12 January 05
Not in Kansas Anymore Dept.
So yesterday I was just minding my business on my way to the bathroom at work which is in another building the one that’s connected to the lab and I’m thinking how nice it is that the sun’s finally shining after all this rain and it’s a little chilly but not bad really and I open the lab door and take the first left into the women’s room and what’s in there but two women with samples all over the floor I mean not just a few but ALL OVER looking frantically for a pair of Island Fox lung specimens so I tiptoe over their cooler and all the plastic sample bags after asking permission and go into the single stall and think how mundane the women’s room used to be in Mrak Hall where people would gather and talk about what TV shows they saw last night or what they were cooking for dinner and I’ll tell you what it wasn’t fox lungs.
11 January 05
Sheets of Clouds
Yesterday I flew to Baltimore for a meeting. There wasn’t much to look at out the window though; it seemed like there was a solid sheet of clouds stretching from the Four Corners states all the way to Maryland. The neatest bit cloudwise however flying at 41,000 feet above the thick layer of altostratus, with blue sky all around us, but then a thin layer of cirrus clouds just above us. So we were above the clouds, but not quite completely.
10 January 05
Cats & Dogs
While I was having dinner this evening with a friend at Thai Nakorn it started pouring. California has been getting lots of rain—dangerous amounts in Southern California.
Numenius has gone to Baltimore for a meeting about the semantic web, so I’m watching cats and rain.
9 January 05
Abraham’s Tribes
A year ago September, we went to the first community Celebration of Abraham, an interfaith gathering among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities here. Today there was the second such gathering, this time held in St. James Catholic Church in Davis (oddly, both St. James’ auditorium and the one in the Catholic Church in Woodland where we met for the first event do double duty as basketball gyms).
Again the event was packed. This time the organizers took up the theme of the Messiah among the three traditions, perhaps a little more divisive than last year’s focus on Abraham himself. It’s interesting that even in an event as innocuous as a good loaf of whole wheat bread as this one was cultural differences still come through. When Rabbi Wolfe spoke he told several stories that seemed prototypically Jewish, and I felt most at home there.
At the end we wrote down an action we’d do to help bring forth the messianic era. Mine was to look up and meditate upon the skies and heavens above at least twice a day. We’ve been having interesting skies lately, and there was a fine sunset after we got out of the event.
8 January 05
Flight of Cranes
There was a break in the rain this morning and we took the cats outside for a sniff around. It’s a comical sight, each of us with a cat on a tether. Once there they have very different ideas about what constitutes outside activities, but at length Diego knew he was done.
I was taking him inside when I heard the cranes.
Sandhill cranes winter in the Central Valley but we rarely see or hear them just here; there are thousands about twenty miles south of us, throughout the delta where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet. Having them fly over your house feels like a visitation, a blessing beyond blessings. There were over twenty-five, flying in a loose V.
To approximate the sound made by these birds, round your mouth as though you’re saying “ooooh,” and while your mouth is thus rounded roll an r, Spanish-style. It’s an eerie sound, and the standard term “bugling” doesn’t really capture it for me. It sounds like something muffled in the fog, which of course the birds often are, as are all creatures that spend any time here in the winter.
If this sound had a color it would be a rich magenta edging to gray…
7 January 05
Indoors Drying Day
We’ve had 0.8” of rain in the past day, with a lot more expected this weekend. Not a day for hanging laundry outside—our wooden clothes rack is comfortably ensconsed in our warm bedroom.
6 January 05
Getting Technical
Faithful readers might notice that there are almost no posts on Feathers of Hope about technical geeky things. This is because I have neither the knowledge nor the inclination to indulge in them, and Numenius, though he has plenty of knowledge, spends his days immersed in them and would rather post here about other things. Suffice to know that ours is a Microsoft-free household: I’m a Mac person, Numenius is a Unix/Linuxhead whose favorite editor is the command-line vi (which he tells me is not quite true, there are different editors for different tasks; none of them is made by Microsoft, though).
This may be about to change, as I gear up for some Linux lessons this weekend. Although I don’t strictly need it for my work or my play, there’s enough good stuff available in the way of open source software that I’m willing to dabble. In particular I want to get more proficient in Fontforge, a type design program.
For now, here’s a Microsoft columnists/gmsv/10581891.htm”>story that I’ll gleefully pass along: Bill Gates was addressing a crowd of thousands when the blue screen of death appeared behind him. Get a Mac, Bill.
5 January 05
On How Not To Prepare Tea
This study demonstrates why it is not a good idea to use a chocolate teapot to prepare a cup of Earl Grey. Happily, the principal investigators were able to make use of the remains.
4 January 05
New Year’s Resolutions
I sat next to a young woman on the plane to Chicago the other day. She pulled out a sketchbook even before we were asked to turn off our electronic devices. It turned out she was working through Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a book I’ve seen many times but never actually read. During the flight we each drew people we weren’t looking at and our hands as two of the four “pre-instruction drawings”—a self-portrait and a chair weren’t really possible that day in row 24 on the port side—but when I got home I looked for Numenius’ copy, the 1989 edition (there’s a new edition out now).
At left is my copy of Picasso’s portrait of Igor Stravinsky, drawn upside-down, which Edwards claims is the fastest way to disengage left-brain activity.
Among all the resolutions I haven’t quite formulated for the new year but which hang in the background as nagging perennials such as eat better exercise more get a better handle on the cash flow, draw more is one that feels like an invitation. Draw more of here.
Ecotone has been sadly bombarded with spam but this is my entry for the New Year.
3 January 05
River High
Some time between when I went to work and when Pica came home for lunch, Putah Creek burst its banks by the Old Davis Road bridge, starting to flood the field to the southeast. There’s been lots of rain lately.
I found this page with graphs of the last 24 hours of flow of Putah Creek. The peak occurred about 3 AM this morning, measured at a station about 18 miles to the west. This site, run by the California Department of Water Resources, gives current river conditions for the major streams in California.