23 September 03
The Joy of Taking a Shower
The hardest part about having an extremity in a cast, splint, or boot is not being able to get really clean. I’ll spare you the gory details of what that translates into but you can probably imagine. Anyway, from sponge baths where I got water all over the floor to sitting in the shower with my left leg in two tightly tied garbage bags, protruding while I perched on a commode in the shower and got even MORE water all over the floor, I have moved on to the ideal solution: take a shower elsewhere.
The PT’s place is a fully functioning gym complete with three showers, one of which, since it’s new, is handicapped accessible. This means I can hop over, grab the rail, hope I don’t slip, sit on the handy seat, wash merrily between my toes, and hop back out again. I think I’m the only person who ever takes a shower in there. At least now I don’t have to go to the hairdresser to get my hair washed, though I must say I miss the chatter of the three Latina hairdressers who, try all they might, never manage to say more than one sentence in English before lapsing into laments about this child or that relative. The handicapped shower in the PT’s place is very silent and unsociable by comparison. But I just BASKED in it this afternoon.
I’ll have to go get my hair trimmed soon to find out the latest on whose quinceaera party is next, is all.
22 September 03
When Carnosaurs Ruled The Roadways
This weekend I read Keith Bradsher’s recent book High and Mighty: SUVs—The World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. It’s a sordid tale, and not one for those who have low tolerance for accounts of raw greed. A favorite quote:
Who has been buying SUVs since automakers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.No, that’s not a cynic talking—that’s the auto industry’s own market researchers and executives.
Bradsher sees little relief from the scourge, and worries about what will happen when the current crop of SUVs starts to age and have mechanical problems, and show up on the used market to be purchased by less capable drivers such as youths and drunks.
Some good SUV links today: Philip Greenspun wonders how SUVs can remain fashionable when only unfashionable people (e.g.. middle-aged suburban parents) drive them. On a geekier note, he also considers Java to be the SUV of programming tools.
Kos meanwhile finds it a bit ironic that Arnold Schwarzenegger is campaigning on a platform of clean air, water, and the environment when he drives a Hummer. Actually, it’s worse than Kos realized: he owns six Hummers, and as Bradsher recounts, Schwarzenegger was the person most responsible for the commercial introduction of the formerly military-only vehicle.
Finally, a look at the SUV of the future, at the classic SUV poseur site.
21 September 03
Waffles and Crosswords
Today was really lazy—gearing up for the week. We used to make pancakes on Sundays, before the Achilles incident. Today we actually took ourselves out to breakfast to Cafe Bernardo, where we had waffles (with pecan butter), spilled tea, and read the paper. We also managed a quick trip next door to Newsbeat, where I was able finally to browse all kinds of magazines I’ve been missing. I feel as though I’m emerging a bit from my cave.
A few weeks ago a friend brought over a book of Sunday crossword puzzles, “slightly easier than the New York Times.” She had suffered an injury herself a few years before and knew it was hard to concentrate on reading for hours at a stretch. I must confess to a new and sort of shameful addiction here. They’re easy enough almost to finish each one, and there are so many blank ones left I don’t feel pressure to finish anyway. Some of them are better than others; there are multiple authors. I’m definitely getting a sense of the personalities of the different authors by now.
20 September 03
One Week To Go
The Giants have 8 or 9 games left (depending on if they have to make up a game with the Mets next Monday), and are trying to stay sharp before they start the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Seattle Mariners are not rolling over like they’re supposed to be, having taken the first two of a three-game series from the A’s at Oakland. Boston lost to Cleveland, which means that the Mariners are now only 1 1/2 games behind Boston in the wild card race: the A’s aren’t doing their job to flatten the Mariners at this juncture! The playoff permutations are still complicated, though not as much so as a couple of weeks ago.
19 September 03
Spiders in the House
There are spiders in the house. There were spiders here before I got injured dancing and carrying on; now that housework is severely limited, there are more spiders.
This is mostly fine by me, because the spiders eat the flies which sometimes get in, and the flies are awful. The spiders are overwhelmingly harvest spiders (“daddy long legs”) and when they don’t find flies to eat or moths or other creatures that appear at regular intervals, they eat each other. This is sometimes disconcerting, but I figure they have to make a living somehow.
There are a few other species of spider that live around the harvests. A wolf spider or two, a jumping spider. We tolerate these fine.
We do not, though, ever tolerate black widows in the house. Yesterday there was one perching over the door. I don’t know how it got in, but I took a well-aimed crutch to it. These spiders have the strongest, stickiest webs; the kind they try to emulate in ghost train rides at the funfair. The web was sticking to my cane, still, this morning.
18 September 03
For Your Morning Entertainment
Yesterday while browsing the new book shelves at the local library, I came across a copy of Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists, edited by Ted Rall. Hardly for the first time, I’m clearly out of touch. I mean I know about Tom Tomorrow (he also has an excellent blog, which the link takes you to), but the collection contains many other out-of-the-mainstream cartoonists that I didn’t know about. Comics from the likes of Scott Bateman, Lalo Alcarez, Ruben Bolling, Jen Sorensen, and Ted Rall are goodies, and I’ll be looking at their work often.
17 September 03
Arrival of a Painting
Still life is a complicated and often misunderstood genre, but I have great hopes that it is being revived in a very interesting way by artists like Gainor Roberts, which is why I asked her to do a painting for us as a couple. It is my wedding gift to Numenius.
Click on the image at left for a larger view. Every single element in this painting is a private signifier.
16 September 03
The Isle Of Fabled Beasts
This is for the set of posts on Islands and Place for the Ecotone wiki.
Almost every day during my eight-year sojourn in Santa Barbara, I would glance seaward at Santa Cruz Island, about twenty miles off the coast. From our perch at about 1200’ elevation in the Santa Ynez mountains behind the town, the view reminded me of looking west across San Francisco Bay to the ridges of Marin and the Peninsula, especially when the fog was in. The island is mountainous with a 2600’ high ridge, similar to the ridges on the western side of the Bay where I grew up.
Despite its proximity I only visited the island several times. I think in all cases the occasion was a birding trip to look for the Island Scrub Jay, an endemic species found only on Santa Cruz Island. Biogeographers delight in islands for their evolutionary treasures, and the Channel Islands off California provide much material. There are many species and subspecies of plants and animals endemic to the Channel Islands. The scrub jay, the Catalina ironwood, the island kit fox, and lots of others.
In the Pleistocene, when sea level was lower and the Northern Channel Islands were connected to each other, there were even pygmy mammoths there, horse-sized creatures four to eight feet tall. It is believed they could swim between the island and the mainland.
Who’s to say magical islands don’t still exist?.
15 September 03
Clusters As Islands
This post is part of the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic, Islands And Place.
What does where we live say about who we are? A very great deal, according to Michael Weiss, author of The Clustering of America and The Clustered World. His point is that people generally tend to live near people like them. He calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.
Weiss’s research has been a boon to marketers, who are able to target, say, Kellog’s Pop-Tarts and Domino’s pizza to the cluster “Greenbelt Families,” who are also most likely to drive Mercury Capris. Greenbelt Families are young, upper-middle-class town dwellers, predominantly white, whose ideology is moderate independent. They are found in high concentrations in places like Parkville, Missouri and Hyde Park, New York.
Unlike the members of the “Sunset City Blues,” mostly retired, married white folks who live in places like Battle Creek, Michigan or Merrillville, Indiana, and who buy cigars, lottery tickets, and pain relievers in high quantities.
You can enter your zip code at the Claritas site to find out what clusters are found in high concentrations in your area. For non-US residents, there are similar efforts in the UK, Spain, and Canada.
For the record, Numenius and I fall under the “New Eco-topia” cluster, people described as most likely to have a computer on the kitchen table, eat organic foods, and support recycling. By the wisdom of the clusterers, we should be living in Westminster, Vermont. An island of people like us.
14 September 03
Go Forth Into The Land North Of Putah Creek
We went on two outings today north into Yolo County today, both of them auspicious.
The first was going on a bicycle ride together! Given that we’re both still members of the walking wounded, it was a joyous thing to be out and about on bicycles again. This was something of a dry run for Pica cycling to work this week: we cycled into campus to pick up the Sunday newspaper. Pica led on her trike Lila and I followed on my hybrid named Red Dragon. It was neither a long or speedy trip (four miles round trip) but it’s great to be doing things by bike again.
The second was travelling to Woodland to attend an interfaith Celebration of Abraham. This was put on jointly by members of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in the Davis and Woodland area. The celebration, which featured prayers, music and readings about Abraham from all three faiths, was held in the gym of the Holy Rosary Community Center up in Woodland. It was a packed event, with perhaps 400 people in attendence, from both Davis and Woodland. The event was introducted by Randy Ros, an attorney from Lodi who has been instrumental in organizing the gatherings, first in Lodi and then in several other towns in the Central Valley. We closed out the ceremony by washing hands and breaking bread together. It’s wonderful to live where there are enough interested people to make such a gathering possible, and I hope that this marks the start of a long tradition of interfaith celebrations, rather than just a one-time event.