25 August 10
Des Reliques
My father was an avid photographer. His favorite thing to do during camping trips in Spain was to fetch out his Minolta FX with multiple lenses and take close-ups of wildflowers. His attempts at landscapes were less successful and of wildlife even less so, but this didn’t alter the fact that during my adolescence the fridge was always full of beer—and film.
Dad died in 1999. Film was still in the fridge, now on the Northern California coast. We brought it back with us to Davis because you can’t waste film.
I just checked the dairy section of the fridge. It contains two rolls of Kodak Gold 400 (undoubtedly for my mother, who still shoots in film/ it will be on its way to her shortly), one roll of Kodachrome 64, and one roll of Kodachrome 25.
We’d better shoot this final roll of 25 because after December, there won’t be anyone left who will develop it professionally. I don’t know what we’ll shoot. Probably a lot of morning glory, which is improbably in flower and which my Dad took in spades.
15 August 10
A Week Behind The Typecase
I just spent the past five days taking the letterpress intensive course at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my new-found printing skills, but it was a lot of fun. We worked with the four Vandercook presses the center has, and produced personal stationery, a broadside of a quote our choice, and at the end of the week we reprinted the text from our broadsides to make up the parts for a pamphlet-bound book. At left is my broadside — two quotes on cats — printed in a rather beat-up 18 point Caslon font. Composing type a pretty intense process, but metal type is beautiful to work with. It’s quite neat to see one’s text laid out in shiny gray metal in the bed of the press, reading backwards of course!
13 August 10
The Small Red Triangle
It came upon me while I wasn’t looking, this thing. Someone I know knows someone who does therapy and by the way she also teaches qigong. What I knew about qigong was that it’s a great Scrabble word and is somehow related to, but not the same as, tai chi, which I’d seen someone’s Shanghaiese mother doing outside Dryden House in Cambridge. It looked strange and flowing and mesmerizing and sure, I’ll go.
Breathing. The medical set. Hitting (it our case it’s a lot more like tapping). Sequences I still haven’t memorized but that become familiar as C. describes the pathways, the flow. The end of our session often — always? — consists of sitting, of meditation. We are an unruly lot of women who’d mostly prefer to be moving about rather than facing whatever it is that sitting still for five minutes will reveal; C. knows this and she just works it in at the end, when we’re all pliable, when there’s no ducking out.
Picture a small red triangle, smaller than a pea, she says. Draw a line from your cranium through your center to three fingers below your navel. The triangle sits there. Red and luminous. Focus on the triangle. (She knows unruly minds will race and she is trying to keep us here, rather than thinking about what we will have for dinner or the laundry or the paintings we want to paint or the words we want to write. Think about the triangle. Here. Be present.)
The dreaded five minutes come and go and still we sit, moving the energy up into our hearts and back into the circle where it is offered back out to the suffering world…
6 August 10
Mr. Ibis Returns
Judging by older blog posts we have a pattern here. In August when they cut the alfalfa and irrigate, the white-faced ibis having recently returned to the area from their summertime jaunts find the flooded fields and settle in for an hour or several of feeding. Often they show up quite close to the house, as they do here.
23 July 10
Tour de Fleece
As you might have guessed from the photos, below, I’ve been spinning a lot lately. I’m participating in the Tour de Fleece, which is a (fiber) spinning event that coincides in time with the Tour de France. Different categories separate different spinners, and you can join teams. I’m in Team Rookies since it really is less than a year since I got my wheel, hard to believe. I’m also in Team JulieSpins because the fiber I’m spinning — a soft-as-butter Blue-faced Leicester — was dyed by the hugely talented Julie Sandell of Massachusetts, whose work can be found here and here.
The Tour de France ends on Sunday, and I find myself gathering my wits, cats, and early hours to try and get all the fiber spun. I separated all 30 ounces out into vague color likenesses, and decided on a traditional 3-ply (versus Navajo, or chain, ply, which would have preserved longer color repeats but which is inherently less stable and uneven than the teutonic solidity of a 3-ply). I could have made this a lot easier for myself and gotten a lot more yarn if I’d chosen a 2-ply, but 3-ply blends the colors better and the yarn is more rounded.
I’m going to use this stuff to make a side-to-side jacket, inspired by kimono construction but tapered at the waist by means of short rows. Designing as you go results in some ripping out. I don’t mind this, I’ve discovered. Maybe in my old age i really am becoming more patient. I just hope I have enough yarn…
Yellow, pinky yellow, pinky magenta, magenta plum: I’m calling this yarn Nectarinada.
Added July 26, 2010: I finished the whole 2.5 lbs. It’s dense!!
21 July 10
Rivalry
Occasionally there is a game to remind us that there is more to the Giants-Dodgers rivalry (which dates back 120 years) than mocking the Dodgers fans for tossing beach balls around their home stadium. Last night was one of these. We missed all the good bits: the Giants’ ace pitcher, Tim Lincecum, started off badly, walking the first batter of the game on four pitches and giving up a home run in the first inning to put the Giants behind 3-0. Things were showing no sign of improving, so I turned off the radio. Checking in online in the top of the 9th, I delight to see an update come in where the Giants take the lead 6-5 on an Andres Torres double, and turn the radio back on. I learn that in the interim, the following has happened:
1) Tim Lincecum (who is lacking control this evening, remember) hits Dodgers batter Matt Kemp with a pitch. He charges the mound; players swarm to restrain the two. The Dodgers’ bench coach gets quite irate. The umpire warns both benches.
2) The reliever who takes over for Lincecum, Denny Bautista, throws a couple of pitches that go inside; the Dodgers’ bench coach yells something about this and gets ejected as a result.
3) The Dodgers retaliate. In the top of the 7th, their starter Clayton Kershaw hits Aaron Rowand with his first pitch of the inning. Having been warned, Kershaw and Dodgers manager Joe Torre get ejected. Dodgers coach Don Mattingly steps in for Torre.
4) Somehow through all this the Giants claw back from 5-1 to 5-4.
5) It is the top of the 9th. Dodgers closer Jonathan Broxton struggles a bit, and the bases are loaded. There is a conference on the mound, and acting manager Mattingly comes out to the mound. He steps off the mound, thinks “oh, one more thing”, and returns to the mound. Giants manager Bruce Bochy notices this, points it out to the umpire. The umpire concurs. According to the rules, two visits by a manager to the mound means the pitcher must be taken out of the game. The Dodgers are forced to take off their closer, and bring on their struggling-this-year reliever George Sherrill, who is allowed (according to the rules) only eight pitches to warm up.
6) Torres hits his double, and the Giants take the lead. Buster Posey, the Giants top-prospect-turned-hottest-of-rookies, gets an additional RBI and the Giants lead 7-5.
7) The Giants’ usual closer, Brian Wilson has pitched in the previous four games and is unavailable, but Jeremy Affeldt takes over closing duties, and the Giants win it.
See, just another usual day at the park.
17 July 10
Spinning: Different Day, Different Cat
15 July 10
Soccer Quandaries
I listened to my first baseball game following the World Cup, the Giants beating the New York Mets 2-0, Tim Lincecum throwing a complete game shutout. I’m not quite ready to give up soccer for another four years, and for now continue to pay attention to the sport. So far this means a) finishing Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett’s latest novel about the wizards at Unseen University being coerced into fielding a football team against the town folk of Ankh-Morpork, the ending of which bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Spain-Netherlands final b) reading Jonathan Wilson’s recent treatise Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics c) learning that Billy Beane, the much-heralded general manager for the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, has in recent years become a soccer fanatic; indeed some suspect he’s gotten bored with baseball and only cares about soccer these days d) wondering if Billy Beane’s favorite English Premier League team, Tottenham Hotspur, would be a good one for me to follow and maybe adopt (it would not do to become a fan of any of the EPL “Big Four” — that’s like defaulting to being a Yankees fan) But chances for me to watch soccer without broadband or any sort of cable TV are few and far between, so maybe I stick to baseball on the radio…
11 July 10
Gané,
Ganaste, ganó, ganamos, ganasteis, ganaron.
(I’m still in shock but we are back from Oregon where we saw Rana Rachel and Dan get married in the most gorgeous spot, had a lovely Thai lunch with Dale prior to a focused expedition to Powells, met the Knitting Rabbi as Numenius mentioned, and watched two football matches. One of which was very, very key. It involved my wearing a red shirt and I’m afraid I made a bit of a spectacle of myself in a bar at the Portland airport, but I may well get over it.)
9 July 10
Wayfarers From The Land Of Knitting
We’re in Corvallis, Oregon this weekend for a wedding. The wedding is tomorrow late afternoon; today there was a mixer for the guests. We were talking to the bride’s parents for a bit, and Pica was certain she recognized one of the guests. She got into a conversation with him, and he turned out to be the rabbi who is officiating the wedding. Pica tried about everywhere in her past where she might have run into him — nothing seemed likely. “Ravelry?” he suggested, thinking of his online social networks. We were awestruck — never in a million years would Pica have thought of a connection through that most famous of knitting social websites. His username on Ravelry is RabbiDave; Pica was pretty sure she had seen his name there. But Pica was still convinced she had run across him in person. They eventually solved the mystery. When Pica was traveling to Maine back in March, she got stuck in Portland, Oregon for a day. Having a free afternoon there, she wandered into the store The Yarn Garden on Hawthorne Blvd. and got into an animated conversation with the clerk about her trip to Maine. Behind them entered a guy who was very intent on looking at the sock yarn. That was, it turned out, our rabbi, who lives up in Portland. The bride is also on Ravelry; conversation strayed little from the Land of Knitting hence.