6 August 03
The Meetup Dance
I went to the first Yolo County Meetup for Howard Dean’s campaign this evening at a coffeehouse in South Davis. The previous local Meetups have been in Sacramento, but there is now sufficient interest in the campaign on the west side of the causeway for groups to start officially meeting over here. There were about 35 attendees, and apparently 8 or so other were meeting closer to campus, as logistics still need to be sorted out. Prominent at the meeting were three local elected Democratic party officials who had seen Dean speak at the California Democratic Party annual conference in March and were amazed and flabbergasted by his performance.
I am an independent voter and haven’t committed to supporting anybody in the Democratic primaries (which apparently I can vote in without having to re-register as a Democrat), but Dean certainly has most of my attention. It comes down to a matter of pragmatics: who has the best shot of sending our loon of a president off to permanent ranchside brush-clearing duties? Dean, a fiscally responsible centrist with a great deal of gumption, is looking very good.
Meanwhile, the latest news from the Let’s Make California A Laughingstock electoral saga is that Arnold is running, Arianna is running, Dianne is not, and the rumors are that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante will be running as well.
5 August 03
Place Bloggers on the Radio
Numenius and I just got back from Point Reyes where, together with Lisa from Field Notes and Chris from Creek Running North, we were interviewed on KWMR (a community radio station for west Marin County) about Blogs of Place. I daresay this is the first radio show in the world to feature place blogs. I have no idea how many people heard the show, which will be repeated on Thursday—or whether any of them knew what a weblog was. We are going to get hold of a tape and try and make it available as an audio file somehow.
The main topics we discussed were how the Web, not a place, is enabling a redefinition of place; about nature and place versus urban place; and about children and their sense of the landscape. It was a wonderful conversation which we four continued over dinner, and now it’s late—I’m turning into a pumpkin.
4 August 03
Unexpected Light Show
Yesterday in the early evening I took a little walk and when I reached the levee at Putah Creek and looked between the trees at the horizon towards the northwest, I saw a massive mountain-sized cloud, with a flat bit trailing off towards the north, and illuminated by occasional flashes. Since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky here at Davis, I wondered if this was smoke from a fire up in the mountains overlooking Cache Creek, up in the northwest corner of Yolo County. I returned to the house to get my binoculars, and walked out on the levee to get a better look.
The flashes illuminating the cloud were vivid orange, and one bolt stretching across the cloud proved that this was a lightning storm. I still wondered if there might be a fire associated with the storm, and certainly wanted to know where it was located, so I went back home to check online. Looked at the weather radar, I was amazed to discover that the storm was over the Trinity Alps and Scott Mountains, at least 200 miles from here. For all I know I was looking at a 50,000 foot cloud, and saw an eight-mile long lightning bolt.
It didn’t seem to cause any fires, at least according the fire incident sites I was able to find, such as this one from the USGS.
3 August 03
Plucky Denizens Of Bee Boxes
California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) may not be the most charismatic of rodents to look at, but they are certainly interesting: social mammals often post sentries, and these are no exception. The alarm calls are different depending on whether the danger is in the air or on the ground, so when a squirrel is screeching at a certain pitch we know to look up for a raptor.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about these creatures is that over millennia they have developed an immunity to rattlenesake venom. We’ve seen footage of a mother squirrel actually parrying a strike by a rattler intent on making lunch of one of her offspring, who presumably are more vulnerable. Donald Owings, of the UC Davis Psychology Department, has studied these animals and their communication systems for some time.
We have our own colony here out back living among all the beekeeping equipment. Last year we saw not one but two albino ground squirrels, an obvious target for predators.
2 August 03
The Aging Of Neighborhoods
This is a post on trees for the biweekly discussions of the Ecotone wiki.
If one looks at satellite imagery of Davis, two neighborhoods show up as being heavily wooded, the College Park area north of campus, and a tract north of Montgomery Street in South Davis. Both are quite desirable and expensive places to live, owing in part to the large trees there. Though there are a few valley oaks amongst the trees, most of these trees are not native to the site, and were planted when the tracts were laid out.
The time it takes trees to mature exceeds the planning horizons of most developers and city workers by a good bit. When I travel through new developments like Mace Ranch shown above, a place with a very low tree canopy to rooftop area ratio, a place where the garages dominate the houses which dominate their lots, I wonder if it will ever appear as forested as College Park. Somehow I doubt it.
1 August 03
Little Apple
This entry is another Ecotone collaborative blog on place, which this time looks at trees.
Some trees are meant to be touched.
I think it’s the manzanita’s bark. Warm copper-red and smooth, smoother by far than eucalyptus whose bark has shredded off in shaggy, untidy strips. The manzanita’s shredding is subtle and delicate, waxy rolls curling like planed metal or even plastic. But there is none of the coldness of metal or lifelessness of plastic. This is a warm tree with a warm heart.
I first saw manzanitas in Napa Valley, in the hills above Calistoga. I couldn’t stop stroking their trunks. Madrones have a similar bark-both these trees are in the Ericaceae, same family as blueberriesbut with their larger, more imposing bulk and leaves, seem less inviting to touch. Many manzanitas rarely grow taller than eight feet, qualifying more as shrubs than treesperhaps it’s the scale, as well as the irresistible bark, that draws me. The same is true of Brancusi’s sculpture of a seal in the Pompidou Museum in Paristhe combination of scale and smoothness-that makes touching it irrestistible (a headache for museum staff).
Ursula K. LeGuinn set her utopian anthropological novel Always Coming Home in a Napa Valley with a different future than the one it seems to be embarking on… the characters share a strong kinship with the land they inhabit, share a lot with the Native Americans who lived there over 200 years ago. They greet all the living things they encounter with a “heya” as if they were meeting a friend on the road.
Heya madrone, heya coyote, heya jackrabbit. Heya foothills. Heya northern chaparral.
Heya, manzanita, I still say, even if sometimes not out loud. This one is never a stretch for me. It is a tree with a warm heart. Touch me, it says.
31 July 03
I’ll Raise You One Governor
In the chaos of the California recall election it is heartening to learn that some people are making merry over it: trades at the Ireland-based Internet betting site TradeSports.Com are currently placing the odds of Gray Davis still being in office at the end of December at about 40%.
There don’t seem to be any wagers on that site about who would replace him. Maybe there are too many unknowns for anybody to sensibly bet. Will Arnold step in? Will Dianne Feinstein decide she wants to trade her Senate seat for the Capitol? Will the Huffingtons—Arianna and Mike, now divorced—run against each other???
30 July 03
Walnut Ink
I’ve been learning how to dye fabric. Not in a very elaborate way—the kind you throw in the washing machine and keep the poor thing returning to the beginning of its cycle for half an hour, till all your cheesecloth is a tangled shroud. The fun part, though, has been learning how to dip the ends of the cheesecloth in some walnut ink I made last year (I had three quarts left, which was never going to get used on paper—a small bottle can last three years; it’s a full sepia color).
The walnut gunge just seeps up into the cotton—it’s beautiful, a deep rich brown fading into buff. I don’t know quite what to use as a mordant, a chemical that forces the pigment to adhere permanently to the fibre, though alum and tara (whatever that is) appeared in a Google search this morning. For the moment I’m not worrying about the mordant—just enjoying the beauty of the process.
How to make walnut ink:
1) Run around at least five yard sales till you find a pot large enough (4-gallon canning pots are ideal).
2) Gather as many black (not English) walnuts as will fit in the pot, husks, stems, maggots, and all. Late October is best. The husks should be turning black.
3) Cover the walnuts in the pot with water and soak overnight.
4) Bring the pot to a boil and then simmer all day.
5) Turn off heat and allow to sit overnight.
6) Remove nuts and husks from dark murky liquid, being sure to squeeze out every last drop of dark murky liquid. There is no way to do this without making a mess. It’s very like making mudpies, so you might as well dig in and enjoy it.
7) Bring to a boil again and simmer all day till the liquid is the consistency of Turkish coffee.
8) Run through a sieve.
9) Run through a finer sieve.
10) Run through a stocking.
11) Bottle.
12) Label bottle so nobody mistakes it for hibiscus juice!
13) Without toxic preservatives such as formaldehyde, a mold is likely to grow on the ink over time. Just stir it in. Strain again before using.
29 July 03
A Grand Day Out
Bill Mueller, 3rd baseman for the Boston Red Sox, today became the first major player to hit grand slams from both sides of the plate in a single game, as the Red Sox beat the Rangers 14-7. A 9-RBI day for him, he also hit another solo home run earlier in the game. Mueller is a former Giant, and was well-liked by San Francisco fans. He’s having a great season with the Red Sox, and it’s nice to see him doing well. We root for both the Giants and the Red Sox, Pica being a Red Sox fan from her days in Cambridge, Mass.
28 July 03
Gobbler on Putah Creek
I was pedalling into work this morning-had just completed my one hill, which I attacked not quite like the riders on the Col du Galibier, but definitely went at with gusto-when I noticed, on the south side of the creek, an enormous bird looking up at me. It was so large I thought it might be an escaped emu, but it turned its head and I saw the prominent trailing neck feathers of a tom turkey.
These birds have been increasing rapidly in the foothills, where they terrorize the local dogs. It’s exciting to see one here in the valley. I have mixed feelings about turkeys-they are very good at finding acorns and they aren’t native to the West-but it was a real thrill to see one so close to home.