24 February 26
Taxes
Everyone I’ve spoken to in the past few days is deep in the mire of sorting out their taxes. These are all people who have an external tax preparer, so the hours they are spending on this grim task are BEFORE a professional actually starts to work on them.
Makes me nostalgic for when I filed taxes in England: they sent me a statement, asked me to review it and let them know if I disagreed, and it was all done. Five minutes. The millions of dollars that are spent every year just so people can get their taxes filed — not counting the thousands, nay millions, of hours of thankless slog just to get them in — are a capitalist absurdity.
The drawings at right are of my siblings as we went through my mother’s tax records for the fourth? fifth? time today. Now to work on ours.
23 February 26
Transcriptions Completed
A week ago Friday, I learned about the Douglass Day transcription project and promptly joined this crowdsourced effort to transcribe printed documents related to the series of Black political organizing conventions in the 19th century. The big push for this project was on Friday the 13th, but volunteers continued on and yesterday finished transcribing the entire collection. There were 1,445 volunteers who transcribed text from 3,416 images of documents. I ended up transcribing 32 documents over 10 days.
I am really happy with the way the effort turned out. This was a way to participate in Black History Month, the volunteers quickly got through the collection, and I discovered that online transcription is a contribution path towards increasing the accessibility of historical archives. It turns out there are plenty of opportunities to do this sort of thing online, through programs at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, and other places I’m sure. I will be looking into these.
22 February 26
On Story Arcs
A lot happened in yesterday’s Comix Coven… the session started out with different story arc possibilities. I added the Heroine’s Journey (I“m reading Mauren Murdock’s classic 1990 book of the same name) with what that arc might look like. It’s particularly appropriate to my own project.
Of course it’s important to understand your family of origin. And, at some point, you just have to take responsibility for your own life. I think this project around my mother’s journey is giving me permission to reconcile with her fully. I just wish she was still around to talk to about it. But that’s the point, isn’t it… If she was, we/I wouldn’t get here.
Update, 23 February: I should point out that Maureen Murdock’s own diagram of the heroine’s journey is a circle, with stops along the way that include a redefinition of self. But this seems to me to be more of an inward spiral than a circle. What I’ve drawn is more like an outward spiral ending in a line, like a snail. However we conceptualize these potential story arcs (and however much fun it is to do so), I’m guessing they look different for every individual, and might even look different for the same individual at different points in time.
21 February 26
The Elusive Bushtit
I’m continuing to try photographing the urban avifauna of Davis, and am learning how bird species differ in their challenges in photographing them. Bushtits are pretty common, but move through shrubbery in a very active flock. It is quite hard to catch one in the viewfinder before it disappears behind a branch. Still, yesterday I walked through the Arboretum and managed to take several good frames of bushtits in a flock at eye level.
Pica and I have a joke that bushtit flocks always come in sizes that are prime numbers.
20 February 26
When Grief Does the Buying
The day Mum died back in September we all sat around, more or less happy that she’d gone how she wanted, more or less numb. We all repaired back to my sister’s after a few hours and I took myself off up the hill to Sherman’s, her local independent bookstore.
There is something so comforting, so open yet enclosed, about a bookstore. Like a mother’s arms. I picked up a copy of Birds of Maine by Michael Deforge and Lynda Barry’s Syllabus from the graphic novel section. Not sure why these books — I just wanted to have something to mark the day, and to thank the bookstore for being there for me.
I’m only now getting to grips with the Deforge, and it is a tour de force. Silly, profound, mundane, bickeringly observed. Daft. I’m going to write a letter to him, it still being International Letter Writing Month, telling him I picked up his tome and thanking him for helping to make sense of a world that doesn’t have a lot of sense in it.
19 February 26
Urban Rabbit
I am continuing to practice a bit of bird photography by strolling around the neighborhood with my 75-300mm lens. But not all urban wildlife are birds. This is a cottontail rabbit that likes to hide under the shrubbery near the Davis Senior Center. He clearly is finding plenty to eat there.
18 February 26
In Praise of the Encyclopedia
My mother was a great believer in the Encyclopedia Britannica, that multi-tome set that was moved from California to Spain and then back to California again when my parents moved to Bodega Bay in 1989. By then it was of course very out of date: scientific advances alone in the intervening 25 years made much of it basically useless. But she hauled the set with her from California to Maine when she moved there five years after my father died, and it remained in her apartment until her death last September. There was no way anyone would take it (we did try) and my only hope is that it got recycled. I do make a small monthly donation to Wikipedia, which I use almost daily and find to be a great consolation in this era of monetized information transfer.
Encyclopedias — print encyclopedias — are wonderful because they are arbitrarily arranged alphabetically, which means you can find stuff you were interested in looking up next to something you never knew you needed to know, but which is fascinating. I picked up Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets last week and am fascinated by the entries, but more so by the juxtapositions:
Hades, then Hag (originally Holy Woman, cognate of Egyptian heq), then Hair (a four-page entry that includes Isis, Berenice, the Compendium Maleficarum, St. Paul, Homer, Tantric sadhakas, and the old Maundy Thursday command that men shave their heads and beards in Britain so that the day came to be described as “Shear Thursday”).
If we kept books in the bathroom this would be an obvious one, but we don’t, which will probably preserve it for longer from the humidity we’re now getting in the form of a very rainy week.
17 February 26
Delicata Squash
Sketched today before it got chopped up for our weekly soup. I drew it with ink and Neocolor II watercolor crayons.
16 February 26
Sketchcrawl in the Rain
Yesterday was our February Let’s Draw Davis outing, not quite beating the front that is going to deliver a lot of rain (and snow!) to northern California.
While I was sketching the band my friend Pete sketched me. We were under the awning at the Creator Space, so sheltered from the weather.
15 February 26
Enric the Adventurer
Thanks to the vicissitudes of the YouTube algorithm, I have discovered the channel Enric Adventures which has the possibility of entertaining me with Catalan language content for years into the future. This is the channel of a 37-year-old civil engineer named Enric Luzán Pi who as of 30 November 2025 started the grand adventure of walking around the world (La Volta al Món a Peu), beginning in Barcelona and walking west to east. His long distance walks started in 2022 with a circumambulation of Andorra, and continued with traversing the Pyrenees, traversing the Swiss Alps via the Via Alpina Green, and crossing the Caucasus range in Georgia. He is trying to vlog his adventure daily. The channel provides subtitles in Catalan which is good for my language learning input.
Enric is presently on day 77 of his adventure and is now in the middle of Croatia. I only started watching him five days ago beginning at his Day 1 departure point at the Plaça Catalunya in Barcelona, so I have catching up to do. His daily videos are about 15 minutes each so if I watch two a day I should converge on following in real time in a month-and-a-half or so. These are a lot of fun to watch because one gets to see the landscape at a slow pace, and I like following his route with OpenStreetMap displayed in a separate window.
Enric has a video on his potential route around the world. Traversing Europe seems easy; going across Asia definitely is not, given geopolitical instability.