2 January 05
Gourds and a One-eyed Santa
We drove to Berkeley today. Numenius has been trying to wean his father off Windows and onto Linux and for the week I was in Maine he had set him well on his way, but in geekery there’s always more to be done and so off we went to do it, well I did the driving part not the geekery.
But first we needed lunch, so we headed off to a fast-food Indian on Oxford and then decided we needed to go to Cody’s because that’s what you do when you go to Berkeley, you look at books. N’s Dad received a call on his cellphone in Cody’s from his wife, S, calling from Cape Cod, where she’s gone to give a recital, reminding him to make sure we took the GOURD home, a gourd she had presented to Numenius on Christmas Day (they’re Jewish, mind you) and which he couldn’t fit in his backpack on the train and his bike on account of its girth, so it was sitting on the dining room table waiting to be retrieved.
Sigh.
Some presents are useful, like socks and knickers. Some are fun, like the Herd Your Horses game my niece received last week, which featured mustangs named Dusty and Blaze and ranch horses of all breeds (did you know, for instance, that percherons only come in black and gray?). Others are gimmicks, silly and cheap and just for the sake of making sure someone’s got something in their stocking (these feature prominently in office holiday gift exchanges and their sales before Christmas in the United States amount to many times the GDP of most countries).
And then there’s the present that my friend T calls the crappy gift. Like the one-eyed Santa she received from someone at her office a couple of weeks ago no kidding cross my heart and hope to die, the office that used to be MY office, and if anyone ever gives me one I’ll hand it right back to them and smile and look blank and in fact closely resemble the one-eyed Santa. They called him Cyclops in Greece. I’m working on the LOOK, just in case. But crappy gifts can also be incredibly expensive: they’re just always OFF, by a little or a lot.
The gourd… let’s just say it’s a large spherical decorated object sorry objet originating in I believe Morocco to go with the other large arty-but-not-to-our-taste objects given by Numenius’ stepmother that don’t fit in our house either stylistically or physically owing to the fact that this is a 600-square-foot abode we share with two cats, a 7-inch dobsonian telescope, and a tandem bicycle. S has seen it. She’s been here. She knows what we have in the way of room.
We stopped off on the way home and deposited the giant gourd at N’s sister’s house, swapping it for yet another former large gift to us from S to give to T, with the solid assurance that if she considers this to be a crappy gift she can feel perfectly free to drop it in the back of someone’s pickup truck on the way to lunch sometime.
But we ain’t taking the cyclops Santa.
1 January 05
Saunter With Ducks
The new year always enters with a bit of lurch. I’m happy to see the solstice, can do without Christmas, but after two weeks off I don’t really want to think about obligations, let alone resolutions, for January and beyond. There is of course one remedy for this: go for a walk. So Pica and I trooped off to the Arboretum for a saunter.
As we returned toward our starting point a stern-looking woman wearing a blue coat and hood bicycled towards and past us. A few paces beyond, a gaggle of mallards swarmed around like ants around the remains of an ice cream cone. Yes, this was
Guerrilla Girl. We wondered what proportion of the Arboretum duck overpopulation problem she was directly responsible for. New year or not, places have their recurrent patterns.
31 December 04
Back From New England
I’ll post a bit more when I gather my wits, which took a bit of a beating in today’s travel.
30 December 04
Help with the Linens
I was trying to put away some towels.
29 December 04
Out of Touch
Not only do I feel out of touch with the landscape in which I now find myself, I feel a little cut off from the world, the world that is obsessing over TV images of tragedy in the Indian Ocean. I obsess a little myself, watching hourly death figures increase on the BBC website, but I’m out of my element here, and we don’t discuss things in quite the same way in front of impressionable children. All my sister’s friends have kids, and they all speak in code, in a move to protect their young from the unspeakable.
But you can’t always do that, as these images, precisely, are showing.
Tomorrow we’re heading south to Boston, a place in which I find myself much more at home. From there I head west again. Dislocating oneself is a useful exercise every once in a while, but I’m hankering for my creek and the oaks I know. Even though it seems we’ve had a lot of water in our neck of the woods too.
28 December 04
Lichen On Black Walnut
A favorite walk of mine is to head west out the levee north of Putah Creek. The black walnut here was just off the levee on the other side of I-80, which at the time Sunday was filled with post-Christmas traffic moving very slowly westbound. There were no leaves at all on this walnut, nor any mistletoe, but many dark brown walnut husks were on the tree and on the ground.
27 December 04
Snowshoeing Alone
This morning I borrowed Martin’s new snowshoes to go for a little saunter through the woods (about half a block away) and to the lake. We had quite a bit of snow yesterday afternoon and overnight, and it was a fine powder covering a lot of ice—perfect snowshoeing conditions.
Although I used to live in New England, I lived in Cambridge, not in the country. 
I don’t know these trees now, if I ever did. I do remember the birds and their calls but there aren’t so many of those about—it’s probably below 0 degrees Fahrenheit as I write this—but the trees, if they aren’t birches, are outside my knowledge, especially the conifers. This part of Maine is mixed deciduous and conifer but if you go only a little further north it gets to be predominantly coniferous, so it’s on a border zone.
I feel like an outsider and a guest. I’m grateful to the woods for welcoming my novice attempts to get to know them this morning. Now, Dave, Beth: what on earth are these berries?
Postscript, December 30: the berries are a form of deciduous holly, ilex verticillata. They are also known as winterberry and black alder and as Beth notes, grow in close proximity to water. As Tattler notes, they are snatched by many for decorations, so I was glad to see them untouched in several places by the lakeside on my various walks.
26 December 04
Davis Depot
Yesterday I travelled by train from Davis to Berkeley to have brunch with my folks. There is an old Southern Pacific railroad depot at both ends of the journey. Sadly, the depot in Berkeley is presently sitting unused—its last role was as a restaurant, and it is currently slated to be the centerpiece of some new development. Traingoers at Berkeley simply get on and off at the side of the tracks underneath the overpass at the foot of University Avenue.
The depot in Davis is in active use as an Amtrak station, and the city has put a lot of effort into making the area around the station an attractive entrance to the town. The depot dates from 1913, at a time when Southern Pacific was building many Mission-style depots. At left is a sketch I did of the station while waiting for the train yesterday. The palms, another good Southern California touch, date from the 1920s.
25 December 04
Pyjama Day
We DID venture out into the northern woods, still with icy snow in them. We DID walk across the lake onto Fibbers’ Island, where we made up fibs (like there’s a hot tub on here and pineapple trees). I did hear black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice. I didn’t fall on the ice except once. We did sort of stay in our pyjamas all day despite the walk in the woods. I did sing songs I haven’t thought about for over thirty years.
It’s REALLY cold here. It’s wonderful. The hairs in my nose froze.
24 December 04
Freezing Mists
Note to self: next time I need to ride my bike somewhere when it’s about 35 degrees F outside with dense fog do wear gloves. Next time means tomorrow morning—there’s a dense fog advisory in effect for the Sacramento Valley (“Conditions are expected to deteriorate through the night into Saturday morning. Locally temperatures are expected to be near freezing by morning”)
Pica meanwhile has headed off to Maine to visit her sister and family. Temperatures several degrees above freezing will seem in comparison to be balmy.