26 February 05
Diamond In February
We went to our first baseball game of the year this morning. This was the UC Davis team playing the University of Portland; the college season begins in early February. We spent much of the time sketching the players. The UCD Aggies ended up losing in 15 innings; we got hungry and left after the 10th to eat some Chinese food. Today’s match was a doubleheader, and the Aggies won decisively 11-2 in the second game. But we were long gone by that time.
It was foggy in the morning, and when we first arrived at the field it was partly sunny and I thought I’d end up being hot after sitting through the whole game. Big cumulus clouds came in though, and the hot-and-sour soup at the restaurant definitely hit the spot.
25 February 05
Spring
Numenius has installed a weather applet (Meteo) on our laptop which means I’m keeping tabs on the weather here, in Maine, in Boston, and in Juneau, where friends and family live. I definitely feel guilty wondering which blossoms to draw when I see everyone else is getting snow today.
Guilty or not, the blossoms here are on their inexorable march; the almond ones have blown away, giving place to the much smaller white plum blossoms. The pale pink nectarine and darker pink peach blossoms are next. We lost a cherry tree four years ago to rot and and the peach might be heading that way (helped along by an overzealous northern flicker), but they’re beautiful while they last.
24 February 05
Daffodil Sunshine
Our landlady keeps a fine garden, and she kindly planted daffodils in back of our house, viewable from our bedroom. They’ve been coming into full bloom right now, warmed by several days of sunshine.
23 February 05
Pica’s Recent Peregrinations
22 February 05
Our Secret Kansas
Yesterday’s pendulous thunderclouds did produce a couple of tornados, it turns out. One of these touched down in the North Sacramento area shortly before two in the afternoon, causing light damage to an apartment complex. Here is a slideshow of some photographs of this tornado.
At the time, we were far away, comfortably ensconsed in the art store in Palo Alto. By the time we got home it was dry, but there were impressive thunderclouds to the west of us, including the storm we had just passed through. At left is a view of the Vaca Mountains from our house at about 5:15 in the afternoon; later on we’d see lightning flashes from those clouds.
(The title of this post is lifted from a chapter of Mike Davis’ book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster: it turns out tornados hit the Los Angeles area much more often than people realize.)
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.