26 March 04
A Five-Eagle Day
Today we went on a wildflower excursion to Bear Valley in Colusa County (one of several dozen Bear Valleys in California), travelling through scenic country which though relatively nearby we’ve never visited before. Our first stop was Granzella’s, a prominent deli and restaurant in the Sacramento Valley town of Williams—we had to pick up a jar of their famous olives. And then we went westwards into the Coast Ranges, stopping at a geologically-oriented geocache at the very point where the rocks of the Great Valley Sequence at the east side of the Coast Range first become exposed.
Taking the narrow and practically-deserted over the ridges to the north end of Bear Valley, we saw somewhere between four and six golden eagles! A pair near the south end of the road, another pair (one of the birds immature) near the top of the ridge, and another couple of eagle sightings closer to Bear Valley.
Bear Valley is a fairly remote stretch of rangeland, all privately owned though much of it protected under a conservation easement, that has some of the most spectacular wildflower displays in Northern California. According to the California Wildflower Hotsheet (a wonderful little page with status reports on California bloom displays), it seems we were a little early for the peak in Bear Valley, but there’s still quite a lot up there already. At right is a photo of an owls’ clover, with lots of yellow asters in the background.
25 March 04
The Rain Gauge Tipped Over
We had rain today, which after the heat of last week and resultant pollen explosion has been a wonderful thing. Unfortunately we don’t know how much—the rain gauge was on its side.
It will probably rain again tomorrow. We have the day off: the University of California has declared its former “Spring Holiday” is now to be known as “Cesar Chvez Day” in honor of the farmworkers leader. Wonderful to get a day to play when most other people don’t.
We were planning a trip to Bear Valley, one of the best places in Northern California to see wildflowers. If it’s raining, though, we may alter our plans and work on taxes. I’d rather go back to the periodontist for a root planing, but it has to be done.
The very hot weather followed by this quite cool, wet air probably will result in some interesting plant phenomena this year.
24 March 04
Call Of The North
It’s good to see that the useful arts and sciences of Northern California are having an positive impact on the most northerly of states, Alaska. First, a story in the Davis Enterprise tells how a Davis veterinarian, Celia Valverde, recently volunteered at the Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, helping to examine the dogs as they came through the checkpoints. She worked for two weeks, travelling from checkpoint to checkpoint by bush plane, and returning in a plane with two pilots, three vets, and 38 dogs.
Second, the news site MacSlash links to a story in the Anchorage Daily News about the mushers in the Iditarod listening to iPods and other music players on the trail to lighten their spirits and boost their energy. As for the question what track do the dogs prefer, one MacSlash commentator says it’s obviously “Who Let The Dogs Out?”
At left we see Tassy, who belongs to Pica’s brother and his wife. Despite living in Juneau, Alaska, she has no interest in competing in the Iditarod.
23 March 04
The Not Day
One of the drawbacks-outweighed by the many advantages-of doing a blog written by two people on alternate days is when something happens on your “not” day. Yesterday, for example, I saw four wild turkeys on the levee, an extraordinary thing by any standards, and I even managed to photograph them. So poor Numenius had to put aside baseball or politics or something arcane and write about my turkeys.
So I’ve decided to even it up a bit. Numenius is, at the moment, in Spanish class, something he’s been doing twice a week since January. Although the UC Davis students are on Spring Break, getting drunk in the Sierra or in Baja or in Hawaii, the continuing education folks are hard at it, deep in syntax and tenses. Good for them, say I.
I don’t hear much about Spanish class other than that the teacher was so pleased last time they all passed their exam—for the first time ever, in her experience—that she brought in a cake. Tonight, more exam results are being delivered. I wonder if there’s another cake? Doesn’t matter, I brought home some Double Rainbow Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream from my foray to the Davis Food Coop.
22 March 04
Turkeys On The Creek
Pica saw four male wild turkeys on the levee by Putah Creek near our house this afternoon. For several years now turkeys have been reported by the creek a couple miles west of here, but we had no idea they were nearby. At right is a photo which Pica took today of two of them.
This past week has been warm, suggesting that summer is going to come early, and the Putah Creek lake of several weeks ago has totally disappeared. But this morning a marine layer came in, bringing dew and fog.
21 March 04
Zoo Happenings
Numenius’ brother and nephew are visiting from Indiana, so today we went to the Bay Area and went to the Oakland Zoo with them and Numenius’ sister and boyfriend. A few of us took the short cable-car ride over the lions up the hill, which is how we managed to get the angle into the giraffe enclosure.
This is a zoo where many languages are spoken. Middle-class anglos are definitely in the minority, which was fun. We wondered how the demographic might be different at, say, the San Francisco Zoo, which is much larger.
20 March 04
Wedding On The Equinox
Our friends Nicole and Mike got married today, in a wedding that started off this afternoon at St. James, the Catholic church in Davis, and then moved to the International House just north of campus for the reception.
Nicole officiated at our wedding back in August. At left we see Pica and Nicole today dancing a reprise to the jig at our wedding that resulted in Pica’s ruptured Achilles’ tendon. Even the musicians playing are the same. Happily, no injuries happened this time, and we’ve been at a fine party this afternoon and evening.
19 March 04
The Luxury of Taking the Train
We live in a place where we see a lot of trains each day (I can also see them now from my new office). The Amtrak Capitol Corridor run from San Jose to Sacramento has been successfully augmented; it’s our favorite way to get to the Bay Area. There are fast freights and slow freights. And then there are the two long-distance passenger trains: the Coast Starlight, that goes from Seattle to Los Angeles, one of the most beautiful journeys in the world, and the California Zephyr, which goes from Chicago to Emeryville, just beyond Berkeley.
We just met someone this evening who has come to Davis for a wedding from Virginia: by train. He got the train from Washington to Chicago and caught the Zephyr, three days ago. He has done this round trip five or six times; it’s his favorite way of travelling across country.
What I didn’t know, though, is that there are people—writers, showbiz folks, executives—who take the trans-continental train precisely to relax. Writers can get their books written; people can escape from phones, tv, email, and the like. Sounds like a great recipe for mellowness to me.
I’ve never taken this trip across the U.S., but I often took the train from London to Madrid in my younger days—Folkstone or Dover to Calais or Le Havre, Paris, St. Jean de Luz, Madrid, the different gauges of Spanish and French trains a quaint leftover from the Napoleonic invasion and the consequent 3 am lifting of the whole train off its wheels for a new set at the border. The Puerta del Sol was an institution. It’s been replaced by faster trains, but in general on the train I wasn’t in a hurry.
18 March 04
The Prevarication Boxscore
In a comment in this thread on Eschaton, Jonathan laments that the following story is not getting enough play in the blogosphere, so here I’ll do my part.
A couple of days ago, the minority Committee on Government Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives released a report, entitled Iraq on the Record, that documents misleading statements made by the Bush Administration between March 2002 and January 2004 concerning the threat posed by Iraq. The investigators examined 125 public appearances made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice and identified 237 misleading statements therein.
Bush had the highest number of misleading statements, with 55 (including 11 in a single appearance!), with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell close behind (51, 52, and 50 respectively). Rice had the fewest public appearances (16) and thus the fewest number of misleading statements (29) but she had the highest number of statements that were false outright—8. The greatest number of misleading statements were made about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, and the highest number over any thirty-day period occurred in the month prior to the October 2002 vote in Congress authorizing military action.
On the web page, the committee even provides a handy search interface to the database of misleading statements. “Nuclear” pulls up 84 statements.
17 March 04
Democracy in Action
There is no shortage of opinions about what the results of the Spanish elections mean, but roughly, the right claims that Spain has capitulated to terrorism, while the left holds that there is no connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. One of the most interesting pieces on this I’ve read is Juan Cole’s, who wonders why there has been such a disproportionate level of U.S. military spending on Iraq versus Afghanistan.
Much of the commentary in the Western press which accuses the Spanish of cowardice at the polls strikes me as patronizing at best. The exercise of the vote over the weekend was, exactly, just that: democracy. Democracy means you get to have a choice. The Spanish chose to dump the Partido Popular and a Prime Minister who led them to war against at least 85% of public opinion, probably higher. And those who might otherwise have stayed at home, resigned to the fact that their vote would mean little, were moved to vote.