17 June 11
Life Atmospheric Phenomenon
Seeing crepuscular rays at sunset is unusual, but I can remember a few in my fifty-odd years. Seeing a single beam of light going straight up is one I’ve never seen before. Known as a buddha ray, it probably has engendered numerous UFO-calls today from northern California.
This month the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha are celebrated. The theory goes that any merit gained during this lunar month is magnified. May our thoughts turn to generosity and to the light.
13 June 11
Century of Challenges
Today we went down to Albany to hear blogger and polymath Nicole Foss who writes as Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth speak about global energy and financial crises. Nicole has been touring both North America and Europe giving her talk entitled “A Century of Challenges” with an aim of helping turn the virtual community that reads her blog into a set of real communities that are working to prepare for future change. The talk was hosted by Transition Albany, one of many hundred such groups that are part of the Transition movement across the world that are working to come with local adaptations to shrinking energy supplies and problems with climate change. Nicole’s prognostications are grim — not that her message to expect a deflationary depression is new to me, having been reading her and her writing partner Ilargi’s blog for several years now — but we left her talk feeling inspired. Nicole says she’s trying to provide “a psychological inoculation” against the human herding behaviors of fear and anger, the inoculant being that by working within community there is in fact a lot we as individuals can do to try to prepare for future upheaval.
7 June 11
Hwaet!
I’ve been really good about keeping the number of knitting works-in-progress (WIPS) down to a manageable level. I finished a shawl this weekend that had been on the needles for a while.
I cast on another shawl (need my lace fix) almost immediately and then, last night, I cast on my Beowulf socks (the first lines of the poem are carried through one sock then pick up on the next where you left off. The yellow yarn I bought is a little lurid compared to the recommended yarn, whose name is “South Side Chicago.” Since this was (still is?) a notorious slaughterhouse district, I can only assume the inspiration for the colorway was soiled straw. I can probably mimic this effect if I throw the socks in some walnut ink when I’ve finished.
I can think of at least eight people I’d make very happy with some socks like these, but full stranding all the way down is slow. It’s very fun, though, but it’s a high-concentration activity. Hwaet!
6 June 11
Loaves For Learning
For some reason I’ve gotten it in my head to work my through the recipes in the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, baking a couple loaves of bread each weekend. I’ve been doing this for several weeks now. At left is what I baked today, a molasses bread recipe. This is made with coarse stone-ground flour and has an overnight first rise.
29 May 11
Indigoing
I attended a workshop in Berkeley yesterday put on by the Spindles and Flyers group (lovely to see Lisa there). It was an indigo dyeing workshop using greener chemicals. This doesn’t mean we fermented a pot of indigo for ten days in urine, which is also a green method; we used slake lime, iron phosphate, and indigo. (The more toxic combinations from the nineteenth century involved sodium hydrosulphite and zinc-lime formulas.)
Barbara Shapiro encouraged us to bring personal projects to dye (I brought some Jacob handspun, woolen spun three plies; it’s at the lower left in the photo). She gave us samples to try different shibori resist techniques on — cotton, linen, rayon, silk, and wool. The same exact exposure to the dyebath produces very different results depending on the material being dyed. Wool produces a sort of Prussian blue, “sad” blue as Barbara called it. Silk doesn’t take the dye so strongly and leaves sections that are more yellow, making the whole look like a cyanotype. Rayon takes the dye very quickly and strongly. Cotton and linen make a beautiful deep blue. We learned that Japanese master dyers sometimes do 18 dippings to get a rich, deep blue. (The only piece I dipped more than once is the scarf at the upper left; it was dipped twice. Now that it’s dry it’s much lighter than in the photo. I can see dipping 5 or 6 times. The caustic solution is not good for wool so I wouldn’t want to do more than 3 or 4 for wool, though.)
Oxidation is what makes this work — the fabric is green in the dye bath and on contact with air almost immediately turns blue. It’s magical. We were all sent home with residual dye from the class and I have some plans for some undyed merino-silk.
23 May 11
DC 2011
On Saturday was the Davis Double CeIntury, the epic 200-mile cycling event now in its 42nd annual edition. As we have done for the past several years we helped out by providing radio support for the event. I worked all day at start/finish helping to operate the radio net control, and Pica drove the course as a sag support vehicle (SAG 10). (If anyone can provide a convincing etymology for the use of the word “sag” in cycling, we would be quite interested.) The weather was quite pleasant for the event (partly cloudy with a high around 80 degrees, and the riders seemed to fare better than usual as a result.
At left is a sketch of our Honda Element tricked out with ham antennas for the event, a dual-band 2 meter/440 Mhz antenna for voice communications, and a smaller 2 meter antenna for the GPS radio tracker.
18 May 11
Ground
When the noise of
rapes and gropes and
men in power
(and men not but
wanting it SO MUCH)
gets too loud
I dig.
In earth
softened by
unhoped-for rain,
earthworms teeming
in a second spring,
tilling improbable loads of
well-seasoned manure
in through loam
and silt. Dig.
Mocked blackbirds and
squabbling swallows swirl as
mud gloms on to my
boots and barrow-wheel.
Dig in grief
for women
silenced by fear.
Fork the rage
into the earth,
go gentle.
Dig: invite
all to sit
at an ancient,
wormeaten table,
sharing the harvest.
15 May 11
Sketching Through The Weekend
Several sketches from a long weekend. The first at right is of a barn about a mile-and-a-half southeast of here on Eggert Road; I cycled out past there on Friday. 
The second at left is a scene from the Davis Farmers Market; Pete Scully who organizes the Davis Sketchcrawl chose the Farmers Market as the monthly venue for it on Saturday.
The final sketch is a little watercolor I did this afternoon showing today’s unstable skies. Mount Diablo to the south is the peak in the sketch. There were several thundershowers throughout the day. We went for a walk in the morning and got hailed upon. 
29 April 11
Hats
The dress was lovely and all, but really today’s been all about the hats, about Victoria Beckham’s superglued-to-the-forehead hat to mimic her pregnant bump (she looks so sour ALL of the time and who can blame her with that double whammy) and the astonishing blue vulva hat and the revival of the Fascinator. But the prize goes to Princess Beatrice’s concoction which I’ve read of today as a reincarnation of Cthulhu, Mickey Mouse on acid and the Eye of Sauron, to mention just the tip of the iceberg.
My poor father would be rolling in his grave if he knew I was paying attention to any of this. From the north of England and of staunch anti-monarchical stock, he was of the opinion that all queens did was sit around and look beautiful, that they were sucking the coffers dry and a disgrace to democracy.
And yet… I had to wear a hat once. To Buckingham Palace. A dark green faux Russian faux fur hat, it was, something we picked up at Selfridges on the way, because you needed to wear a hat when your father was getting an OBE. (You didn’t, it turned out.) We arrived at the palace in a borrowed jag with Bob the borrowed chauffeur and emerged to lines of waiting and lines of recipients of the royal pleasure. I have no idea what went through my father’s head as he waited in morning dress in the antechamber before heading out to meet HM who referred to him in the document received as “our most beloved and loyal subject” but I did get an overwhelming sense of the number of people it must take to get this kind of thing to run smoothly on a daily basis, quite a bit more involved than just sitting around and looking beautiful, in the end.
These kinds of people were apparently absent when Beatrice was getting dressed this morning because her Cthulhu hat facebook page now has more than 50,000 fans. People are saying it’s Fergie’s way of flicking the vees/flipping the bird at the palace. Who knows. I wish I owned more hats than just baseball hats and straw gardening hats and chullos for birding in cold places, though, even if I never had anywhere to wear them. Maybe I need a Cthulhu hat after all.
23 April 11
SketchCrawl 31
Last Saturday I took the train down to San Francisco to take part in the 31st Worldwide SketchCrawl, being joined on the train ride down by fellow Davis sketcher Pete Scully. We all met at a cafe at the northeast corner of Dolores Park in the Mission District and fanned out from there. At left is one of the first sketches I did there, of the prominent San Francisco landmark Sutro Tower. From the park there is a great view of this 299-meter tall antenna mast, so I was glad I remembered to bring my antenna sketchbook to record it. Across the street from the park is Mission High School, illustrated at right; its architecture is far more ornate than where I went to high school. 
I then walked a couple blocks to the west and found myself unexpectedly in front of Pica’s favorite store ImagiKnit, so I had to sketch the sign.
I had lunch at a taqueria on Mission Street, headed back to Dolores Park for a final sketch from the hill, and left early to travel to another engagement in Davis in the evening, making the train back by about all of thirty seconds.