22 January 05
Hill Walk in the Fog
We went for a short walk today up Mix Canyon, which is easily the closest very steep hill for all the hard-core cyclists. (We saw two on their way down.)
It’s also the best place near Davis to see California newts. We did see some, but alas none were alive—they cross the road in the rain in the dark and many get run over. It’s late to be looking for them, but I was hoping. Numenius says he’ll take me to Briones to see them there. Maybe we could have a Bay Area blogger meetup at Briones.
The buckeye seeds that dropped last fall were all germinating. At left is a sketch. We saw the blue sky briefly but mostly walked in the gloom with the scent of California bay piercing the cold, damp air.
21 January 05
The Chlorophyll Mandala
Our friend Karen recently gave Pica a copy of the new book The Earth Path, by Starhawk. Starhawk wrote this book in part because she’s seen that many members of Pagan communities, though professing to a nature-based spiritual practice, actually have had little contact with nature. Much of this book consists of exercises to help ground each of us in nature and place. I love this stuff, and there are many practices described therein that it would do me well to start carrying out. Such as finding a home base, a little nearby natural spot to return to time and time again to hang out and observe. I used to have several such spots, and with the creek nearby, I certainly should have one now.
I like Starhawk’s imagination. One of her ideas is take twenty-five or more friends, and make a mandala of the chlorophyll molecule, with people forming the atoms. As she says:
If we had a Gaian Goddess temple, the chlorophyll molecule would make a lovely stained-glass window or floor mosaic. But, in the spirit of not taking ourselves too seriously, here’s a story and directions for making a chlorophyll molecule—an enterprise that can be done with a minimum of twenty-five children or childlike adults.
I also think it’s also time for me to start observing the seasonal holidays of the Celtic year, on the solstices, equinoxes, and midpoints between. Why, Brigid, or Imbolc, is coming right up on 1 February. Along these lines, I’ll point interested listeners to a wonderful Paganish CD entitled The Almanac: Time and the Turning Wheel, featuring the fiddler Shira Kammen. The very Wiccan song “The Wheel of the Year” on the album is quite apropos. (It may be legally downloaded from the not-evil record distributor Magnatune on this page, as well as other tracks from the album.)
20 January 05
Farewell to a Friend
Bsag over at but she’s a girl was recently wondering how to improve her handwriting. While I was leaving a comment I looked up a reference to Tom Gourdie’s book on this very subject and learned from a Scotsman obituary that he had died on January 6th of this year at the age of 91.
I’m a calligraphy buff. I own probably more calligraphy books than novels. There are the greats and the Very Greats, Edward Johnston and Irene Wellington and Alfred Fairbanks and Donald Jackson, Gainor Goffe and Denis Brown and Thomas Ingmire, Sheila Waters and Julian Waters, Ludovico degli Arrighi and Hermann Zapf. These are the stratosphere people, true artists whose work is inspiring and somewhat terrifying. They are generally a gentle bunch, well the ones who are still alive anyway, but their gentleness doesn’t prevent an aura of solemnity from emanating from their midst and their work.
Tom Gourdie was never like this. You just KNEW. His great project was to improve handwriting in Scottish schools and for decades he devoted himself to introducing the italic hand to children, when he could so easily have been one of the stratosphere people. I never heard him speak but the copies of letters he so generously included in his many, many books show a sensitive yet sensible person, a born teacher, someone you’d love to have over for dinner and then clear the table and get out the ink and the pens.
Clarity for Gourdie was key—in fact I’m sure he’d say it was synonymous with beauty. Any handwriting that deteriorates at speed is useless. In a time when people find it hard to pick up a pen at all any more, this message should be sung from the rooftops. I’d be up there only I have a history of mishaps involving my lower extremities…
19 January 05
Under The Fog
I’ve been having fun with weather applets of late, having installed Meteorologist for Mac OS X on this laptop and KWeather on my computer at work. So I ought not complain about the weather here, since they tell me that in Norway, Maine (home of Pica’s sister) it is now 12 degrees F, and expected to drop to a low of -12 degrees F on Friday. Still, we’re into a chilly pattern here, in the low forties with 100% humidity. There’s a fog layer that’s sitting several hundred feet above the ground surface. Get above the fog, and it’s sunny and warm: in Placerville today, at 1800 feet elevation in the Sierra foothills, it was 69 degrees today. Here under the fog, it’s gloves and furry hat time for cycling.
18 January 05
Dunkin’ Donuts girls
One of the added bonuses of spending so much of last weekend travelling by car was that I learned, via my math teacher birding friend, what is considered cool among teenagers in Massachusetts these days.
There are the obvious things—iPods, for instance, the newer and snazzier the better. He’s given up trying to regulate cellphone use in last period (it’s illegal to use your cellphone in class) and instead starts off telling everyone to check their messages now before the end of school so they can get the scoop on what’s happening afterwards—which siblings to pick up, where their parents are going to be. (They all have cars and they all drive them to work, which makes for interesting town hall meetings when a new $300,000 parking lot for the high school is being discussed; riding the bus is, you guessed, not cool.)
And then: there’s the distinction between Starbucks girls and Dunkin’ Donuts girls.
Teenage girls apparently all show up to school looking like their mothers these days, which is to say they’re holding the obligatory cup of coffee complete with handprotector and plastic lid. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts makes sense: it’s good, it’s cheap, it’s easy to park, and there’s no line.
But of course it’s not cool.
So the girls aspiring to coolness at Andover High have to get up earlier in order to park, stand in line for ages, and get their exorbitant latte, so that when the question gets asked “is she a Starbucks girl or a Dunkin Donuts girl?”, they will come out on the right side of a divide whose significance is known only to their peers and that will one day, soon if they’re lucky and way longer if they’re not, come to seem as absurd as it does to old farts like me who don’t like coffee, least of all the overpriced gunk that pours forth from Starbucks.
17 January 05
How To Be A Birdwatcher
From the Guardian Unlimited’s The digested read (“The must-read books in just 400 words”) comes a summary of How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes.
Sample paragraph:
Birdwatching is not at all like trainspotting. That’s an activity for dull geeks. Birdwatching is for very exciting geeks who like clamping a pair of binoculars to their forehead for hours on end on the off chance a dodo will come back from the dead. Birds are alive. Now I know dogs are alive, too, but dogwatching isn’t much fun.
16 January 05
Snow on Salt Water
I just got in from a trip to Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to meet up with some birding friends from Massachusetts and also from here. We did go looking for the rare birds reported and saw them all—the redwing, the Baikal teal, the falcated duck, and the McKay’s bunting. We also took an overnight trip from Vancouver to Victoria to look at the resident skylarks. I’ve seen both the skylark and the redwing in Europe but never in North America; it was a fabulous experience to go on Canadian ferries and to navigate the various islands with conifers looming right down to the water.
Halfway across yesterday it started to snow. It became horizontal quickly. An inch or two is quite severe weather for Vancouver Island and we hunkered down in the inn we found called the Waddling Dog. Everyone-from the guy in the customs booth to people on the jetty we walked out for the McKay’s bunting to the helpful receptionist at the Waddling Dog-sounds like me. It was an extraordinary experience, like echoes of a former life; the inn reminded me of a restaurant in Uttoxeter where my father used to take me when he was visiting me in boarding school. I smelled the roast beef and yorkshire pudding right away…
Chris Corrigan lives across the sound on Bowen Island. I’m not able to see from the map whether the ferry takes him to the mainland or just over to Vancouver Island. I have enjoyed his descriptions of ferries and ferry trips and see now that it’s very much part of life in these parts.
As we left Sidney on the ferry this morning six marine foraging river otters cavorted around the boat. We saw Pacific loons and a rhinoceros auklet, pigeon guillemots and common murres, pelagic cormorants and mew gulls in among the glaucous-winged. It was this morning. I can still feel the cold air on my cheeks as we stood in the bow trying to turn driftwood into alcids. I’m many hundreds of miles away now, many degrees warmer.
15 January 05
Long Way Off
Yesterday the Huygens space probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. The image it took of the surface is one of the most tantalizing things I’ve seen. The probe was not intended to survive long on the surface and I don’t think any more images from the surface are forthcoming. So this narrow view of a field of flat rocks is the farthest close-up surface look of a celestial body we will have for some time.
14 January 05
Adventures In Laundry
In lieu of Pica’s regular blog for today—she has headed to the Pacific Northwest for a quick birding jaunt—we bring you some catblogging. Here Diego and Charlie continue their training in laundry work. (That’s Charlie’s leg at rear right).
13 January 05
Phylogenetic Rambles
At my meeting in Baltimore I learned about a wonderful online encyclopedia, aimed largely at college students, about animal diversity. This is the Animal Diversity Web, which was developed by the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. The species accounts, of which there are several thousand at the site, are written by students, and the descriptions of higher-level taxa are written by professional biologists.
Here is the species account of one of our favorite critters, the turkey vulture.