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)
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.