8 December 04
Ephemera
Growing up in Madrid in the 60s we traded these things called cromos—cards that could be stuck in an album, but only across the top, so you could lift them up and learn all about the item depicted in the image. I don’t even remember what the theme was (probably the natural world), just how Desirable they were, huge swaps going on in the playground with giant stacks of cards, shady deals and so on.
I must be the last person on earth to hear about Artist Trading Cards, which were started by a Swiss artist in 1996. The idea is to hand make an edition of twenty cards or so and send it in, and you’ll get fifteen different ones back. This is a strictly non-commercial unjuried art show, part of Copy Left, intending to get artists to meet each other at Events and subvert the corporate hold on art. At least that’s the impression I get from a random look at the Gallery.
There is no such Event anywhere near here soon, but I might send in a set to Sister Trading Cards. I make such things often in any case: for me it’s part of recycling what’s lying around. Having it make sense on a 3.5” x 2.5” card is a new challenge.
7 December 04
Light Rain in the Evening
Two successive fronts have come through in the past day. Overnight we had 0.80 inches of rain. No rain throughout the day, though not much in the way of blue sky sky either, and light rain started again late in the afternoon. My bike commute to Spanish (alas no longer conveniently on the UC Davis campus) is maybe a six mile journey all told and so far I have avoided becoming soaked on the ride. It’s mostly a matter of wintertime luck, but it helps that we rarely get soaking showers. Nothing a pair of rain pants and a good rain jacket can’t handle, which I both had tonight.
6 December 04
A Southern Hemisphere Sojourn
The fork-tailed flycatcher, there called tijereta: that’s what I remember most clearly.
And the meat.
I once managed to get myself on a Rotary-funded exchange program from Cambridgeshire in England to Buenos Aires province. This was in 1988, not too long after the Falklands/Malvinas war, and there was a push to improve relations. Young women (25-35) who spoke Spanish and who could take five weeks off at short notice were chosen from each country to visit the other. We were the return trip, so we met the women who had been to England.
I stayed with nine different host families over the course of the five weeks. Every single place we went, without exception, served us an “asado,” which roughly translated means entire cow roast on a spit. It was great… except I was a vegetarian. First course, kidneys and sausages. Second course, steak. Third course, steak. Fourth course, steak. On to about course # 8, which was salad. (I managed courses two and eight. Usually. I muttered simple prayers to the god of vegetarians.)
I learned that the spanish I spoke categorized me as a “gallega,” a person from Galicia but the Argentine term for all Spaniards; I learned to drink mate from a gourd (and essential part of digesting courses 2-7, above); I learned how people cope with 400% annual inflation; I walked on the Plaza de Mayo and thought about the disappeared and tried not to think too much about the disappeared; I pondered on the unseemly Reaganite relish with which Thatcher had taken on the generals, now looking almost quaint in retrospect; I watched argentine films with women my age and twice my age; I flew in a Piper Cessna over flooded ranchland, being careful not to tread on the nest of a black-necked stilt on the way to the plane. Sting was playing in Buenos Aires toward the end of our stay. We all watched it on television, along with healthy dubbed doses of Miami Vice and whatever else our host families tuned into.
I saw a mate gourd for sale at the Co-op the other day. I almost bought it—the one I bought in Tandil started leaking a while a go and I threw it out. Then, yesterday, an argentina commented on a post I had written about Master and Commander. Brings back memories of tijeretas and roasting meat…
5 December 04
Lunch With Cat
Charlie here is, as always, interested in food, preferably ours rather than his. The sample of the apple proved to be particularly purrworthy.
Our cats are strictly indoor cats, but we’re getting them used to being on a harness and leash, so they can at least sauter a bit outside. Diego is taking to the effort with a lot more enthusiasm than Charlie. Today he explored a patch of grass on the field outside our house.
4 December 04
Crow Duty
The Wildlife Health Center’s crow monitoring project is going quite well; after weeks of catching none, my colleagues have now caught a total of ten crows (almost all juveniles) and three yellow-billed magpies. Two of the crows managed to ditch their transmitters, somehow, and the third is completely missing, but the remainder are tracked daily.
Numenius has a small ham radio, so we often turn it on in the morning when there are foraging crows on the field to see who’s out there. (It’s usually crow # 594.) But to get them all, we need to go over to the University Mall at nightfall, where an impressive nightly roost yields lots of radio signals and an awful lot more guano. (BAD place to park overnight.)
This evening we volunteered to check, and heard crows #333, 594, 473, 454, 194, 113, and 652. Five minutes of work. This time last year, folks, I was writing articles about nonresident tuition. Now I count crows on Saturday evenings…
3 December 04
The Druids Across The Way
Jim of the acorn grubs held a potting party for his valley oak seedlings at his house this evening, conveniently located on the other side of the street from us. It’s quite a production. The acorns get laid out in flats over vermiculite, as seen at right. Once the acorns germinate, they get placed in pots made of two milk cartons, preferably quart-sized, opened up and duct-taped end-to-end. Meanwhile, folks are scouring Davis cafs for empty dairy cartons, and our office is serving as a waystation for garbage bags full of half-and-half containers coming from the campus Memorial Union coffeehouse.
So far over three hundred acorns have been potted, and a number of flats of these have gone out to various people. A lot of teachers have become interested in the project, and several were at our gathering this evening. The seedlings will be ready to plant once the tap root reaches the bottom of the twinned carton. Jim this will happen some time in mid-January to the beginning of February.
At left we’re happily inspecting seedlings to the music of La Bottine Souriante.
2 December 04
Different Paths
I’ve been taking an online calligraphy class, my first. Roman Majuscules. The ones on the Trajan Column, beautifully proportioned and fiendishly difficult to do well—the basics are easy but everything, EVERYTHING is in the nuance, the subtleties. It requires a lot of practice.
The time I have to practice is early in the morning. This is also the time when I might be writing or meditating, and in practice it ends up being the time when I everyone else’s blog over several cups of tea. And get ready for work, having eaten breakfast. And taken a shower. And am late for work. And so on.
Meditation’s not easy for me; I am easily distracted and the thought of a week of Zen practice, let alone longer, is inconceivable (Lorianne has my admiration no just because she wrote a 50,000-word novel in the month of November…). All the uncomfortable sitting, thoughts whizzing through my brain…. Yet this morning as I patiently dipped the pen in the ink, strove for the 30 degree pen angle (but 60 degree on the verticals of the “N,” 20 degrees on the “Q’s” tail and the upper diagonal of the “K,” 0 degrees on the diagonal of the “Z,” I pondered on what a meditative exercise it was. Family groups, organized widest to narrowest; then the alphabet; then abecedarian sentences (I gravitate mostly to those in Latin, like “Trans zephyrique globum scandunt tua facta per axem,” which nonetheless leaves out “K” and “W” as well as “V” which should replace the “U”). Finally, I decided to try Michael Nagler’s suggestion of the prayer of St. Francis.
There is no way to write these letters quickly. They build stroke upon stroke, over time, and the space between the strokes is as important as the shape of the letterform. They get absorbed, penetrate the psyche. It’s pure concentration: pure present.
Lorianne says a Trappist monk once told her Catholicism had lost sight of its contemplative roots. I’d like to think the invention of the printing press had a tiny part in that….
Since this photo gives a rough sense of what the rest of the house looks like, and the reasons I find to avoiding doing housework, this will serve as an Ecotone Wiki entry—this time it’s Housekeeping and Place.
1 December 04
Luring The Wild Entomologist
Simply offer a jar of grubs.
The listserv of the ecology graduate students at UC Davis evidently is a happening place. Recent emails have concerned offers of Swedish massage by a graduate of the ecology group who has since gone on to get massage training, and a note by a visiting Portuguese scholar/rockstar seeking temporary housing for winter quarter—a person with a keen ability to find a party every weekend, but someone who gets grumpy if he runs out of salted codfish.
My officemate, who is in the middle of a project growing valley oak seedlings for restoration plantings, posted the following in response:
Seeing as the list serve themes are eclectic today, I’m offering up
a jar full of grubs. They emerged from the valley oak acorns currently
sprouting all over my house.While these grubs are not the life of the party, nor do they know Swedish
massage, they still might be of interest to budding entomologists who are
curious about oaks. Get ‘em while they’re hot!You will have to figure out what they eat, or if they can be salted and
used instead of codfish.
There were no claimants via email, but this morning we got a call from a woman who was quite excited about the grubs. She’s an entomologist, and came over on her bike in a half-hour. She immediately concluded they were lepidopteran larvae, probably some gray moth, and wondered why they hadn’t pupated yet. She took the jar, and would be heading over to the entomology museum tomorrow. This will be fun, she said.
30 November 04
Loss
A friend has just lost her guide dog, Bruno. He had cancer for a while and it finally caught up with him.
Losing a dog is awful. Losing a dog who helps you get around, is your eyes, your legs, who picks things up you can’t find, who gets you past those awkwardnesses when people don’t know how to respond because you’re in a wheelchair, so that even strangers come up to you and start conversations, who kisses you when you cry because let’s face it the world’s a pretty bleak place right now, who allows your partner to go to work without worrying—losing this, I can’t really imagine.
Bruno attended Code Pink rallies in a pink bandana, wagging his tail and smiling at everyone. He sat at the ACLU table at the Farmers’ Market, encouraging people to take literature, warning them about Ashcroft, grinning through his graying Labrador jowls. He was a true activist, a true friend. He was a Good Dog with a fondness for cookies.
He’ll be missed…
29 November 04
A Wiki For Davis
I learned today that my town now has its own community wiki. The Davis Wiki was started by a number of students and first went live at the end of October. It has grown rapidly, now having well over a hundred contributors and 600 pages. The wiki is particularly strong in describing the town’s eateries, and also has a growing number of pages on quirky features of Davis, such as the building known as the Death Star, Cows, and the Locomotive Hedge. An excellent feature of it is the interactive Davis map that allows you to click on and insert landmarks that link to wiki pages.
Pica and I have both signed up as editors, Pica quickly leaping in to add a page on our favorite Thai restaurant in town, Thai Nakorn.