12 January 10
Geese Flying IFR
We had rain today, both a shower in the early morning and another in the afternoon. This is a change in weather pattern from this past week, where we’ve had dense and low fog (tule fogs) in the morning lifting to about 1000 feet by midday. The wetlands of the Sacramento Valley have lots of water by now, and frequently I will hear the calls of geese flying above well in the fog. As a pilot would put it, they are flying under IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) conditions. It’s easy to imagine that they are calling frequently so as to stay in touch with other members of their flock, but how are they managing to navigate? How do they know when to set down in their favorite flooded field? It’s a mystery. To me that is, but not to the geese.
10 January 10
Not Reading for the Plot
I’ve discovered the e-audiobook service at the Sacramento Public Library, and now I’m knitting away while someone reads me a book. It’s wonderful. I’m gobbling up big books I’ve read before and bigger ones I haven’t.
I’ve always managed to miss Edith Wharton. I saw the film version of the Age of Innocence when it first came out but it seemed a Merchant Ivory period piece, pretty and insubstantial. What I’m astonished by in the book is how perfectly she nails American (specifically, New York postbellum but easily transposable to a Boston I knew when I lived there in the 1990s) snobbery. This might get dull after a few hundred pages but it unfolds in such perfumed, stifling, dark-panelled and rose-bedecked prose that I find myself pulling at my neckline, trying to get more air.
I will never again say that irony is not one of the weapons in the American writing arsenal. Wharton deploys it like a stiletto, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and bearing at its tip an orchid poison. I’m following along in horrid fascination.
For anyone still reading this blog, any recommendations for other books, given how much I’m enjoying this?
1 January 10
Virtual Airsickness
We spent New Year’s Eve lying nauseous in bed — this was following a dinner of pasta with a squash and arrugula sauce and some holiday champagne. Our leading theory is was the perhaps undercooked arrugula that laid us low. (Happily we are feeling much better this New Year’s Day).
Or maybe it was virtual airsickness. Not long after getting this new laptop, I installed the open source flight simulator FlightGear and have been addictively learning to pilot its simulated Cessna 172P since. Right now my game is going on an airport-hopping trip of short flights, having left University Airport in Davis a couple miles from our house a few days ago. Last night’s segment, made just after dinner, was flying from Arcata to Crescent City along the northwest coast of California, with Pica virtually riding along in the co-pilot’s seat.
To make things more interesting, I fly with the real weather conditions fetched from the Internet. Last night’s conditions were the diciest I’ve been in yet. There was a 25 to 35 knot wind aloft from the south-southwest with a good bit of turbulence. I worried about how I was going to land the plane just as my real-life nausea was kicking in. Fortunately the landing wasn’t as tricky as I feared. Below the clouds at 1500 feet the air was smoother. I flew past the airport as far as the Smith River, and then made a 180-degree turn so as to land into the wind. Thanks to the crossed pair of runways at Crescent City, I was able to land with pretty much a straight headwind (I’m not sure I’m up for landing in a 25-knot crosswind).
The wind conditions are pretty similar up there right now. I think I’ll wait before going on my next leg up to Coos Bay in Oregon.
25 December 09
Long Walk into Town
We walked into Davis this afternoon, looking for somewhere to have lunch. We’d been to Kathmandu Kitchen yesterday and they said they’d be open today. In the event, it was the only place we found open. Indian two days in a row: not a problem for me.
On the way home we stopped at Lake Spafford so I could draw a common merganser.
Quaere: How many photographs of mallards — of the millions and millions that have doubtless been taken — were taken by default, because no other ducks would come close? Numenius thinks one day when I have access to divine wisdom I’ll know the answer to things like this.
24 December 09
But We Forgot The Beer Beforehand
Yesterday we went to see “Invictus,” the movie directed by Clint Eastwood about Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s largely Afrikaner rugby team, the Springboks, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup played in South Africa. It’s a great story, and pretty much all true. Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon do credible jobs playing respectively Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, the team captain of the Springboks. In classic sports movie trope fashion, the underdog Springboks manage to win the final, and more significantly help to unify the country in those fragile post-apartheid years.
As it happens there’s a bit of local color to the story. There’s a guy in Davis named Michael Lewis who writes a column every month or so in the local paper on beer and brewing (Lewis started the brewing science curriculum here at UCD). His last piece was about the story of the movie. It turns out Lewis was actually in attendance at the final of the World Cup, having been an amateur rugby player from a long ways back and for some reason was on hand in South Africa at that time. As he puts it — “The event is quite clear in my memory — despite a prodigious amount of pre-game beer sunk with my son and my brother-in-law, at his club — because it is, without a doubt, the seminal moment of my life associated with a sporting event.”
He concludes: “I look forward immensely to seeing the movie…partly, I suppose, because I’m an old rugby player, but mainly because I feel some ownership of it, odd as that might seem. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it as well. Look out for Jonah Lomu, the SAA 747 *, and the No. 6 jersey. And to make the experience thoroughly authentic, have a few beers before you go.”
* The bit in the movie about the jetliner is true.
17 December 09
Knitting Away
I don’t blog much about the fact that I now spend a good deal of time, mostly in the early morning, with a cat on my lap under a pair of knitting needles. I took a break from knitting for about 20 years but am back with a vengeance, which means all kinds of other things don’t get done.
This time, though, I knit socially too. This means I know that I’m not alone in my obsession. My social knitting revolves around a weekly group that meets, improbably, in a video store owned by a Salvadorean couple, he a master baker who used to work at the Austrian pastry shop in town, Konditorei. (This is bad for the waistline along with all this time I’m sitting on my rear so I usually restrict myself to Mayan hot chocolate.) My online social knitting group is much more vast, knowledgeable, and distracting than this. Knitting problems are shared and answered instantly by people with varying levels of authority.
There are reportedly millions of knitters in the United States. Many of them are under 30, rewriting stereotypes and sharing their design skills for free with the knitting community.
And then there’s Knitty . When this goes live every three months, servers tremble. The new one came out earlier this week; there are at least three things I’d like to make on there, two of them with my own handspun. Which is now piling up….
10 December 09
Troperville
We’re now well into the off-season, and one of these days we will need to break out the baseball movies to make it through the winter without ballgames to entertain us. Maybe we’ll even watch some we haven’t seen before. Of course the tropes of these movies will be familiar: sports movies seem to center around the same half-dozen tropes: the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (Major League), the player on an end-of-career Redemption Quest (For Love of the Game), the Miracle Rally (Major League again)…
The above links are all from a wonderful site that took me only six years to run across, the by-now-quite-misnamed TV Tropes. This is a wiki whose participants have been cataloging all the tropes of creative storytelling they can identify: not just in TV, but in film, literature, poetry, anime, games, theatre, and real life. Completely fascinating. Even A Spot of Tea hasn’t escaped their attention.
8 December 09
Archeology
We cleared off the counter this evening, uncovering, in no particular order:
A DVD of Return of the King (Extended Edition)
An emery board
A sample (2 capsules) of raspberry-flavored Ultimate Omega, which we each ate one of
A cat brush, loaded with diatomaceous earth
Yarns of different lengths
Random thread
Buttons shaped as teapots and cups and saucers
An aluminium wingnut and washer and single washer
A box of kleenex
About 80 end-of-year solicitations
Stitch markers, different colors, materials, functions
A cork
A shrivelled tomatillo
A bottle of Estro Soy capsules
Knitting patterns for twined gloves and a lace shawl
An Exacto knife
A blue-and-white pottery ink pot
Mail from at least 5 months ago
Grains of rice
A stack of Artist Trading Cards
An accordion-fold book of sketches of a wedding we went to a year ago in August…
Sheesh. We should tidy a bit more often.
26 November 09
Thanksgiving Mix
Having taken care of all of our familial Thanksgiving duties a week-and-a-half ago, we were free to do what we much prefer for the holiday, to have a mellow day on our own. These past several years we’ve had a little tradition on Thanksgiving to go on a walk up Mix Canyon Road, which is a steep road that goes right up to the crest of the Vaca Mountains about 25 miles west of here. We never make it into a big hike, rather we just enjoy being in the canyon in late fall with the chestnut-colored buckeyes rolling down on the ground and the bigleaf maples in color. Alas Pica didn’t make it a hike at all today: she slightly wrenched her knee looking at a Nuttall’s woodpecker within 50 yards of the car, so she stayed put and drew while I walked up the canyon a ways where I was lucky to see a couple of pileated woodpeckers.
We wanted to have the traditional Thanksgiving meal of going out for Chinese food — I was especially craving hot-and-sour soup — but none of the Chinese places we looked at in Davis were open. Happily, the Nepali restaurant Kathmandu downtown on G Street was open so we now have a new tradition of having palak paneer and saag chana masala thali plates on this day.
23 November 09
25th Sketchcrawl
![Peeps, watercolor]()http://www.magpienest.org/images/1138.jpg "Peeps, watercolor")
In honor of the fifth anniversary of the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, we headed out on Saturday morning at 9:30 to the California Raptor Center where they were holding an Open House, moved on to Mishka’s Cafe, on to lunch at Cafe Bernardo, out to the Yolo Bypass for a blackbird study, ending up at the Davis Library and a warm house where I drew Charlie. We had hoped to run into Pete Scully of Urban Sketchers fame but missed him.
More sketches can be found here. Unfortunately Numenius seems to have caught a cold from one of the kids we were sitting next to in the Raptor Center classroom during the presentation….
Bird sketches can be seen on Bird by Bird.