11 December 10
Amateur Extra
I passed the requisite exam today and upgraded my amateur radio license to the Amateur Extra class today! This is the highest of three levels in the amateur radio licensing system in the United States. I don’t know what in particular I’m going to do with my new privileges (basically a bit more spectrum to operate on HF), but I’ve had the study guide for the Extra class on my bookshelf for a year-and-a-half and when I heard six weeks ago that there was going to be a testing session in Davis in December I decided to go for it. The testing session took place in the morning; I was there for somewhat over an hour including the time spent doing paperwork, the test itself, and waiting for the grading to be done. We celebrated with our traditional Saturday lunch at El Mariachi taqueria, joined by our friends Laura and Danny. Danny was celebrating too: he was also at the session and passed the exam for the Technician level license. His call sign should be issued in several days, at which point he can go on the air as a new ham!
8 December 10
Lace and Pirates
I must be out of my mind, because I’ve taken on a lace scarf designed by a knitter in Germany. It’s knit in 24 sections, each one divulged on a new day — an advent calendar; the last section will be released on December 24. Like I had nothing else to do in December…
Nupps are not a traditional German knitting technique, having been perfected in Estonia — but with YouTube and Ravelry, everyone’s tradition is now up for grabs. So this sampler scarf has as one of its sections a version of the Estonian lily of the valley pattern. No doubt we’ll get Brazilian frog patterns at some point next week.
I was working on this (I find nupps fiddly but not impossible as many of my co-knitalongers seem to have found) on Friday when I heard giggling in the other room. Numenius had found a pirate radio station which was playing big band swing music, and whose frequency he tracked down to a pirate known as Wolverine. The music changed to songs from across the 20th century with a moon theme.
We have rain, and more rain, yet Cold Creek was still not running on Sunday when we went up there for a short hike. Hoping this changes soon. I’m thinking about newts and where they are going to be able to spawn.
23 November 10
Just Another Morning Around 60 Meters
I’ve been doing a fair bit of shortwave listening these days. I enjoy the randomness of what one finds there. For example, the following is from between 1607 and 1708 UTC on Saturday:
- miscellaneous voices in Spanish talking to each other on 4888 kHz USB, one of them using a call tone like those irritating ones on FRS radios.
- air traffic using HF, including an Alaska flight out of San Francisco on 5574 kHz.
- two RTTY-like digital signal stations (5306 and 5403 kHz). I try to decode these, and without any surprise fail; all I know is they have an 850 Hz tone shift.
- a shortwave broadcast from Sarawak (5030 kHz). No confirmatory ID on it, but it matches the published schedules.
- on 5810 kHz I heard Radio Free Asia being jammed. What I heard was voices on a news broadcast fighting it out for the frequency against orchestral music. Radio Free Asia is a US-funded set of propaganda stations broadcasting to various undemocratic regimes in East Asia.
- and best of all, a numbers station, at 4724 kHz (1607 UTC)! It was saying “Charlie Charlie Charlie Zulu Romeo…Bravo Two Three X-Ray Seven Tango….” Numbers stations are generally believed to be communications to spies over shortwave radio, and are the subject of much amateur sleuthing.
Throw in the religious broadcasters, and we have quite the microcosm here
On Sunday’s sketchcrawl, I got to see Pete Scully’s sketchbook for his project of drawing fire hydrants. This gives me an idea for an infrastructure-related drawing project: how about a sketchbook of antennas!
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….