4 August 04
Four Kitten Update
Diego is helping me with this blog as I write though some of his text needs a little editing. He is also very interested in pens, so I think we have the makings of a literate kitty here. Anyway, it’s official: we’re keeping both Diego and Charlie. Our landlord is letting us keep a pair and we signed the adoption certificate for them this past Sunday. Our cats are now bona fide.
We’re having a great deal of fun having them around the house. I’ve never had a cat before. Since I’ve been a cat lover since at least age 6, this is quite a joy for me. I’ve always lived in a situation where people were allergic, cats weren’t wanted, or cats weren’t allowed.
We saw Diego and Charlie’s sister this evening. She’s grown quite a bit, though is much smaller than her big brothers, and is feisty as ever. The interesting thing is that she’s developing a grey undercoat to her black fur, coming in across her back especially. She’s also getting a grey coon tail pattern contrasting with the black.
Up in Woodland, Louie, the orange kitten we adopted out a month ago, is doing very well in his new home. His family loves him dearly and think he’s going to grow up to be a huge cat.
3 August 04
A Different Kind of Thought
I just finished reading a book so remarkable I’m not sure what to say. The book is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. I had heard a lot about this book—my sister works with autistic children, for one thing—and when the chance came to evaluate it for next year’s Campus Community Book Project, I leapt at it.
I have always thought I had a visual mind… When people talk, I immediately render what they’re saying into pictures. When the topic is very abstract, this is hard, which is why it’s hard for me to get my head around REALLY abstract concepts. I couldn’t have been a philosophy major, for instance.
But I have NOTHING on Temple, a woman so courageous it leaves me humbled. She thinks only in pictures. Every thought she’s ever had is an image, and they get stored in her head, sequentially, so she retrieves them as though from a hard drive. This method of thinking has allowed her to be an amazing designer of facilities for livestock, with whom she identifies and is able to “see as”: thinking like a cow, she calls it. So she’s been able to design chutes, insecticide vats, vaccination restraints, and even restraints for slaughter that are humane and dignified, cutting down on the amount of unnecessary stress on the animals. When the book was written, a third of all livestock facilities in the United States were designed according to her principles. All of which are done in her head, visually, from every conceivable angle, like pieces of neurological Meccano.
Yet it is Grandin’s account of growing up autistic, of the tantrums, the isolation, the terror of being an adolescent and not fitting in, unable to communicate, yet miraculously tumbling on two or three mentors who didn’t mind that she was different (understatement of the year) and finding her calling as a designer-the journey is quite spiritual. And that she is able to articulate all this, an experience that is usually perplexing and completely opaque to non-autistics-no wonder this woman’s such a heroine in those circles.
My hope is that she’ll be a heroine in other, much bigger, ones. She has so much to teach us all about difference, tolerance, other ways of seeing.
2 August 04
The Sundowner
An entry for the Ecotone wiki topic on weather and place.
Art, Lynn, and their two kids passed through Davis today. We had a picnic lunch at the Village Homes green—Art wanted to tour and photograph the development—before they continued their trip north. Art is an ecological designer and on this trip was headed to a workshop on cob building techniques. It was fun seeing them today; it’s been several years.
During 1997-1998, while I was still in grad school at UC Santa Barbara, we rented their house out while they spent a year living in Mexico. Their house is a funky cabin located in a canyon at an elevation about 1200 feet above the city of Santa Barbara in a small community called the Trout Club. Their house has about 40 different types of fruit trees in their yard, solar hot water heating, and grey water irrigation. It was a magical place to live for a while.
We took advantage of the commute. It is 9 miles each way to the UCSB campus, and the way back involves a climb of about 1400 feet. Considering this a challenge, we rode our bikes to and from campus about three days each week. The ride up the hill (Old San Marcos Road) is long and steep in parts but it became a type of meditation.
Some days it would be a lot harder than others because of the strong sundowner winds that set up late in the afternoon occasionally in the region. These are fierce, hot, downslope winds that blow down the canyons of the Santa Ynez range, in part associated with a high-pressure cell over the Great Basin. The steepest bit of the ride, near the top, involves a set of hairpin turns. If there was a sundowner, we’d be in the lee of the hill until we left the final hairpin, at which point we’d almost be blown off our bikes!
1 August 04
Over There
The year after I finished my degree in England I went to work in Paris for a year. I had done a short secretarial course in Cambridge, England, which in those days invariably involved learning shorthand, which I got good at quite fast and then taught myself shorthand in French. (I can still remember the contraction for “Dans l’expression de mes sentiments distingus,” the equivalent of which is “Sincerely yours” in American business English.) I got a job in a French insurance agency. This was my first, and only, corporate job, apart from a translation gig in college for a Spanish agricultural engineering firm.
The unit I worked in at Faugre et Jutheau was reinsurance: a big game where the insurance companies themselves are insured by others. Lots of money; it’s like corporate Vegas. Anyway, many of the “jobs” the company reinsured were in the United States. And many of the US “jobs” that needed reinsuring were because of the weather. Why? L bas, c’est pas une blague, le temps. (The weather over there is no joke.)
Hurricanes and tornadoes. Hailstones the size of canteloupes. Freezing temperatures that would glue your hand to your car door if you were stupid enough to leave your gloves inside. Heat that rivals anything, most anywhere, including the Sahara.
For all this unjoking weather, I’ve fetched up in the California Central Valley, close enough to the Sacramento River Delta that we get a cooling breeze each night in summer, so that even if it’s been well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit—over 40 centigrade—during the day, it almost always cools down at night. (We’ve lived here five years or so and have never turned on the air conditioner.) In winter occasionally it freezes but mostly we have to contend with the local version of purgatory, the Tule Fog, where you can barely see your hand if you stretch it out in front of you.
Subtle, this version of weather, once you weather it a bit. (We don’t even really get earthquakes here, which are what other Americans claim keeps them from moving to California—though they seem perfectly happy to live in tornado country and the like).
I imagine the first inhabitants of the Sacramento Valley used all of this weather to help them survive. The fog is a powerful blind to a hunter; compelling thirst would drive prey to water. Lots of food grows in this climate. It was probably close to someone’s version of paradise, long ago.
This post is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Weather and Place.
31 July 04
On Treating A Computer As A Wastebasket
This afternoon we went into Pica’s office to download something from her computer, and as I had a scrap of paper to throw out, I looked underneath her desk and saw a rectangular object with light sides and a dark interior, so I started to throw the paper there. In fact this wasn’t a wastebasket but Pica’s Mac G4 computer.
These perceptual errors always make me think of the theory of affordances, a term coming from the renowned perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson. To quote Donald Norman, “the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support, and, therefore, affords sitting.”
Gibson explains:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment…
There is a language which objects communicate to us in. If you see a door with a flat panel rather than a handle on it, you know to push on it to open it. Boxes suggest opening them and looking inside, and if you’re a cat, laptop computers suggest walking over them!
30 July 04
Predators Too Close
Davis is in an uproar. A number of cats-about 20 or sohave gone missing from North Davis; two or three have been found dead and mutilated. Coyotes have been seen in the area for over a year and they were blamed for the deaths. Two adults were euthanized two days ago; their pups were caughtprobably todayand although the local paper said they’d be “relocated,” the Animal Services director said they had no intention of doing anything other than putting them down (which is probably the humane thing to do in the circumstances-they’re orphans and probably under severe stress at this point).
When we push our urban and suburban bounds into the territories of wild animals, these kinds of encounters are inevitable. Coyotes are naturally wary of humans, but find that our golf courses and overwatered lawns provide an abundance of rabbits and rodents on which to prey, plus all the food humans put out (as garbage, as food to feral cats, as food to coyotes), and they are gradually losing their fear.
The outraged pet owners demand coyote deaths. It’s easy enough to keep cats indoors, though—it’s much better for the ecosystem and much safer for the cats. As long as there’s a constant supply of food, these kinds of stories will continue to hit the news.
29 July 04
Decluttering The Feline Way
We’ve been on a major tidying tear these past several weeks. Yesterday it was going through the box of all the things that were in our old car Blue, transferring some of them to Nellie the new vehicle, and tossing the rest. Today we cleaned up the space under the glass table in the living room. Clearly the cats have something to do with this binge; they are certainly quite happy to supervise at any moment. Our one reference on the topic, Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui (for more details see the author’s site on Space Clearing), has nothing to say about the role of cats. But it is well known that cats are masters of feng shui, and we are learning what we can.
28 July 04
Apologizing to Cats
Being part English condemns you to apologize for things for which an apology is totally inappropriate, as in, “Sorry, do you mind if I just open the window?”-and must get thoroughly tedious after the third or fourth round. Unfortunately I find myself apologizing to kittens-if THEY get underfoot, if THEY are finicky about their food, if THEY are (much worse) finicky about their litter.
But they’re going to have to put up with it, I’m afraid. Pending approval from the landlord, we’ve decided to keep both Diego and Charlie. We’re out for too much of the time for one cat to be in here, cooped up, by himself and not start becoming neurotic. At least this way they’ll have each other to play with and make mayhem with.
For someone who isn’t a “cat person,” I’ve done a lot of cat stuff in the last few weeks. It’s been entertaining and far more fun than I’d ever have believed. And-yes-sorry to all of you who are bored out of your minds by all this kitten-blogging.
27 July 04
Return Of The Corpse Flower
Last year in June, the botanical conservatory at UC Davis was the site of the first “corpse flower” ever to bloom in Northern California. When this plant from Sumatra blooms, an event that happens every decade or so, its huge flower emits a stench like rotting flesh to attract flies as pollinators.
This year, a second one of the conservatory’s corpse flowers will be blooming. The flower, nicknamed “Tabatha the Titan”, is expected to open sometime between August 3 and August 13. The bloom doesn’t last long, the odor peaking over a period of about eight hours, so there’s not much of a window to smell the plant in its full odoriferous glory.
26 July 04
Roast Duck Curry
Our intrepid traveller friends put in a request last night for Thai food tonight. Not just any Thai food (they had been to lots of Thai restaurants in Australia); Thai food from Thai Nakorn, one of the newer Thai restaurants in Davis and our personal favorite.
Seems like it hit the spot all round. Nicole ordered Roast Duck Curry, which she claimed was never on the menu where they were; a couple of vegetable and tofu dishes and vegetable tom-ka soup sorted us all out.
Thai Nakorn opened around the same time last year as the Davis premiere of Finding Nemo (just next door). We mentioned both things in our blog entry for May 30, and were amused to find that entry pasted in the window of Thai Nakorn for a couple of months afterwards, apparently replacing any bona fide restaurant reviews.
Not that it has ever needed any; this restaurant has easily sifted its way to the top ranks. It seems always crowded now.