21 November 10
Davis Sketchcrawl
Davis sketcher Pete Scully organized a Davis sketchcrawl today. We started out at the Amtrak station and over the course of three hours moved about two blocks.
Five of us spread out and drew what we could see. After the torrential rain of last night, the sun was very welcome.
Pete would like to get a Davis Sketchbook project underway which I think is a great idea and I might do a birdy take on that subject.
I heard birds all day but didn’t see them so I haven’t got a bird by bird entry, but hoping to make up for that.
20 November 10
Sheepskin For The Kitties
The cats enjoy the sheepskin that Pica picked up for them last week at the sheep shearing.
14 November 10
Shearing Day
I took a friend down to Meridian Jacobs farm yesterday to see the sheep shearing. Robin Lynde has about 60 Jacob sheep but there were other sheep too, brought in to take advantage of the speed and skill of a master shearer.
It is very hard to sketch a sheep during the process of shearing because it all happens so quickly, and the sheep is turned left, right, over — but this sketch gives a sense of that in an odd way. This was a dark silver Wensleydale ram whose name is Marley. You don’t shear the forelocks on Wensleydales and after he was shorn I went over to say hello. He is a gorgeous fellow with wrinkles on his nose and came right up to me in the friendliest way. Rasta sheep…
I bought a lambskin from Robin, some Jacob horn buttons, and a beginning weaving book.
11 November 10
Offseason Plans
There’s no baseball to listen to anymore so I’ve tuned the receiver 6.375 MHz higher, and am back to doing ham radio, mostly Morse code on 40 meters. It’s also a good time to get caught up on baseball reading: I am now reading the book Game Six: Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America’s Pastime, by Mark Frost. Not that videos are our beat, but this book makes me want to see the documentary that came out last year about the return of Luis Tiant to his homeland Cuba after 46 years away — Luis Tiant was the starting pitcher for the Red Sox in that game. Different sport: I am also in the middle of reading The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, by David Goldblatt.
5 November 10
Parade, bis
Attending a huge celebration party in San Francisco the day after the Republicans took back the house was maybe the best way to deal with it. (The Republicans bombed in California, though Prop. 19 failed, the move to legalize marijuana, but you’d never know it from the way the city smelled all day long…) The cops were cool — I even caught one dancing to a drum beat for a few bars — and for a party of a million people it was fairly mellow. Yes, people were drinking. But mostly there was just this incredulous delirium, a dream in orange and black.
Yesterday I found out my director’s husband went out and bought twenty copies of the SF Chronicle dated Nov. 2 and put them on the graves of his parents, his grandparents, uncles and cousins. Giants fans from before they even moved to San Francisco, caught up in the Giants farm team. It’s like what happened in Boston in 2004. I am sure lots of these stories will emerge.
We were waiting at the BART station for the rest of our party to show up at the end of the day, still sketching. I said I thought the mix of people we had seen was interesting. The obvious multiracial blend, but many more Latinos, fewer African Americans than I had expected, though there were plenty. Many of them wore Mays, McCovey, Bonds shirts. Mays and McCovey drew deafening cheers as they went by in the invisible cable cars; Bonds wasn’t there.
Numenius paused for a second and said you know, Bonds is kind of like our Moses. Leading us to the Promised Land but not allowed to go there himself because of his transgressions.
So I will take this opportunity to say thank you, Barry Bonds. Prickly and chosen and transgressing. Because you helped make Wednesday possible… and it was a hella good party.
4 November 10
Parade
One of my earliest baseball memories is getting taken to see the victory parade for the Oakland A’s winning the World Series in 1972, their first championship win in the Bay Area. Today I got to see the equivalent event on the opposite side of the bay, as seven of us rode down from Davis to see the San Francisco Giants’ victory parade, taking a minivan down to the Pleasant Hill BART station and riding the train into the City. I suspect the 2010 incarnation of this celebratory ritual was far bigger than the 1972 event; San Francisco city officials today did not have a crowd estimate but believe this was the largest parade or civic event in the city’s history.
We didn’t actually see that much, there being about 20 ranks of people between us and the parade floats. At right was the typical view I had from our spot on Market and McAllister. We could barely see the motorized cable cars passing by, labeled fore and aft with the names of the two players each were bearing. I’m fairly sure I spotted Cody Ross and Matt Cain, and had a good sighting of a busload of trainers and physiotherapists and another of the front office staff, accountants and all, but that was about it.
We had no chance of hearing any of the speeches, being probably a third of a mile from where we needed to be at that point, but after lunch grabbed at a gyro place across from the closed-for-the-day SF Public Library, Pica and I went towards Civic Center Plaza and did some sketching. At left is the sea of orange-and-black humanity stretching forth towards City Hall, and at right is one fan sporting a Willie Mays jersey.
A sea of happy people, dancing in orange-and-black. I have to wonder about how this event will change the character of San Francisco. This may be subtle, perhaps a new aura of confidence about the city. Certainly the city now has a claim to be a baseball town of the first rank, which it never quite could before it won its first World Series, though the team has had a fantastic sense of tradition.
Alas, I can’t help but worry about next year. Others are pondering the same — the most pressing question seems to be who’s going to play shortstop — and the front office has many decisions to make soon. The Giants’ awesome rookie catcher Buster Posey in his speech today that we didn’t hear, apparently said something like we’ll celebrate for a week or two, but then we gotta start putting the work in for next year! Baseball is always a cycle.
2 November 10
First Spain, Now This
The Giants won the World Series. First the Red Sox in ’04, now the Giants in ’10. The rose is from my boss. A gift from my other boss is encouragement to go to the parade in San Francisco tomorrow, despite my workload. Working late to try and make up for this generosity….
29 October 10
Rest Day
A break from the World Series today as the Giants travel to Arlington, Texas for three days of away games starting tomorrow, the Giants winning the first two games of the series at home. We went to the co-op this evening to pick up dinner fixings and ran into a guy wearing a panda hat who it turns out was at the game Wednesday night. He thinks the Rangers are through; even if the series runs six or seven games the Giants will win it: it was the vibe he got at the ballpark two nights ago.
There’s still a lot of baseball left to be played. We nervously await Game 3, first pitch tomorrow afternoon at 3:57 PM Pacific time.
25 October 10
Weaving for the World Series
I had a two-day weaving workshop this weekend at Meridian Jacobs with Robin Lynde (who also taught me to spin). Robin took one look at my Giants Ishbel and handed me some black and orange yarn to weave with. There wasn’t quite enough of the orange to make a scarf-length piece so I added some gray at either end (all of the wool is from Robin’s Jacobs sheep).
My mind is still spinning with the language of weaving and the giddy sense of how fast it moves in terms of fabric length. I tried several patterns (plain weave, twill, broken twill, and pebble weave, settling on broken twill for the scarf). The warp is all black except for four strands of gray either edge.
I got home just in time for the first pitch on Saturday night, having woven about 5-6” of orange. Orange and black. The Giants won their game and the pennant, moving on to the World Series. I went back yesterday and finished my scarf, which I now have to full (wash and agitate a little to get the wool to settle).
Go Giants. (And thanks, Robin, for an excellent weekend and for these photos.)
24 October 10
The Raggle Taggles
I have no idea how the Giants just managed to win that game but they’re going to the World Series!!!
Their bullpen gets a lot of the credit though. The Giants’ starting pitcher Jonathan Sanchez got pulled in the third inning with two runners on and nobody out and the bullpen held the line for seven more innings. The last bit of play was a classic Brian Wilson the Giants’ closer sequence. Giants up 3-2 bottom of the ninth, with two outs. Phillies’ runners on first and second. A base hit ties the game, an extra base hit wins it. Wilson is up against the slugger Ryan Howard and the count goes full. Wilson gets him looking on a low outside strike and The Giants Win The Pennant!