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.
1 April 05
Friday Troll Blogging
Here is a little painting of one of the two trolls our friend Jennifer sent us from Sweden several years back. I did this last night using watercolor over a water-soluble 4B sketching pencil drawing, a combination which seems to turn out better than I thought it should. So I’ll be trying more experiments with this choice of media.
31 March 05
Passing the Book Torch
Maria of Alembic has passed the stick along to me for this book meme.
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Since this involves memorizing an entire book and I’d have no hope ever of doing that for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus which would be my first choice, I’ll take Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, lots. Sargeant Angua, the female werewolf on the Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, and Stephen Maturin of the O’Brian series come to mind as the most recent.
The last book you bought is?
The Zen of CSS Design and CSS Cookbook
What are you currently reading?
Faithful, an account by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan of the 2004 Boston Red Sox which I need to finish by Opening Day (Sunday); Enemies of Promise by Lindsay Waters; Behind the Curve, a sailing whodunit by Steven Chance, to whom I’m related and would otherwise not be reading it at all; The Zen of CSS Design; Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer which I started at DocRoc’s and which is an astonishingly gripping account of the fall of an empire; Jingo by Terry Pratchett; and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I may give up on the Chance pretty soon, though I’m told it contains a reference to my grandparents in a slightly salacious way. I just can’t plod my way through till I get there. Oh, there’s another one, it was at the bottom of the pile and never quite got finished: Starhawk’s Earth Path.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Since we’re all going to be on the desert island and everyone else already has the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the collected Shakespeare, I’ll bring a natural history of greater Oceania or whereever the island is, complete works of Chaucer, the Divine Comedy, Proust, and Cervantes.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
DocRoc, because she reads widely and well; Chris R., because she does too; and Chris Clarke, because I know the answers are going to be so unlike mine and will, I hope, include paleontology and things. He seems awfully busy these days, though, exposing the tears in our civic fabric.
30 March 05
Resurrection of the World’s Ugliest Car
A mechanic in Dorset has spent the last twelve years restoring what is surely the world’s ugliest car. This vehicle was built by a New York priest 50 years ago who intended it to be the safest car ever made. It had more than its share of teething troubles, breaking down 15 times on the day of its official launch, and after a few years it ended up being abandoned in a field behind a body shop in Connecticut. The car deteriorated there for 30 years, but when mechanic Andy Saunders learned of its existence, he thought he had never seen anything so ugly and knew he had to have it.
29 March 05
More on Pens
We took over a new pen for Karen on Sunday for her birthday, a purple Sunrise Stypen-Up with purple ink. (The retractable fountain pen.) I was happy to see her using it in our kickoff meeting today for the Campus Community Book Project for next year (Kite Runner).
And then Numenius tells me about another pen fetishist out there (Scribbling Woman, nice Zapfino masthead). Safety in numbers. Good. I’m already having anxiety about what pens to take to our Artist’s Journal workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book weekend after next…
Thanks to all who left notes of congratulation on our second blogday.
28 March 05
Painted Ladies On The Move
We’re in the midst of a massive migration of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui). My officemate alerted me to this late this morning, and when I went over to the Memorial Union for my lunch there were dozens passing by each second, moving determinedly northwest at a good clip — 15 MPH perhaps? — against a headwind. Pica went home for lunch and saw thousands while she was crossing the bridge, swirling around traffic like a tornado. (Not all of them made it across, and Pica retrieved a fallen one for me to sketch.)
The butterflies are in the middle of a three-day trek from the desert by the Mexican border to the Central Valley and the foothills of the Coast Ranges. The impressive turnout this year is probably due to the heavy rains and subsequent plant growth in the desert this past winter.
27 March 05
The Big Man
Postscript: I’ve edited this post to substitute “enlightened” and “unenlightened” for “evolved” and “unevolved” following some confusion about the terms…
1. Most men in the world are not Big Men.
2. Being a Big Man is something that is highly valued in many cultures, particularly in the United States. This is how you can end up with a bodybuilder turned Big Man actor as governor of California.
3. The Evolved Big Man is the Buddha. The Unevolved Big Man is Dick Cheney. Unevolved Big Men outnumber the Evolved ones by a factor of 1,000,000 to 1.
4. The prime motivating force of the Unevolved Big Man is power. Power over women, power over the future, and particularly power over other men who are not big whom they hold in cold contempt.
5. The Unevolved Big Man need not necessarily be a) large in physical stature, though this helps; b) male, though this helps even more. Margaret Thatcher is an example of an Unevolved, un-male, Big Man.
6. Many small men who are wannabe Big Men end up running countries or empires tyrannically. They include Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the last century, Napoleon Bonaparte in the previous. A more vapid counterpart today is George W. Bush. But they all share an ability to get Unevolved Big Men to work for them and keep them in power, and since power is the prime motivator of the Unevolved Big Man, the Big Men get to rule just below the top. Goebbels comes to mind. (Examples of Unevolved Big Men who also ruled tyrannically include Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet; Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is an untyrranical Unevolved Big Man.)
7. Unevolved Big Men hold a particular scorn for small men who are Big Men wannabes. This enfuriates the smBMws who then become the most dangerous of all men, violent, cruel, and sadistic. The Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and the secret services of many cultures are filled with men like this. They often masquerade as innocuous small men. They are easy meat for the CIA and its counterparts and are prime fodder for terrorist organizations. They issued the orders at Abu Ghraib. They are the people who apply lit cigarettes to body parts belonging to persons that end up on Amnesty International lists. The less grandiose can become high school teachers, policemen, postmasters, and perpetrators of Road Rage. Or they beat their wives and children. Or all of the above.
8. It is a characteristic of the Unevolved Big Man to dismiss any criticism out of hand without offering explanations. Explanations are for everyone else to provide.
9. Big Men who are on their way to becoming Evolved are often mistaken by others, especially by women, as Unevolved Big Men, and are feared and shunned. This is especially perplexing for them because they’re trying hard to become unthreatening without becoming small. It’s the work of a lifetime, fraught with peril and disappointment; it’s also Really Important.
10. I have a particularly acute fear of Unevolved Big Men. I’m not sure why. I’m working on this.
11. I have recently discovered this fear is such that I will avoid any Big Men, evolved or not, just in case.
12. I realize this puts me at risk of never meeting some truly wonderful human beings.
Today is the second blogiversary of Feathers of Hope.
26 March 05
March Farmers’ Market
This morning I went to the Davis Farmers’ Market to have a go at sketching the crowd. In a week-and-a-half the Wednesday evening Picnic-in-the-Park starts up, but for now the farmers’ market is only on Saturday mornings. But Saturday brings the usual medley of kettle corn, fiddlers, strawberries, and rescue Labrador retrievers — a delightful stroll.
25 March 05
Downshifting Amid Butterflies
While DocRoc was off up the mountain to do Shakespeare with a bunch of brainy teenagers of different ages, I headed south to Anza Borrego to meet up with a friend from Boston and do some botanizing.
This friend is my best birding buddy, and we’re definitely out of our element looking at things that don’t fly off at the slightest provocation. Before I got to the visitor center she had found a black-tailed gnatcatcher; I pulled the car in under the nest of an incubating Costa’s hummingbird. But we were there to look at flowers, so we armed ourselves with lists, maps, directions, and a bag of Fritos.
North of Borrego Springs was a carpet of yellow stretching all the way up the canyon. This was desert sunflowers, primarily, interspersed with magenta sand verbena and white evening primroses. There were thousands and THOUSANDS of butterflies: painted ladies, they were called, and they were wafting through the morning while the huge caterpillars of some striped moth methodically chomped through primrose petals.
We headed south on our way to ocotillos and Yaqui Wells, but stopped as the colors shifted abruptly from yellow to white. What you do is you get out of the car and see the white flower (desert chicory, in this case). Then next to it you notice another large plant with a white flower which you hadn’t seen from the car (Fremont’s pincushion), but below that is one you couldn’t possibly have seen from the road, and underneath that is a diminutive white five-pointed flower (4mm diameter) I couldn’t find in any of the materials we had and will have to look it up in Jepson, scary though that prospect is.
It’s like Russian dolls. This just isn’t what happens when you bird.
We found our ocotillos. We also found blooming barrel cactus, blooming smoketree, blooming millions of DYA’s (damn yellow asters). And Lawrence’s goldfinches, singing, on territory, busily getting on with spring before summer hits and everything dies out.
I’ll post photos of some of these when I get back to Davis…
24 March 05
Bloom
This is an entry for the Illustration Friday topic on Bloom.
A couple of weeks ago when we went to our friends’ picnic in the foothills of the Vaca Mountains west of here, there were many brodiaeas out on the grassy slopes. Here is a sketch I did of a couple of plants near the top of the hill.