14 July 04
Waterbrushes
On our trip to the Sacramento Zoo last week, I tried out Pica’s Niji waterbrush. This is a synthetic brush that is attached to a squeezable handle that one fills with water. I was quite impressed with the utility of this tool, especially for field use in working with watercolor pencils and small watercolor pan kits. It provides a lot of control in how much water reaches the brush, and it is much easier ergonomically than filling a tiny cup with water and dipping a brush in it everytime one wants to add some brushwork to a watercolor pencil sketch.
Anyway, we ordered some more of these brushes in several different sizes from John Neal Books, and they arrived yesterday. Here is a sketch I did today showing Mt. Diablo at dusk, together with the 15mm waterbrush.
13 July 04
Older Bloggers
In March of last year Numenius posted about Samuel Pepys’ blog. We had only just started Feathers of Hope at that point; looking over these older entries is a bit like peeking over someone else’s shoulder.
Now it seems Thoreau has his own blog too. (Thanks to Dave of Via Negativa for alerting us to this.)
12 July 04
Into The Hills
It was a rest day today in the Tour de France, meaning that the riders only went on light training rides of 160 kilometers or so, and tomorrow the racing begins again, into the hills of the Massif Central. These mornings we’re following the live reports on VeloNews. The haikus submitted for Friday’s stage were especially good.
11 July 04
Bye Bye, Louie
Louie got adopted today by a sweet girl called Jane. He was her sixteenth birthday present. We’ll miss his lively chirruping around the house. What a change he is from the poor little huddled creature one May Wednesday morning in the carport…
10 July 04
Refuge From The Heat
Following a trip to the bike store for a new tube and patch kit, I spent some time this afternoon sketching in the Arboretum redwood grove. Over this past year, there has been a major landscaping project in the redwood grove: a whole host of volunteers put in about 20,000 forest floor plants, not to mention redoing the path with bark and mulch so it is no longer so muddy in winter. At left is my painting of one of the new plantings, a sword fern.
9 July 04
Telemetry, Here We Come
When your boss-the big boss-comes in your office and asks if you have your bike here today, to which you respond yes, and then asks whether you’d like to go out with him and test a radio transmitter to be used on corvids, backpack-style, hauling your yagi antenna around on the bike, you say yes, not knowing that he actually means RIGHT NOW. This is what I did at 10:30 am. I found the transmitter he had hidden in the wild grape near the freeway. He showed me how to use the directional antenna, how to alter the controls to get the most efficient pinpointing of sound.
Numenius and I will almost certainly be participating in a study Walter Boyce will be heading up at the Wildlife Health Center focusing on crows, yellow-billed magpies, and West Nile Virus. We’ll be checking in on the birds every day, trying to track them down if they die, which we’ll know because the radio signal will change. It sounds like a lot of fun. And it’s even all in a day’s work.
8 July 04
Octarine Kitties
Diego and Charlie are here playing with the magic wand that Pica’s sister sent her a while ago as a gift. Fortunately, no permanent damage resulted, though we did have some difficulty retrieving the storage box after it levitated to the top of the ceiling.
[Postscript by Pica, Friday, July 9: I’ve added a few more photos to the kitten gallery.]
7 July 04
Tour Time Again
Mornings are back, for me, to going to the official Tour de France website and following the agonizingly slow feeds of the day’s stage, live. This is only televised on OLN, a cable channel, a channel we don’t get because we don’t have cable because we don’t have a TV. But just occasionally I wish we did.
Lance Armstrong is up for a record-breaking sixth Tour de France win, and also a record-breaking sixth consecutive win. He is neither as likable as Miguel Indurain, the quiet Basque who dominated the Tour in the early 90s, nor as brilliant (or crazy) a cyclist as Eddy Merckx (nicknamed “The Cannibal”), but he is OBSESSED with the Tour de France (detractors would say to the detriment of cycling in general). He is so obsessed that he’s turning it into a race that cannot be won without this level of obsession. The next two and a half weeks will be full of our contemplation of this obsession.
(You’ve been warned.)
6 July 04
Watercolor Compendium
Today I found the site handprint: watercolors and watercolor painting, which is an amazingly comprehensive resource about watercolor materials and techniques. The section on paints and pigments, with hundreds of evaluations of different paints, is alone worth much study.
5 July 04
Riding the Ferry
As Numenius says in his post from yesterday, we took the ferry from Vallejo to San Francisco and got deposited right at the ballpark rather than at the Ferry Building owing to some crisis or another. It gave us ample time to wander around SBC Park, enjoying what has to be one of the great sports arenas of the world.
When you go to a city by ferry rather than by driving there over a bridge, your whole perspective of the city changes. Obviously, you’re looking at the city from below rather than from above, with all the literal and metaphorical implications; but there is somehow this shared sense among fellow ferry-riders that we’re ON to something: we share a secret.
Cities are formed by arteries and what’s between them; organs, if you like. Arriving by ferry deposits you plonk in the middle of an organ. You bypass the bloodstream, go straight for the heart. It’s a good way to travel.
It’s also what my father used to do in the early 1960s; take the ferry from Tiburon to the Ferry Building. I always feel a connection with him when I do this. The ferries, the buildings, the city have changed, but not, I think, that essence.