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.
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.