4 July 04
A Holiday Baseball Outing
Today we went to see the SF Giants play the Oakland A’s in SBC Park in San Francisco. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry from there into San Francisco. The ferry ride is a very pleasant 55 minute journey, and it was crowded with people going to the game, both A’s and Giants fans. The boat even docked at the pier nearest the ballpark, owing to some temporary problems at the Ferry Building. This was convenient allowing us to arrive in time to catch some of the batting practice. We got some lunch, and then went to our seats high above home plate (see my sketch at right).
The A’s were dominant all day, and ended up winning 9-6. Mark Mulder pitched well and won the game, bringing his record to 11-2. Eric Byrnes had a banner day, hitting two three-run home runs. We saw Barry Bonds break a record: he walked twice and thus became the all-time career walks leader, passing Ricky Henderson. But he didn’t get a hit today, and struck out on a 96-mile-an-hour Octavio Dotel fastball (the A’s new closer from Houston) to end the game.
It was a long 10-hour outing. The kitties were hungry when we got home, but seemed to harbor no resentments at our extended disappearance.
3 July 04
Distant Cousins
Numenius and I took a trip to the Sacramento Zoo today to do some sketching. If you don’t mind an audience (human), it’s a great place to sketch; the animals are used to having people around and sit still. Actually, they sit in a torpitude that only prolonged incarceration can bring.
This sketch is of a female orangutan that picked up a piece of fabric and draped it over her head not unlike the chadors I saw when I was in Iran. She looked right at me, a suffering buddha. I was almost too distraught to notice the children around us, yelling “monkey, over here!” or older children yelling “where’s the wrench”? I got fatigued quite quickly after this.
A creature that can gaze at us like this—it knows. It knows us. It knew me.
2 July 04
Interactive Online Keying
One of the problems with using a traditional dichotomous key such as found in most floras to identify an organism is that it’s easy to get stuck if you can’t determine which choice of the key is correct, especially at the topmost levels of the key. What you really need is an identification tool that lets you enter the characteristics of the specimen you do recognize, and narrows down your choices accordingly.
Such a tool is difficult to create in the pages of a book (though I have seen punch card examples), but is straightforward to build on a computer. At last week’s NBII meeting, I was reminded of the IDnature guides that are being produced at the Discover Life project at the University of Georgia. These are a set of online interactive keys to many different taxa ranging from dung beetles to liverworts. It’s a very promising approach to helping non-experts identify critters.
1 July 04
Twang!
About twenty years ago I was walking through the streets of Cambridge (England) with my mother. We wandered past a music shop. There was a mandolin next to a banjo in the window. It was my birthday coming up and, well, we walked out of there with a mandolin, a beautiful instrument I never really took to. When I moved to Boston, the mandolin stayed behind.
I’m wondering whether I just made the wrong choice. This evening I picked up a clawhammer banjo from a friend’s house across the way. Jim plays bluegrass guitar AND mandolin and won’t be needing his banjo for a while, so he’s generously lending it to me.
I’ve learned three chords so far; I am mystified by the upper register fifth string and how to play it (backwards from a guitar, it turns out); and I have the kittens totally intrigued. More anon.
The Ecotone wiki discusses Courage and Place today. That seems to be more than I’m up for just now but please scoot on over to take a look.
30 June 04
A Pancake Journal
If one is ever lacking for subjects to sketch, breakfast is always a possibility. The site Pancakes Across America has a set of galleries of pencil sketches of pancakes from many breakfast places across the country. For instance, here is a sketch of a three-stack of buttermilk pancakes eaten in Bardstown, Kentucky.
I’m not sure what subject would make a good culinary travel journal for me. Burritos, perhaps?
29 June 04
More Thoughts on Field Notes
Thanks to those who have been encouraging us to keep better field notes. In the week or so I’ve been tallying corvids from my bike I’ve been noticing much more than what I’m supposed to be counting: the direction of the flying cattle egrets; whether the Swainson’s hawk I see (there’s almost always one) is north or south of the creek (there are two pairs); whether the magpies are out and about or hidden in the thick of the walnut trees.
Dave of Via Negativa says that his mother, after thirty years of notes from an acre at the top of a hill, has made many unique observations of birds and mammals. I’m sure this is true. Observation of behavior seems to be a dying art among the biological sciences, supplanted by the much more prestigious genomics… I’m happy to buck the trend in however tiny a way.
Kitten footnote: Babette went to her new home yesterday; I had no idea it would be this wrenching. And then there were three.
28 June 04
Monocot Forest
The corn field outside our house is now well over eight feet tall, screening our view of the hills, the rail line, the levee and just about everything else. This sketch was made with a bamboo pen (I love working with these though it’s hard to carry the ink around on field outings) and our new Derwent Signature watercolour pencils, lightfast and with rich pigments.
27 June 04
To Learn, and Learn, and Learn
Coup de Vent at London and the North has just written about our feelings of loss as the little comfortable corner of the blogosphere we’ve settled into shifts, much as a kitten on a sunny nook of tile floor discovers that the source of heat has moved on.
I’ve been pondering this all day. Yesterday we bought a copy of Peter Steinhart’s The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (Knopf, 2004). Although I’m not very far along in this, the startling truth is that life drawing classes are chock-a-block full of people who show up with compulsive regularity, not to produce ART, but simply to get better. Maybe one day.
As Steinhart relates of Hokusai, at the age of seventy-three: “From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”
While this kind of timetable can become a little depressing, it also argues, I think, for showing up every day and TRYING. I think this can extend to the blog as well as drawing. While there are probably as many reasons for blogging as there are blogs, I wonder whether some of us aren’t tempted by the lure of the immediate success, the instant masterpiece; this is what our culture (Western, Butuki, but I’m not sure Japan is immune) is pushing us towards.
I hope, one day, to do a drawing that’s a little bit good. I hope also, one day, to write a piece, here or elsewhere, that’s a little bit good. Until then, I’m grateful to people who read here and either refrain from pointing out my shortcomings or are actually positively encouraging. I am so grateful, basically, for this community.
Incidentally, Michael Moore feels a bit more urgency than some of us might, and so I’m also grateful he has put Fahrenheit 9/11 out there for all of us. Not just the choir he was palpably preaching to in the theatre we saw it in yesterday; all of us. See it if you get the chance.
26 June 04
Lone Mountain Ascent
Overlooking the Big Sky ski resort is the 11,166 foot Lone Mountain. I like mountains; they inspire to head up. Living at 45’ elevation in the flat Central Valley doesn’t give me much opportunity for hill-climbing, so I made the most of it during my trip, going on hikes after the sessions were over in the afternoons. (If I had realized the conference was in the mountains, I would have remembered my hiking boots.)
Reaching the peak itself was beyond my available time and ability, but I longed to hike up to the bowl of the cirque some 1500’ above the resort. After things wound up on Thursday I started hiking, bringing my sketchbook, not sure how far I’d get.
I had gone a quarter-mile from my room, climbing maybe 100’, when an obstacle presented itself. There was a bear grazing just off the trail a hundred meters up. So much for heading up that trail, so I sat, sketched, and even managed a photo through my binoculars.
Hungry by this point, I made a foray to the resort grocery store, then started hiking up the slope below the gondola, stopping at one of the pylons to sketch the view at left of the mountains to the northeast, constantly bedeviled by mosquitoes (forgot the insect repellent as well).
At 8700’, in the rocky slope below the cirque, there was a field of these beautiful lilies (illustrated at right) standing about 15 cm tall. I don’t have any Rocky Mountain flower books and don’t know what they are. I wasn’t sure how much farther I wanted to go up, but I was hearing odd bird calls from above (ptarmigan???), so I kept going, and reached the bowl.
The barren walls of the cirque were impressive, and there was quite a rush of meltwater draining from the remaining snowpacks above. The bird call turned out to be a raven, and though there was interesting birding to be done (were there rosy finches around?), I had to turn around before it got dark, a sign on one of the ski structures reading 9067’ elevation.
25 June 04
Worse for me than thee
I took the kittens in this morning to be spayed and neutered… from starving them to the fear that Babette wasn’t quite big enough, through their yowling all the way there in the car, I was a basket case by the time I got to the vet’s… I got chastised for having them in boxes not carriers, which didn’t help much.
All day I worried about them… I was told not to come back until 5-6. I called, at around 3:00pm, to check up, but there was no answer. I had to content myself with watching a juvenile Swainson’s hawk nail, and then eat, a juvenile California ground squirrel. So it goes.
Got the kittens home, cringing all the way (different yowls this time, yowls of pain?) and first thing they did when they got out of their containers was basically purr up a storm. Purr around food, purr around each other, purr around the blanket I had put down for them. They were purring when Numenius walked through the door from Bozeman. They’re fine, leaping about in an unseemly fashion. Purring.
Now, I can get some sleep.