21 February 05
Jaunt to the Peninsula
Going south on I-80 there’s good light on those hills but the poor almond blossoms are getting massacred by wind and rain and the road surface needs fixing throughout the East Bay and over the Dunbarton Bridge we go and head north but need to go south and we meet Rachel for lunch and talk about Dante I’m sick of allegory she said ten years ago and again today and we laughed over eggs and then headed to the art store across the street and I made the sweet discovery of the shared guilty pleasures of finding hidden inks and brushes and paints with Numenius and then on we went to Kepler’s oh my and then headed north again through a huge pounding thunderstorm beyond Vallejo the kind that makes even SUV’s slow down and there were small funnels maybe starting but sun shone into the valley beyond though and we get home and the road’s not wet here.
(I did just read Eats, Shoots and Leaves and am normally a huge fan of punctuation, I promise.)
20 February 05
The Five-Star McDonald’s
For a brief while last week, the McDonald’s in Times Square in New York went upscale.
19 February 05
Water, Water Everywhere
Today I submitted my final assignments for my online Roman Majuscules class. One of them was to render on watercolor paper the lines from the Ancient Mariner (and a description of our current weather); the other was to do in gouache a quote of our choice.
My choice for this was the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, since I’ll be having lunch with an old friend and Dante fanatic on Monday.
18 February 05
The Somerville Gates
Residents of the Boston area who are unable to make it down to New York to view Christo’s The Gates should know that there is an art installation of similar note closer to home. And this time there’s a cat.
17 February 05
Remembering Clive
My parents were given an unusual wedding gift: a German short-haired pointer puppy. He was there as I took my first steps, my first ride on a swing, my first birthday party when my English grandma came to California—his haunches quivering with pent-up power and spring, snipped tail always on the go. He herded me, and then my sister and brother, and barked at strangers and snakes. I remember the smell of wet dog in that foggy paradise of my early childhood with the Golden Gate bridge looming through the kitchen window, while the Cuban missile crisis droned on the black-and-white TV and then Kennedy’s assassination reduced the adults in the household to uncommunicative mourners. Clive was THERE.
Clive didn’t come with us to Spain in the mid-sixties. I think his attempt to get to my mother from the supermarket parking lot through a closed car window (he won) convinced my parents this might not be a great idea, especially since we were flying to New York and then going over to Southampton by boat. He was found a new home, and we were given a new puppy once we’d settled in Madrid by the friendly waiter at the Conde Duque where we stayed for six weeks while house-hunting—Blackie, a mongrel bitch who grew up to be more brown than black and who had a manageable level of energy.
A German short-haired pointer has just won the Westminster dog show (the one that’s spoofed in Christopher Guest’s hilarious Best in Show). Since poodles or poodle-type dogs almost always win, this is a welcome change. But I hope everyone’s watching their car windows, since this event always results in increased sales of the breed that wins Best in Show… visit your local shelter, people. There are lots of great dogs and cats waiting to be adopted.
16 February 05
Philosopher Cat
Let us hope Wittgenstein liked the company of cats, for there is not so much he can do to avoid this one.
15 February 05
Harm
I have a memory of having buried a bird alive when I was small. My guess is that I believed it was dead, and I probably only put a handful of dirt on it, but it gave me nightmares years later.
My love of birds now is, I believe, not unconnected to this memory.
Much more recently I harmed a garter snake. I was clearing with an axe the rampant growth of California bay sproutings in the cabin we were staying in during the last big El Nio year.
The axe fell on the snake.
I have never howled so much as this, never felt so much a part of snakedom. I was wretched. I have respected and liked snakes ever since—I can’t claim to love them, not the way I love birds, but I have lost my fear of them. I love what they do to a landscape, curling around it.
We called this snake Speranza. Out of harm comes understanding.
Or so I hope…
14 February 05
Bay Area Historical Maps
The Earth Sciences and Map Library at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the USGS, has had a project to scan old topographic maps of the San Francisco Bay Area and make them available online. The collection dates back to 1895, and covers many of the editions of both the 15 minute and 7.5 minute quadrangles.
At left is a map of where I grew up as it appeared in 1895.
13 February 05
Twitchers’ Rehab
It was the perfect antidote to racing up and down the Lower Rio Grande Valley: spending an hour or so watching this owl sitting in a mature tamarisk and sketching it. Numenius rigged up the telescope so that, sitting on the ground, we had a good view to sketch from.
I was able to get about fifteen sketches of the bird done when Richard mentioned he wished he had stuff to sketch with. Here, take this, I said. I have my
So I went back to the car for the paper and then worked on this drawing, which I could never have done if I hadn’t done the warm-up sketches. I think it must be like Lorianne’s 113 early-morning bows or something. The result, in any case, was purely meditative.
12 February 05
Day of the Long-eared Owls
Today we headed south with Sami and Richard to Mercey Hot Springs in Little Panoche Valley to look at long-eared owls, a species neither Pica nor myself have seen. For the past several years, this resort has been the site of a winter roost of these birds, who in daytime hours perch halfway up the interiors of the tamarisk and pine trees. 
The birds couldn’t have been more cooperative. The second one we saw was posed nicely for a sketch, so I went back to the car and got my drawing materials and our scope.
After one full sketch and several details of this bird, I went up the hill to do a quick painting of the Panoche Hills on this beautiful partly cloudy day.