27 May 24
Back to the Stars
A couple weeks ago, on 10 May 2024, we in Northern California were treated to an almost unheard of sight at our latitude, an aurora. That evening there was a lot of chatter about it happening, but I had no idea if I’d be able to see anything from our backyard in the center of town. Once it got dark, I went outside but couldn’t tell if the pink in the sky I was seeing was from city glow or from an aurora. But maybe my camera would help me see something my eye couldn’t. So I got my camera from inside and shot some stills and video through an ultrawide lens. Success! The photo above is an eight second time exposure, and I could see motion on the video (taken with half-second exposures).
This encounter has gotten me excited about astronomy again, and in particular electronically-assisted astronomy (often abbreviated EAA). Cameras have the ability to see much fainter objects than the human eye can detect, especially through taking long time exposures. I have almost all the right equipment to dive into EAA, the one exception is that my equatorial mount, which is needed to get those long time exposures, is currently broken. I am hoping to get it repaired soon.
Meanwhile, we are being alerted to look out for the once-in-a-lifetime eruption of the recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis. This may happen sometime between tomorrow and the next couple of years, but most likely in the next several months.It is currently 10th magnitude, but the last time it erupted in 1946 it got up to 2nd magnitude in brightness.
27 May 24
26 May 24
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
20 May 24
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.