22 August 11
Melons, Squashes, Beans, Okra, Tomatoes, Feral Chard, &c
I can’t keep up. The squirrels are going to eat the melons unless we harvest them and the beans hide behind every leaf. The okra is getting bigger than is good for its being appetizing.
Very late tomato season this year, but now it’s making up for it…
15 August 11
Sunday Challah
Now that I’m back from vacation in Pennsylvania, I’m continuing on with my project to work my way through the recipes in the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. Today I baked their whole wheat challah recipe. Despite it being entirely from whole wheat flour, it tastes amazingly like challah. There are four eggs in the dough, and it was incredibly sticky to work with.
5 August 11
The Golden Thread
Just like studying a new language is a portal to a different culture, so is studying calligraphic hands. This week we’re studying a few of Western ones in chronological succession, to discover how (and guess why) hands morphed from rounded Romans to compressed blackletters to slanted and graceful Italics.
This is a study of the letter “o” and its shifts through time, what Sheila Waters calls a golden thread. It’s difficult and long hours and learning how to build up a discipline. I’ve decided to go home and study them all again for a much longer period, using original manuscripts rather than what contemporary calligraphers, even if they’re masters, have interpreted them as being.
Back to my rotunda, but before I go—there’s a sheep breeder up the road. She has, oh no, covered fleeces…
26 July 11
Cabinet Cat
Not to be confused with Ceiling Cat or for that matter Debt Ceiling Cat.
It’s a good thing the wine glasses are on the bottom shelf.
21 July 11
Well, well, well...
… I love learning new words, but I never thought I’d learn one while watching the live Yahoo UK text feed for the Tour de France. We’ve been riveted. The Tour is at a critical stage where there are four contenders, one of them, gasp, French. But he’s a gurner. He grimaces on the mountain stages, apparently more than others on this grueling 3-week hellride. Well worth a gurn or two if you ask me.
Gurning is a time-honored tradition, celebrated by competition in the oldest fair held in the United Kingdom dating back to the reign Henry III in the thirteenth century. It means making faces. Gurners often disfigure themselves by, say, having all their teeth removed, the better to swallow their noses.
Really. See. Here.
18 July 11
Enthralled
Not having a TV, we always roam the town looking for venues to watch major sporting events. This afternoon we ended up at International House Davis to watch the Women’s World Cup final; they had advertised in the newspaper a couple days ago that they would be hosting viewing the event. They clearly are not as practiced in showing sporting events as the sports bar down the road, and Comcast was flaking out on them today, so they resorted to showing the ESPN3 internet feed. This was hardly high-def, and had the annoying habit of several times freezing at critical junctures, including the winning penalty kick! But the video feed sufficed.
We went to see the match without a strong rooting interest, mostly hoping just to see a good game. It didn’t take me long to figure out I was pulling for Japan; after the barrage of shots they weathered during the first few minutes it was clear they would be playing the role of the underdog. The game turned out to be as exciting a soccer match as I’ve ever seen. For the underdogs to equalize once, then twice, and finally win on PKs is great drama. I left very happy for Japan. Both teams are good, good teams and played their hearts out. What more does one wish to see in sport?
3 July 11
Our Local Fibershed
I went over to Robin’s this morning to talk about her Jacob sheep display for the upcoming State Fair. While I was there I noticed the beautiful Fibershed map on the wall. This features a map of wool, cotton and other fiber producers within about 100 miles of San Francisco and notes whether they are dyers, weavers, and so on.
I conducted my first natural dye experiment on Thursday, and was enthusing to Robin about it. She pointed me to Rebecca Burgess’ new book, Harvesting Color, a treasure in itself but one that strongly encourages use of local plants for dyes (and, even better, INVASIVE ones: French broom, here I come). I’d still like to plant a dye garden, though, that would include indigo and madder and coreopsis and marigolds and sunflowers. Don’t need any coyote brush though, we already have that!!
Foxfiber is a grower of organic cotton up in the Capay Valley, definitely on my list of places to visit in any Fibershed tour.
It’s the Tour de Fleece. I’m spinning my first fleece, one of Robin’s Jacobs, a ewe named Summer (how appropriate). It’s 101 degrees outside. Spinning is cooler than knitting, people…
28 June 11
Field Day
On the fourth weekend in June is Field Day, which is an annual exercise in amateur radio that stresses field deployment and operation of radio equipment often in remote sites and using backup power systems. It is also a chance for many radio clubs to have a bit of an overnight campout. This year our local club the Yolo Amateur Radio Society held its Field Day event on a ranch in the foothills of the eastern side of the Vaca Mountains, in a beautiful blue oak woodland landscape. Though in the past I’ve made a few contacts from home during previous Field Days, we’ve never participated in a club Field Day event, and didn’t know quite what to expect. It was surprisingly fun: we arrived early in the morning on Saturday to help set up, stayed through mid-afternoon, and returned on Sunday for the final couple hours of the 24-hour event and to take down the equipment. The exercise was oddly akin to being on a sailing ship: deploying three antennas with 30-foot tall masts involves plenty of rope work! At left is a picture of one of the antennas we set up and used, a three-element beam for 20 meters and above.
24 June 11
Ted the Stinky Titan
The Titan arum is blooming again, for the fourth time (once every two years). We saw the first bloom and I thought I’d go over again and sketch it this time. It wasn’t particularly stinky, but little wafts of unpleasantness came my way here and there as I worked my watercolors…
22 June 11
John Ruskin, Meteorologist
I just finished reading Paul N. Edwards’ excellent book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. This book is a history of the information infrastructure that has grown as the sciences of meteorology and climatology have developed since the 19th century. The title of the book comes from the following quote, which Edwards uses as the book’s epigraph:
The meteorologist is impotent if alone; his observations are useless; for they are made upon a point, while the speculation to be derived from them must be on space…The Meteorological Society, therefore, has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine, and it feels that unless it can be this, it must be powerless; if it cannot do all it can do nothing. It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface. — John Ruskin (1839).
John Ruskin as a twenty-year-old was into meteorology. Who knew?