14 June 03
A Creek Saunter
I went for a sketching saunter out to Putah Creek this morning. There was a lot going on down there: the magpies were being raucous, and there was a white-tailed kite that stayed perched on the top of the bare branches of a tree for at least twenty minutes before taking off and circling in its display flight. Further away, a couple of Swainson’s hawks were soaring and calling over the field south of the creek. And a blue grosbeak was singing in the eucalyptus behind where I was sketching. Alas, the yellow starthistle is abundant and turning spiny. Not quite as noxious, though still a weed, the chicory is in bloom. At right is a quick sketch of the railroad bridge.
13 June 03
Pica’s Migrating East
I’m flying out of town, leaving Numenius with a huge pile of post-Commencement rubble. My posts over the next two weeks will be sporadic and probably un-Californian, so I’ll direct you to an essay I wrote on California that was published yesterday over at Faultline magazine.
12 June 03
Glorious Fog
I woke up this morning, poked my nose outside, and thought I was back in Berkeley. It was overcast with a proper marine layer overhead! It is unusual to see marine layer fog in the Davis area in summertime; I hope the pattern persists. It’s much more pleasant than the more usual 100-degree temperatures we often experience around this time, as I’m sure many people attending commencement this evening would agree (though some will regret not having brought sweaters). Meanwhile, in Southern California, the June Gloom has been gloomier than usual.
There’s a wind blowing right now from the south at 10-15 MPH, so I think we’ll have a good fog layer tomorrow as well.
11 June 03
A Catbird in California
About fifteen years ago, Jeannie moved to Northern California from Maryland to be near her son and daughter-in-law. She had spent many years around the birds of the Chesapeake and settled in Bodega Bay, where she could familiarize herself with other shorebirds, different sparrows, and rarities.
Bodega Bay is a migrant trap, which means that when passerines (songbirds) are flying north or south to their nesting or wintering grounds, they often run out of land to fly over or time or both and just hunker down where they drop, usually for 24 hours, sometimes for a little longer. Sometimes, blown off course, they’re very rare for California. Bodega Bay is not as famous for rare birds as Point Reyes just to the south, but it’s still an incredible place to live if you’re a birder.
Twelve years ago, Jeannie saw a catbird in Owl Canyon. The hoity-toity birding establishment didn’t believe her (catbirds are found far to the east and north of the Sierra Nevada), even though she grew up around catbirds and knew their sweet songs, calls, whistles, and beady black eyes with the rusty under-tail coverts offsetting the steel gray feathers. She didn’t care. She knew she had seen a catbird.
Jeannie died yesterday at four. My mother had been sitting with her for three hours and when she got home, five minutes later, she got the phone call. She also got a report of a catbird in Owl Canyon.
Sing sweetly, Jeannie, wherever you are; we’ll miss your gentle humor and quiet strength.
10 June 03
The Stink on Campus
This isn’t corruption in the administration building, but rather the blooming of a rare “corpse flower” (Amorphophallus titanum) in the campus botanical conservatory. The rarely cultivated plant from Sumatra gets its name from the strong fly-attracting odor of rotting flesh it emits when it flowers, which only happens every 10 or so years. This is the first corpse flower to bloom in Northern California.
Our plant in question, nicknamed “Ted the Titan”, was raised from seed planted in 1995, and the flower bud first appeared around 15 May of this year. The bloom is a very transient event, and the flower lasts only about 24 to 36 before it collapses. Also, the stench only lasts about eight hours. The bloom was predicted to start around 11 June, but it was two days early, starting yesterday around noon. We all went over to the greenhouse a little after six that evening, where there was a small crowd gawking at the 3 1/2 foot tall flower, pictured at right. The stench, which I thought was something like rotting cabbages at the bottom of a compost pile, wasn’t overwhelming at that point, but would become so later in the evening. Ernesto Sandoval, the conservatory curator, was full of parental pride, giving interviews to the press on his cell phone, and making sure everyone got a good look and smell.
Addendum:There’s a RealOne webcam for the plant here. Also, the Sacramento Bee has an amusing editorial cartoon featuring the plant.
9 June 03
The Worth of a Blog
A Brazilian blogging friend recently told us that, last year, there was a service offered in Brazil’s burgeoning blogosphere (estimated at more than 300,000 strong, most using Blogger) where someone would leave a comment on your weblog—for a fee. Not just a “me too,” or “right on,” or trite comment (see Fred First’s chuckler on this, where he discusses comment anxiety), but something of substance.
Apparently that didn’t fly, because now there’s another enterprising Brazilian movement afoot: “I’ll leave a comment on your blog if you leave a comment on mine, and in less than a month you’ll have five thousand comments…” Comment CHAIN LETTERS?
Gosh. I guess I have a different idea of what makes someone’s writing worth reading. We were more than a little amused, then, to dicover we’d been listed in Blogshares. Our blogworth is apparently $2,002.51 as of 6:00 pm today. The value seems to be calculated by, among other things, inbound links, which will surely exacerbate the “please blogroll me” pleadings. If we add the Blogshares logo onto our homepage, we’ll apparently be “verified” and able to trade.
An interesting measure of one’s existence. Insider place blog trading, anyone?
8 June 03
Landscape in K-Band Radar
People key in on vastly divergent elements of the landscape. This is one of these facts that makes studying place so fascinating and challenging. With that in mind, I was bemused to discover that there’s an online exchange forum for information about speed traps. Driving fast through an unfamilar area? Go to the site to learn where you need to be careful. Is there a particularly nasty speed trap on your own commute? Write it up and submit it through their contribution form.
The town of Davis doesn’t cut a very good impression with these contributors. The entry for Davis says: “this whole town is a speed trap. Several tickets issued for 1-2 miles over the limit. Whole town is 25 except for 2-3 roads.” And a follow-up comment reads: “Not only due you have to watch your mile over the speed limit, but the parking tickets are HERENDOUS!! [sic] Even if the security knows your car!! No permit… TICKET!!!”
Sigh. My bicycle commute—over the creek, past the horse stables, and under the freeway where the rough-winged swallows nest—is in a very different world.
7 June 03
An Evening with the River Cats
We went to the Sacramento River Cats game this evening. The River Cats are the Triple-A team for the Oakland A’s, and they were playing the Albuquerque Isotopes, whose parent club is the Florida Marlins. I had to go watch a team named the Isotopes: aside from being a joke from The Simpsons (in one episode Homer had to stop his favorite team, the Springfield Isotopes, from moving to Albuquerque), it’s in the family—my father in his days as a nuclear chemist was the co-author of several editions of the Table of Isotopes. Anyway, the team has a neat logo, so I picked up a hat.
The River Cats played well, and won 6-2. Bobby Crosby, their young shortstop, went 2-for-4 with 3 RBIs. Since the A’s shortstop, Miguel Tejada, will probably not be staying with the A’s next season (he becomes a free agent, and the A’s don’t have enough money to keep him), there may be forthcoming advancement opportunities for Crosby. Eric Hiljus, who’s bounced between the A’s and the River Cats a lot, pitched for the win.
Raley Field is a great little stadium, and Sacramento fans, generally starved for sports, have really taken to the team. The game was sold out this evening, with 14,611 in attendance. Minor league ball has these endearing sillinesses you never find in the majors—tonight’s favorite was The Dancing Usher Guy.
And what River Cats game is complete without the antics of their mascot, Dinger, shown at right.
6 June 03
Commencement is my Life
I was wearing a T-shirt today that said “Commencement is my Life”; I silkscreened the calligraphy onto a white shirt a couple of years ago. Among other things, I’m responsible for making sure that 500 graduate students and their faculty go across the stage next Thursday in the Recreation Hall at UC Davis in an orderly manner; that the 70 or so volunteers show up and make this happen; that there are enough chairs, not too close together to impede movement nor too far apart to overrun the space; that the faculty who say they are going to show up to get their PhD students hooded in fact do so and go to the correct side of the building; that the food for the volunteers, food for the orchestra, food for the police, and food for the guests and students gets to where it needs to be in time; that students have their academic dress on the right way around and the correct names on their reader cards and an adequate pronunciation guide of their name in case it’s needed; that guests not place themselves and others in mortal danger by hanging over parapets with tripods. I’ve never been a mother but I imagine this is what it’s like to have several children under the age of five.
And yet….
It’s not quite true. Commencement isn’t really my life. Certainly, the graduation ceremony does occupy an inordinate amount of my time at work these days, but it will be over soon. To be honest, I was tossing and turning at three this morning, but it wasn’t because of commencement stress; I was mentally composing an essay in response to our first collective “Bloggers of Place” assignment (see the Ecotone Wiki, Collective Blogs). I did get up. I did write the essay. And now I can sit and watch it percolate (it’s not due until June 15, but who knows what my life will look like between now and then), while the last few stragglers (“I don’t really want to walk at graduation but my mother wants a picture”) beg for late, atrociously late, admission, while the details of who hands out programs (which of course omit the names of the atrociously late) and where the sign language interpreters stand and what the Dean says (which depends on what the Provost says) and where the bigwigs sit and what position the flowers take and how to explain to the conductor that no, we can’t have the orchestra fill the entire auditorium, because there are nine hundred people that have to file past it—take up my day to the point of breaking.
I’ve been thinking hard about place. My heart has been in Venice today.
5 June 03
Marking the Sprint
I was cycling the other day past the Tremont Cemetery when I noticed a series of pavement markings every 100 meters: “400…300…200…100…Finish”. And after that, the marking depicted at right, followed by “Nice Job”.
Somebody’s doing time trials out on Tremont Road. The local racers have in the past done Wednesday evening time trials out on Putah Creek Road, along the usual bicycling route between Davis and Winters, where there is a similar series of markings. But the markings on Tremont are new—perhaps they’ve changed location, or it’s a different group of cyclists.
Cycling is, needless to say, an ideal way to explore the landscape. But not when you’ve got your nose to the bike stem in the last 100 meters of a time trial sprint!