11 April 05
Bike Basket Inventory
A list of items in my bike basket — it’s good to do one of these every now and then!
- Today’s Davis Enterprise, front page headline reading “Picnic Day nears”
- A copy of Programming PHP, by Rasmus Lerdorf and Kevin Tatroe, that I was going to return to my office today but forgot
- A plastic grocery bag in which I was carrying around the PHP book
- A Kryptonite bike lock
- My charcoal grey light fleece sweater
- An apple
- An old washcloth used primarily to dry the bike seat on rainy days
- A Cateye bike light
- A 700×20/28C bike tube, Presta valve
- 2 blue Uniball Signo pens
- One green Uniball micro pen
- One Bic ballpoint pen
- 2 medium binder clips
- A Park micro toolkit for the bike
- A Park 36mm headset wrench
- A copy of the Discworld reading order guide
- An Amtrak ticket jacket
- 3 AA and 3 AAA alkaline batteries, state of charge unknown
- 1 pencil
- Scratch paper with conjugations for the verbs conseguir, tomar, and cubrir
- A black Pilot G2 pen cartridge
- A rubber band
- And a twist tie.
10 April 05
Grokking Grids
Thumbnails; sketches; writing; paintings: the grids we devised yesterday got a workout today. We studied the different gestures made by leaves, branches, treetrunks; the geometric space of irises; the greens in a redwood grove and how they change in the dapple light.
At left is the last exercise we worked on this afternoon in the South African section of the Arboretum: zoom in, zoom out then pick a sketch and work it up a little more.
My mind is racing with possibility. I am ENTHUSIASTIC. (See Blaugustine on this topic for April 8.)
9 April 05
Artist’s Journal Class
We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a class with Andie Thrams on creating artist’s journals. In our afternoon session we learned about gridding up a journal page. The handy trick we were taught is to make a grid template by poking holes on the grid intersections on a stout piece of paper, allowing one to quickly layout the journal page.
Tomorrow our class goes to the field — we’ll be spending all day sketching, painting, and writing in Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park.
8 April 05
Friday Afternoon Activity
Next weekend is Picnic Day when over 50,000 people throng through campus seeing sheepdog trials, cockroach races, barrel making contests, and the like. I’ll be there at the Wildlife Health Center and this afternoon was working on a twist to the quiz for kids: a folded paper game that I learned today was called a “cootie catcher.” I remember playing with these as a kid in Madrid but never knew they had a name.
This may be a way for us to engage the imagination of kids who will be here in numbers next Saturday. Swainson’s hawks and island foxes need all the help they can get, and we don’t need kids growing up thinking that the best thing to do with a mountain lion is to shoot it. Some folding seems to be in my future…
7 April 05
Chart of Stones
For those of you with an interest in barrows, henges, stone circles, and ancient trackways, or who, like Terry Pratchett, want to upgrade to a 33-megalith processor, there is now an interactive map of the megaliths of Europe at the Megalithic Portal.
6 April 05
Adem
The surname of a Mexican Cohomologist at the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department.
The Department of Environmental Management in the State of Alabama: administers all major federal environmental laws, including the Clear Air, Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts and federal solid and hazardous…
A singer-songwriter with the Domino Recording Company and with a very cool website.
The Department of Emergency Management in the State of Arkansas.
Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.
Administration of Employment in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
A microfilm company located in Britain.
The four letters that give uncial letters the characteristics that make them unmistakeable for anything else. I’m not sure any other hand can boast this, though I’d love to be proved wrong. Example below is written out with a Pilot Parallel Pen that arrived in the mail this morning…
5 April 05
Green Roofs
My officemate, continuing his jet-setting life, was up at Oregon State last week, and on the way back he stopped off at Powell’s in Portland — lucky him! He brought back a spectacularly designed new book entitled Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction. This book illustrates some forty case studies of green roof architecture around the world.
For a primer on green roof architecture see Greenroofs 101.
4 April 05
Of Deer and Popes
I saw you early at Wembley:
“Like as the Hart
Desireth the Waterbrook”—They rehearsed us to death,
Drunk with youth and hope
Till the chopper brought you into
Howls. Holy Hooligans, Batman!
Among us you were
Joy
Before your Inquisitors
Silenced Boff
A hint
Of times
To come
You’re gone, now
Facing Death standing up
No heroics
(Unlike the ones
They insisted on
For Terri)
I felt the tears
But is it you,
White Hart,
Or saccharine nostalgia,
Or just
This Is The End
The white light
Down the tunnel—Hollywood and faith
Caught in the headlights?
Leonardo Boff was a Brazilian Franciscan and a Liberation Theologian who advocated a Preferential Option for the Poor which ran him afoul of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and had him defrocked.
3 April 05
Here We Go Again
Happily, they broadcast the opening game of the baseball season on the radio so we got our Opening Day baseball fix in. Unhappily, the Yankees, who have been waiting all winter long after their playoff collapse to beat up on the Red Sox, did just that, winning 9-2 in the game at Yankee Stadium. Of the two 41-year-old starters, Randy Johnson was impressive, but David Wells most decidedly was not.
It wasn’t baseball weather here, though — a brief storm came through, dropping 0.46 inches of rain this afternoon over several hours. There was a wonderful rainbow just before sunset: the sun had descended just below the cloud deck covering the sky, and the resultant rainbow in the east was about as tall as you can get.
2 April 05
Cache Creek Outing
We got a late invitation from our landlord la to go for a hike today along a ridge over Bear Creek and Cache Creek in the upper northwest corner of Yolo County, crossing over into Colusa County. It was predicted to be a beautiful day so we said yes, the first time we’ve accepted one of his invitations like this. (We agree on almost no political, social, or environmental issues at all, though we could all agree that the poor Pope was probably best off being allowed to go quietly, no heroics.)
This didn’t leave much in the way of conversation topics over 3 hours of driving or 5.5 miles of hiking, but we seemed to manage. We saw five tule elk; a prairie falcon (possibly two, though it might have been the same bird); a perfectly splendid wildflower assortment including larkspur that was intoxicating in its purpleness, much yellow and white, and of course the green bursting through blue oaks and the hillsides.
I’m sore from this, being well out of shape for this kind of thing, with my usual crop of three or so blisters, so I rounded out my day by finishing the account of the Red Sox 2004 season, in plenty of time for Opening Day tomorrow.