harden, was at the top of his game, ending up allowing only one hit over seven innings.
We had fun nonetheless. The train ride was great. The Coliseum station platform has only been open a couple of weeks, and the person who collected our tickets had no idea we were expected to stop there. But all got sorted out, though we four ended up being the only ones left on the train to get off at that stop. It turned out to be a fast game, too—it wasn’t much of a dilemma skipping out to catch the early train home.
25 June 05
A Wheat Crop and Three Planets
They finally harvested the wheat out back. It seems about three weeks too late—we’ve had unusual rain twice since early June and some of the crop seems to be going a bit black—but it will probably fetch a good price anyway. Yolo County did well, agriculturally, last year, and this year seems likely to follow suit at least in certain crops.
There was also a crop of planets to look at this evening; Mercury, Venus, and Saturn were all close together in the western sky at sunset. I was at work till after dark, having gone in for a quick session after dinner, and ran into Numenius heading home with his binoculars having spotted all three.
Mars, then, in August…
24 June 05
To The Game By Rail
Last Sunday we saw an article in the Sacramento Bee that gave ratings for the five major league baseball stadiums in California (how did we end up with more baseball teams than any other state, anyway?). The Coliseum, home to the Oakland A’s, came in last. No matter. It’s looks like Sunday we’re going to be taking the train down with our friends Susan and Barbara (she of the em-dash debate) to watch the A’s play the Giants at the Coliseum. There’s a new train platform by the Coliseum, so we won’t even have to transfer to BART.
Both teams are doing poorly this season, so the spectacle may have more the air of an exhibition game—barring some miracle, neither team is playoff-bound. I try to support both teams, which makes these interleague games a bit conflicted. I think this means I wear neutral garb like my new Durham Bulls cap!
23 June 05
Arguing About Dashes
I’m working on the biggest publication project I’ve ever tackled. I’m doing the design, layout, and production editing for the California Wildlife Diversity report to Congress. This is hitting my desk a chapter at a time, and my job is to turn it into something that looks good, incorporating about 50 maps. The report will then become a book, about 300 pages, and the book will include 4-color photos.
The editor, a good friend of mine, is excellent. We see eye to eye on most details, I catch a lot of things she misses and vice-versa, and it’s a pleasure to work on this because it’s a project that’s being well managed. (My next two weekends will probably involve a lot of office time, but I had planned on my entire June being a nightmare, which it absolutely isn’t.)
Barbara and I cycled back from a friend’s house tonight arguing about how you punctuate the following four words, used to describe one of the bioregions in the report: Central Valley Bay Delta. Central Valley is one entity; Bay is a second; Delta is a third.
Barbara thinks it should be Central Valley—emdash—Bay—endash—Delta. I think the endash should be a slash, though I dislike them (they’re untidy and ugly, a bad combo). We discussed this heatedly for about a mile and a half, as the California fuchsia by the side of the road starts to come into bloom and the sun already sets a few minutes earlier than it did just two days ago…
22 June 05
Davis Dartboard
The new O’Reilly book Mapping Hacks has arrived in the campus bookstore; it looks excellent. I haven’t picked it up yet since supposedly I’ll be getting an email giving me a 30% discount on it and the related book Web Mapping Illustrated by virtue of going to the conference last week. The former book is by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh, who are quite active in the ‘locative media’ movement. Here’s a game which I may play which is very much in this spirit.
I’ll take a city map of Davis and drop down a couple dozen random points on top of it (all in my GIS, of course). Then I will go to each point and sketch/photograph/write about what I see there. The results of this exercise will end up on this blog, on separate web pages, and/or in a physical book.
Thanks to the Davis Wiki, this town is perhaps one of the most extensively annotated-on-the-web places on the planet. And as it turns out, the city has a comprehensive set of GIS layers that are freely downloadable, not to mention a set of detailed aerial photographs dating from a couple of months ago. But GIS layers and imagery only get you so far. I’m sure I’ll learn things about this town through this exercise, and perhaps catch glimpses of deep culture as well.
21 June 05
Solstice
I’ve been thinking a lot about the solstice for the past few weeks; an Artist Trading Card swap for June has this as its theme and I’ve been wondering how to approach it. It’s a bittersweet time: the languor of the longest day combined with the heading back to winter.
We walked up on the levee to watch the sun set and the moon rise. While we were sketching we heard the sounds of bluegrass from Jim’s house (the former artificial insemination barn). We headed down there to make sure they had seen the moon. (They hadn’t, and immediately headed outside to serenade the moon with a stirring rendition of Blackberry something.)
20 June 05
Cat Dancing
When we went over to Nat and Ben’s last week, one of their kitties would fetch a cat toy like this one when tossed. So we got one for Charlie and Diego, and they agree it’s a very good toy. Charlie even ignored the fact it was dinnertime when we were playing.
19 June 05
Walking
Numenius and I decided as part of our walk today to walk into Davis for lunch.
It’s not very far, but it’s something I don’t do nearly enough. You see different things when you walk, as opposed to riding a bike (or, of course, driving):
1) a red wasp, similar in movement and general size to the blue mud daubers we have waiting for the hot weather to come (we’re having a freakishly cool June);
2) a tree in flower in the Arboretum we couldn’t identify, but wanted to, whose flowers are like snowflakes with green stems;
3) the shifting shadows on the bark of the trees in the Redwood Grove;
4) a secondary covert feather of a red-shouldered hawk;
5) a bug (true bug) neither of us recognized, only on the bladderpod (currently half in bloom, half in seed)
6) the fact that the star thistles (an invasive weed) are able to grow through tarmac.
Lunch was good. So was the DVD (which we watched at my office on the way home) of the making of the St. John’s Bible, which featured these vignettes of local insects and flora too. It felt all of a piece.
Approaching our driveway I spotted the turkey which had apparently been hit by a car and was down the bank by the bullocks, under the California black walnut. The barred feathers confused themselves in the dapple light. I want those quill feathers…