5 April 04
Season Underway
This notion of having a couple of regular season games in the week before everyone else gets started is pretty silly, but the regular baseball season is finally underway for good. Already there’s excitement. The Detroit Tigers, the biggest underdog team in all of baseball, given their performance last year, opened their season by shutting out the Toronto Blue Jays 7-0. And the San Francisco Giants won in familiar fashion. Down 4-1 in the eighth, Barry Bonds hit a three-run home run. The Giants scored another run in the ninth to win 5-4. In the game Barry Bonds went 3-for-3 with a walk.
One down, 161 to go.
4 April 04
Archeology of a Car
Inspired by Jenny and Tvindy, I made an inventory not of things that were in my fridge (nothing really interesting in there except a whole drawer full of walnut ink), but of things that were in my car. Here is a partial list from March 27, 2004. The photo at left is the little flutter book I’m in the process of making of the same subject.
A bottle of generic Ibuprofen that doesn’t expire until 2005. (This seems miraculous.)
An envelope, empty, from the Registrar of Voters in Fairfield, dated November 2003.
A press clipping on Sicilian puppeteers and Osama Bin Laden (Charlemagne’s betrayed again).
Half a ream of orange cardstock.
Denise’s green marble. It’s lain in the tray where it was since she sold me the car back in 1995.
A black umbrella I found on a train from Berkeley to Davis.
A broken #2 pencil.
A plastic bottle with SPF 40 sunblock from 1998.
A tube of Boots Lipsalve from England, long melted into oblivion.
A light that’s supposed to come on when you open the door; it just dangles from the roof instead.
A glass Venetian egg given to me by Rachel as I set out on my western quest.
The draft program for a peace ritual Karen and I held outside Mrak Hall on March 17, 2004.
Two jumper cables. They lie on the bed of the hatchback, which is where they’ve been for eight years.
A first aid kit I haven’t opened since I bought it in 1996.
Some Yolo Audubon raffle tickets from 2001.
An empty green Delorme Atlas bag.
Two inscribed art books, on Burne-Jones and George Watts, given by my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother for “her birthday, September 6, 1906.”
The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition, faded to pale pink in exposed patches.
A few dessicated pads: alcohol and Wash ‘n’ Dry.
A green Irish stone to put in my pocket, given to me by Gail.
An art book in German, ca. 1899. Condition poor.
Marian’s copy of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. I still haven’t read it.
A blue blanket with yellow stripes, the “donkey blanket.” Slept on in Spain, France, and Michigan.
A black flowered Spanish fan bought at the Corte Ingls on the Castellana. This is our only air conditioning.
A pasta spoon, white plastic with prongs.
Five assorted Spanish earthenware dishes.
A Japanese travel blessing, the string now broken, given to me by Cora, best massage therapist in Cambridge.
Exam questions for my 1981 Birmingham B.A. Combined Honours [sic] finals (French and Spanish).
My Latin linguistics exam taken in Montpellier in 1980 (in French). (I got 18/20.)
A day parking permit for UC Davis from early August 2003. Price: $6.
A receipt, type faded into illegibility.
A box of Rose Pastilles we bought in Santa Barbara in 1999.
A calligraphed “Poets Against the War” pin.
A Davis Bike Club T-shirt for the July 4th, 2001, Criterium volunteers.
A gallon ziploc bag containing traces of Skippy peanut butter.
A French orange Rhodia notebook where we write down our gas mileage.
A purple coolmax shirt from REI.
A bag of plastic styrofoam peanuts that needs to go to PDQ for re-using.
Owner’s Manual, 1986 GL Subaru 3-door.
A Giants cap with Jeff Kent’s name on it, won by Numenius in a baseball trivia contest.
A few strips of balsa-wood veneer, used as nibs in a March 2004 calligraphy workshop in San Francisco.
A pair of pink dreamcatcher earrings, given to me by Chris the day Medea Benjamin came to Davis.
A receipt from Arco, Russell Boulevard, dated March 20, 2004. Gas cost $2.19/gallon on that day.
A Bic pen that doesn’t work, and another one that does.
A brown paper bag with only one functioning handle and another one with none.
AAA maps: Davis, Woodland, Northern California. Bike map: Yolo/Solano counties.
A yellow plastic funnel and an orange plastic trowel, neither of which has ever been used.
Empty plastic bottles: Odwalla Soy Chocolate, Aquafina 16.7 oz, two nalgene water bottles.
A UC Davis L permit, good only for Lot 11, and a disabled parking permit. Both expired.
A wire coat hanger from the Santa Barbara Cleaners. I think I went there twice.
A strip of Velcro that held a trash bag, now lost, given by Auntie Kit in Cohasset for our westward trek.
A whole series of Yolo Audubon Burrowing Owl newsletters from the mid-1990s.
Two unopened bottles of brake fluid. They’ve sat through two or three stifling car-summers.
A pair of sandals I last wore while gardening at Barbara’s in April 2003.
A pair of psychedelic sunglasses I bought in Santa Barbara for the boat trip with the island scrub-jay and the red-footed booby.
Framed photos: my sister and me in 1962 (Tiburon), us with our brother in 1973 (Madrid). The frames are disintegrating.
A pair of blue shorts and a brown ponytail holder, both belonging to Numenius.
An orange plastic rain poncho, $1.99. Never been opened.
Some Windex in a blue squeezable plastic cologne bottle.
A blue cotton sheet for a twin bed.
A length of pink tulle, part of my going away present from my former job, and last worn at Code Pink.
An Aramis umbrella I found at a bus stop in Harvard Square.
Assorted socks and parts of trousers that are now officially rags. (Actually, now officially trash.)
3 April 04
Tuleyome Tour
This is the eighth year running that David Robertson and Rob Thayer, founding members of the Putah-Cache Bioregion Project and professors at UC Davis, have taken folks on a 225-mile circumambulation by bus of the Putah and Cache Creek watersheds. Today we finally went on this trip, starting at the headquarters of the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area just east of Davis early in the morning and returning after sunset.
Our route took us in a clockwise direction up the Putah Creek drainage, crossing over the watershed boundary to the north in Lake County, and returning following the Cache Creek drainage (approximately the same route of the Davis Double Century epic cycling event held each May). Water and people were the themes of the trip—we stopped at lakes, dams, creekside preserves, and historic settlements by the wayside. We sang several chants along the way invoking the spirits of the creeks, and carried out a couple of water rituals, one of them being carrying cups full of water across the Solano Diversion Dam (half of Putah Creek’s water flows south at that point to supply Solano County with drinking and irrigation water).
The high point of the trip literally and figuratively was passing by the headwaters of Putah Creek on Cobb Mountain in Lake County. At right is a photo of where we stopped here. The vegetation is much, much different from where we live: it is a montane forest with ponderosa pines, Douglas firs, black oaks, and white alders along the stream. Despite having lived here five years, neither of us had been to Lake County before, a surprisingly isolated place. It is one of the only counties in the United States to have never had a rail line in it, and economically the county has never quite taken off, going through a series of booms and busts. This decade the growth sector is wineries. The last boom centered on geothermal energy. (It’s a volcanic area, the Clear Lake Volcanics perhaps being 600,000 years old. The most impressive volcanic cone in the area is Mt. Konocti, though some believe it is hollow and inhabited inside.)
I did lots of sketching at stops and from the bus, and was able, a bit to my surprise, to add some watercolor to my sketches while travelling in the bus. At top shows my sketch of a hillside dotted with blue oaks in the Cache Creek drainage.
Pica kept a bird list for the day. Highlights were seeing both golden and bald eagles, a peregrine falcon, and white pelicans at Clear Lake.
Tuleyome is the name the Lake Miwok gave to themselves and their homeland. It means “deep home place”, a place not too far from where at the Guenoc Winery we had lunch today.
Postscript by Pica: Since we had this watershed be a significant part of our wedding ceremony last August, it was particularly important to me to see its headwaters, scrambling down the bank with my now-repaired Achilles to put my hands in this very cold water…
2 April 04
Warm Pine Needles
July in the Gredos mountains, west of Madrid . . . June in Idyllwild . . . May in South Carolina . . . August in the Landes near Bordeaux.
When pine needles have been sitting on the ground, piled up for a while, and get warmed by the sun of the late afternoon, and that languid time and scent is punctuated by occasional languid birdcall, when the breeze rustles the tall pines overhead, then is the best time, the best place, for a nap.
For the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Smell and Place.
1 April 04
Earthworm Perfume
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on smell and place.
There is such a thing—honest. Amy Stewart, author of an excellent new book on earthworms and their achievements, writes in her book tour blog about discovering this fragrance:
Finally I pulled off the cap and sprayed it into the air. It hit me, instantly familiar. Worms. No doubt about it. It was the smell of dirt and rotten leaves and compost piles, and also the faint scent of skin, worm skin. I dont know how else to describe it. It was just vaguely—invertebrate.
The creator of this scent is Christopher Brosius, co-founder of a company called Demeter Fragrances, whose line of fragrances include many evocative of place. One, called Holy Water, comes from the smell of an old Norman church in England. Others in their list include bamboo, funeral home, New Zealand (by special request for the premiere of The Two Towers), and the most popular one of all, dirt.
As for Earthworm, Brosius says that the scent is “surprisingly popular…It sells at smaller upscale shops with a very sophisticated clientele.”
31 March 04
California Quarter Redux
I wrote an article for Faultline last year on the design and choosing of the new California quarter dollar, featuring a gold miner, the sierra, a poppy, a bear, and the words “a golden moment,” the apparent choice of the voting California public. It seemed like a done deal, mishmash that it was.
But we had a different governor then. Schwarzenegger has decided that a better choice for the California quarter is Garret Burke’s design featuring naturalist John Muir and the Yosemite Half Dome, along with a California condor (apparently at the Governor’s last-minute request).
You know what? Despite the fact I’ve been proved a liar, and despite the fact that the wishes of those Californians who chose to spend their time on internet votes for designs such as these have been blatantly disregarded, John Muir is an excellent figurehead to have on a coin for this state. I’m also thrilled the condor is there (though it hasn’t yet staged an “amazing comeback” as Schwarzenegger says; it will be many more years and millions more dollars before such a statement can be made, if ever). I gleefully sense rumblings of pissed-offness among California republicans. They voted for him to represent THEM, not the environment or (heaven forbid!) gay marriage. May he continue to confound their senses, and, I might add, mine.
30 March 04
Season Approaching
The regular baseball season opened today with a game played abroad in Japan. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays beat the New York Yankees 8-3. So for the moment the Yankees are in last place with a record of 0-1. Alas, I don’t think it’s safe to extrapolate this to the rest of the 162-game season, but we can enjoy the standings while they last. The Yankees and Devil Rays play another game tomorrow, and then the regular season begins in earnest next Monday.
Meanwhile, the Giants today acquired left-hander Wayne Franklin from the Milwaukee Brewers. Franklin is a pitcher we remember from Triple-A games. We have some friends who for some unknown reason loved to razz him when he came to pitch against the Sacramento River Cats: “What’s the mattuh with Franklin? He’s a BUM!” Now that he’s a Giant, we may just have to root for him.
29 March 04
Pet Show, Madrid, July 1971
Since both Jennifer and Jenny recently admitted to being regular visitors to Feathers of Hope (from Sweden and Australia respectively), I thought it might be nice to show a photo of them together.
Jennifer is modelling the blue/green/white floral frock at left; Jenny’s right behind her. I’m watching the tortoise or whatever it is from extreme far left. My Dad’s doing the judging. As I recall, nobody really won or lost.
28 March 04
Kerry The Cyclist
I have a newfound fondness for John Kerry. According to this report in the news section of the trade site Bicycle Business, John Kerry is a serious long-distance cyclist. The Senator from Massachusetts rides many charity events and last August came in 37th out of a field of 3000 in the 110-mile Pan-Massachusetts Challenge ride. The report also tells how Kerry finished an 80-mile ride to the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod in freezing weather that Greg LeMond, three-time Tour de France winner who was also riding in the event, called the worst conditions he’d seen.
A cyclist in the White House? Sounds fine to me. And Kerry will need all the stamina of a long-distance rider if he is to outpace the Repugs by November.
27 March 04
Feathers of Hope Turns One
It’s our blogday!
In the pattern suggested recently by Coup de Vent, the leadup to the war on Iraq got us both reading widely on the blogosphere for the first time and prompted a curiosity about blogging. Moving from a daily logbook on paper to a more wide-ranging one onscreen seemed a little intimidating… but we had help.
First, Rebecca Blood’s excellent Weblog Handbook was very good at providing the big picture along with the mechanics. Fred of Fragments From Floyd and Lisa of Field Notes got us interested in the idea of doing a more collaborative kind of writing about place with their duoblog, Now Showing: Sunset and Clouds; the Ecotone Wiki grew out of this and continues to be a forum where folks can gather and talk, write about, and show photographs about place. Fernanda of The Chatterbox, a Brazilian who lives in Davis, was the first blogger we met in person (and remains the longest continual blogger we’ve met to date), and was encouraging and full of advice (obrigados, Fer). Chris Clarke of Creek Running North joined us and Lisa in Point Reyes for a broadcast program about place blogging (wonder whatever happened to that transcript?). Pica met Beth of Cassandra Pages last summer while visiting New England, and she’s as thoughtful and delightful in person as her writing is. The list goes on. Thank you to all who read, and come back, and leave comments. We hope to meet more of you in person, and see some of you in person we haven’t seen for, oh, 30 years or so.
A few stats:
Number of entries by category: Nature and Place 179, Design Arts 26, Politics 29, Baseball 33, other categories 82
Biggest pain: The comment spammers (less of a problem now since we’ve installed MT-Blacklist)
Weirdest success: Numenius’s innocuous review of The Da Vinci Code
Number of comments posted on said subject to date: 118
Number of Google searches for “Sangreal” that landed at the above post today so far: 12
Number of Achilles Tendons ruptured and blogged about during the last year: 2 (Pica and Keith Knight)