19 October 03
Soup Season Jumpstarted
I was scheduled to lead a beginners’ bird walk for Yolo Audubon this morning. I’m walking better than I was a month ago but I have to confess I was hoping nobody would show up at the meeting place at 8:00 am so I could return to my tea and mellow morning.
But no: a couple rolled up in a BMW. When it became clear they’d be the only customers, I asked them what they’d like to do. Oh, she said, I’d like you to tell me what all the birds are I see and hear in my yard. I’ll make you a cup of tea.
Well, this is what we did, and saw a number of birds and Karen’s spectacular garden. She learned a lot of birds, and I got a huge bag full of apples, peppers, tomatoes, basil, and sage. Such a deal! I made pesto and we had the tomatoes for lunch. I have since made a large pot of soup, which is what we live on in winter—it has cooled down enough for long simmering.
Since this was the first soup, there was no stock for it, giving it a “shallow” taste. But all the veggies—cuttings, leavings, ends—have ended up in the freezer for next week’s stock.
18 October 03
Place Name Blunders
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on place names.
An ongoing project in many of the world’s natural history museums is to digitize their collections. In this modern era, typewritten herbarium specimen labels, handwritten field notes, and labels dangling from the feet of taxidermied mice are much more useful to people if they’re captured in a database, and, ideally, placed online.
One attribute that is very important to record digitally is the locality of the specimen, needed to make any sort of map of the critter’s distribution. Nowadays we all run around with GPS units which means that it’s easy to record the exact latitude and longitude of a specimen, but the naturalists of yore didn’t have such luck. Usually they would record localities in a telegraphic description such as “Sonoma Mt. Road, 4.2 miles E Adobe Rd., Sonoma Co., Calif.” It is possible, with a large supply of undergraduate laborers and a good map collection, to convert these text localities into lat-long coordinates, and many museums are now diving into this tedious process.
Alas, some of these localities are a bit more cryptic than one would prefer. Lake of Boys???
17 October 03
Playoffs Haiku
I wrote the following two years ago after the AL playoffs. It seems appropriate now.
Our summertime dreams.
16 October 03
Californian Place Names
This post is a contribution to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Place Names.
The European colonization of California was at first northward expansion, from New Spain (Mexico), of Franciscan Missions. The tribes encountered by the friars already had names for the places they lived in, paddled to, the rivers they fished from, the woodlands whose acorns they ate. A lot of these names still survive-near here, for example, Napa, Sonoma, and Petaluma are all indigenous namesbut for the most part California as far north as Sonoma, which is where the northernmost mission is located, is a quilt of Spanishand often Catholic-place names. San Francisco. Santa Maria. [Sagrado] Sacramento. [Nuestra Seora de] Los Angeles, the largest city in the world dedicated to Our Lady.
Above Sonoma there are another 300 miles of California, and along the coast, where there were Russian outpost colonies in the eighteenth century, we have the interesting juxtaposition of Sebastopol next to Santa Rosa.
Then the Gold Rush ushered in the new waves of English, Germans, French, Spanish, and other Europeans, who turned to farming when the gold was gone. The small farming communities around here have mostly English names. Davis, originally Davisville, was named after a prominent farmer here in the late 19th century. (Vacaville, the most absurd place name I can think of in the vicinity-literally, “cow town” in Spanish then French-was named after a Mr. Vaca.) Arranged on a neat, orderly grid, Davis streets were named First, Second, and Third, with the cross streets the logical A, B, and C, and so on, which allow for expansion as needed, at least as far as the twenty-sixth letter.
New housing developments, however, eschew this pleasant logic and instead impose an arbitrary conglomeration of theme names, Disney-fashion. Thus, in Davis, we have the “college” neighborhood (Rutgers, Villanova, Radcliffe); the “painters” neighborhood (Picasso, Gaugin, Manet); the “bird” neighborhood (Mockingbird, Sandpiper, Pintail); and the “golf” neighborhood (Fairway, Country Club, Greenview). You get extra points for figuring out the relative socioeconomic status of the inhabitants.
There is one Davis neighborhood, however, whose street names are on a theme I find quite tickling. Village Homes, where we stayed back in spring for a couple of weeks, has street names straight out of Lord of the Rings. Imagine having an address like “420 Rivendell.” You’d pay a lot for it: two-bedroom houses in this little progressive utopia sell for nearly $450,000 these days.
15 October 03
In-Flight Entertainment
On my trip back east, I discovered one thing I like about flying United—that if you turn to channel 9 of the in-flight audio system, they often pipe in the primary transceiver from the flight deck. It’s neat to hear ground saying “United 701, turn to heading 210” “210, United 701” and watch the plane start turning. But they can also pipe other radio signals, and on the flight out they put on the Cubs game straight from the Chicago radio station WGN.
On my return trip yesterday I changed flights in Denver, and waiting for the next plane, I wandered over to watch the Cubs in the terminal bar and grill. Mark Prior was pitching an excellent game, and the Cubs were up 1-nothing, which became 2-nothing after a Dontrelle Willis wild pitch. All was looking bright, and the Cubbies were six outs away from their first pennant in 58 years, at which point I left to catch my plane.
Once aboard, I tried to see if they were broadcasting the game like they did earlier over channel 9. I couldn’t get any audio feed at first, due to a faulty headset plug, but 45 minutes later I got the thing to work, and tuned into a cockpit-ground conversation where the controllers on the ground were saying the Marlins won 8-3—they scored 8 runs in the 8th. Oh god, I thought. The poor Cubs.
And as we now know the Cubs would lose the series in today’s 7th game. It’s a sad day. And channel 9 notwithstanding, I still prefer flying Southwest to United.
13 October 03
Peace, Love, and Baseball
I was out this evening at a meeting planning the Peace Picnic which is part of the Campus Community Book Project, so I missed the Red Sox/Yankees game. I got home to two voice mails, both informing me of a Red Sox win. I’m so glad I’m being taken care of so well by Numenius and Doc Rock!
12 October 03
Fracas At Fenway
Yesterday’s key playoff matchup featuring pitching aces Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens between the Boston Red Sox and the NY Yankees turned much uglier than expected. Both pitchers threw intentionally well inside at the opposing batter, resulting in two skirmishes on the field of play, and the septuaginarian coach for the Yankees, Don Zimmer, being knocked down after he charged Martinez. To top that all off, two Yankees players may end up being charged with assault and battery after they tangled with an overexuberant groundskeeper in the Yankees bullpen. Not a good showing for either team—one wonders how they’ll make it through the rest of the series intact. The Red Sox lost 4-3, putting them much in the hole.
Down south, the Chicago Cubs seem well on their way to the World Series, beating the Florida Marlins at home 8-3 and now being within one game of the playoff series win.
I’m off on a two-day trip to Baltimore to meet with some frighteningly bright computer scientists. This will play havoc with following the playoffs, alas.
11 October 03
Harvested By the North Wind
Friday morning started out gusty and then the full-on October north wind set in before dawn. This took down a lot of the ripe English walnuts from the tree just outside our window.
I went out this morning to collect as many as I could before the rodents-good and badget them. A coyote, the first I’ve seen in a while, scared the living daylights out of about eight jackrabbits. I heard mockingbirds, white-crowned sparrows, the muffled voices of cyclists zooming down the road, the cattle across the street, the occasional tomato truck, about five trains, and the dogs barking every time I shifted to the next patch of fallen walnuts-my boot cracking them noisily.
Long morning shadows
A coyote trots northward
The full moon, sinking
10 October 03
The Winery Downstairs
It’s that time of year again, when a new crush of students starts crushing grapes. The Davis Enterprise has a front page story today about the wine production class that takes place in the teaching winery next to Wickson Hall, the building where I work famous as the home of the UC Davis viticulture and enology department. It’s neat seeing the forklift moving around large bins of grapes when I come cycling in each morning.
I can’t say I’ve ever had any of their wine, but we in Wickson Hall have a special dispensation to have alcoholic beverages without a campus permit. This comes in handy for those champagne-and-cake office celebrations.
9 October 03
Full Moon over Walnuts
Numenius and I wandered out this evening to look at the moon. It may not seem like much, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to match his strides in this way since August 10th. The boot is still on but every day I get stronger. I am even walking with a shoe on my left foot at the PT’s, doing certain exercises with it.
The moon and the walnuts remind me it’s time once again to get busy making walnut ink. Since this involves simmering a huge pot on the stove for three days, the weather needs to cooperate. I was thinking this year of expanding my repertoire and trying to make oak gall ink; the valley oaks seem to have been hard hit in the last few years and the galls are lying about on the ground, ready for something. Sybill Archibald suggests that in medieval times the symbolism of the wasp-evil inversion of the bee, attribute of the Virgin Mary-meant that oak galls were a bridge between good and evil, and that the process of writing with ink prepared from oak galls was spiritual. I’m interested to try it, though I have no idea where I’m going to find ferrous sulphate.