24 May 24
Shifting into Comics
I can’t remember when I started exploring comics as a medium — probably in 2021? — but very quickly I discovered the Sequential Artists Workshop. Based in Gainesville, Florida, but with a Mighty online presence, it has been a tremendous resource and source of inspiration and community.
I have a piece on Franco’s suppression of memory in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War due to appear in a SAW anthology called Troubled Histories next month. I will publish it here once it’s been printed, but for now, here are some of the comics I made to support my pitch for this submission.
23 May 24
22 May 24
21 May 24
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13 January 23
A Pair of Shoes
I’ve been attending some of the Friday comics workshop from SAW (the Sequential Artists Workshop). Today’s was about Creating Place. We were asked to loosen up by drawing a pair of shoes, either ours of a character’s.
I drew a pair of saddle shoes I inherited at age 4 from a neighbor in our house in Marin County, California. They seemed huge after all my other shoes, grown up and sturdy. I loved them, scuffed though they were.
The next exercise was to draw where these shoes might take us. For me this was past the pebbled swimming pool and playhouse down to the end of the garden, where my imaginary friends Veggie and Kenner lived. I wanted them to come with us to Spain, where we would be heading soon. I must have been anxious enough about the trip to have wanted the company of friends.
I think they did come — I have a vague recollection of talking to them in our new house north of Madrid. But at some point they must have drifted off back across the miles to their tree in a Tiburon garden. I hope you made other friends afterwards, guys.
11 January 23
Erosion
We lost power for about 18 hours on Sunday when a couple of thunderstorms came through overnight. Thousands of residents of Davis were in a similar situation, and in Sacramento it was reported that over 300,000 people were without power. With the power restored by the afternoon, this constituted a mild adventure. We were able to charge Pica’s phone off a 12 volt SLA battery, and then get a little more energy into the SLA battery from a small solar panel. (Perhaps the first time I’ve exercised that bit of resilience planning in an actual power outage.)
But two blocks away, our local food co-op didn’t fare so well. It was closed on Monday since they still had no power. Early Tuesday morning is when we do our weekly shopping, but the store still had no power. I am guessing the widespread outage on Sunday caused a cascading failure in the local circuit supplying the food co-op. It is the responsibility of the power company PG&E to fix the outage, but their current estimate is that it won’t be repaired until Friday night.
So the food co-op has no power, which means that the perishables are perishing. The co-op has brought in two refrigerated trucks and a larger refrigerated truck container (shown in the image above from this morning) to try to preserve the perishables. Today they opened the store for a limited three hour period, running two cash registers off a generator, and having staff members escort a small number of shoppers around the darkened aisles. Pica stopped by to pick up some staples and thought it felt like what shopping during a war would.
Note the cascading series of events. PG&E’s infrastructure is badly in need of maintenance and investment – indeed in 2020 they plead guilty to causing the deaths of 84 people in the 2018 Camp Fire which was initiated by a faulty power line. And in 2023 California is being battered with a highly unusual sequence of atmospheric river storms, attributable at least in part to climate change. Our ability to respond to disasters is diminishing.
This how societal infrastructure erodes away. We wonder when we’ll have fresh produce again.
9 January 23
Swatching
Although I was born on August 23 and am therefore technically (if only just) a Virgo, precision has never been my thing. I’m more of a mudpie kinda gal, sloshing around and having fun in the world of “it’s good enough.”
But I’ve knit enough sweaters in my time that have NOT FIT well, and this is a huge waste of time and resources. So I’ve learned to embrace swatching.
Swatches are notoriously untruthful, so it’s best to make a large swatch in the pattern you mean to use, and measure how many stitches per centimeter/inch you end up with, calculated over at least a 4”/10cm width and breadth. Measuring the entire swatch and then weighing it will give additional information such as yardage required. So I’ve done all this. (My mudpie-self is looking at me incredulously.)
My sister would like me to make a tunic vest for her based on a commercial one she bought. I’m sending her all these swatches to make her decide which yarn, pattern, and fabric she likes. Once she chooses there will be more calculations to make, difficult for those of us in mudpie-land, but for now a huge shoutout to Norman of Nimble Needles whose video tutorials are so impressive I’ve gone ahead and supported him on Patreon. I’ve learned so much about knitting in the past month or so (and I consider myself an advanced knitter).
7 January 23
Weather Watching
I think we’re in the middle of the fourth storm here in 2023 already, and we have so far gotten 3.09” of rain in January. This has meant paying a lot of attention to what the weather is going to be doing in the next hours or days. Today for instance I wanted to know if I’d be able to cycle out to fetch take-out burritos sometime between 12:30 and 1 PM without getting rained on. It’s about a 4 mile round trip bike ride. So I studied my weather apps scrupulously. No precipitation was predicted to fall before 2 PM, so out I went.
There are two apps I’m finding especially useful. The first is Windy, which is available equivalently as a webapp or as a iOS or Android app. It provides many different weather visualizations, including reported temperatures and wind speeds, and radar and weather satellite views. Here is a view of radar imagery from Windy, showing a precipitation cell about 3 minutes away from reaching Davis.
The scientist in me particularly likes how Windy give you several different major forecast models to choose from, at various different spatial extents. For instance it lets you animate the ECMWF global weather model over the next 11 days, good for predicting how long this rainy pattern will last. But Windy also has visualizations of the HRRR (High Resolution Rapid Refresh) model for North America, which is at a 3 kilometer resolution and is updated every hour. Here is a view of predicted precipitation from the HRRR model over a 15 minute period, the image being straight from the HRRR website.
I also just discovered the wX app, available solely for Android. It is basically a repackaging of many different National Weather Service products, allowing you to avoid wading through lots of different NWS website page. From the app’s starting page you can just scroll down to see the NWS text forecasts for your location, and you can also click on an icon to get to a comprehensive suite of different weather radar products e.g. storm relative mean velocity, or reflectivity at various different radar tilt angles.
5 January 23
The Holiday Card
I’ve now been living in the U.S for nearly 35 years. It sounds a lot when you put it like that, when it seems like just a few short years ago that I stepped off a plane in January into a brilliant blue sky made more blinding by piles of snow at Logan Airport. The drive south to my uncle’s house had me reeling with the exciting architecture right and left of the freeway. (I had just discovered postmodern architecture; the love affair didn’t last all that long but it was fun while it did.) I applied for a job as soon as I could to an architecture firm in Cambridge.
That November the ex and I took the train to my Aunt Nancy’s for my first American Thanksgiving. (She wasn’t really an aunt; my mother’s elderly first cousin.) On the way back I started drawing trees, all of them long-denuded. I decided to cut up all my fast pen sketches and use them as Christmas cards, called “trees from a moving train.”
My Christmas card list was long that year — keeping in touch with friends and relatives in Europe seemed really important as we forged a new life in New England. But I have made a holiday card every year since. Drawings, collage, calligraphy, stamps — and while the list has shrunk dramatically in recent years because most people have eschewed sending anything by mail, I still somehow do it.
This year? Cedar waxwings in the persimmon tree.