1 April 26
Awaiting A Moon Launch
The world is in even much more of a train wreck than when I first reported on this at the end of January, but there might be a launch to the moon tomorrow! At the moment we have 16 hours before launch of the Artemis 2 space rocket that will send four astronauts on a loop around the moon. It’s quite possible the launch will be scrubbed tomorrow due to a mechanical difficulty or weather (there’s a 20% chance of the latter), but the launch window for this month extends a few more day so they’d be able to try again the following day.
I will be following this actively tomorrow afternoon. Trump is scheduled to make some pronouncement about the Iran war in the evening — nobody knows what direction he’ll go on this — and is usurping all broadcasting for that; I will not be watching that. Ugh.
30 March 26
What to Take
I’m heading out tomorrow on a trip to Germany. I’ve been studying German fairly assiduously since the start of the pandemic and though I grew up in Europe I never went to Germany.
I have some rules about traveling, which overlap a lot with Numenius’s (though not entirely, and in this case we’d have very VERY different itineraries). One is, hand luggage only, whether for a week or a month. Two is, forget cameras; bring minimalist sketching equipment (you know that advice where they tell you to put all the clothes you plan to bring and cut it in half? I had to cut my sketchbooks into a QUARTER). Three, have plenty and diverse things to keep you entertained (I have knitting, audiobooks, and access to whatever films they show us on the 11-hour or so flight in addition to my sketching stuff).
I’ll be seeing friends and exploring different places on my own, all of them in the western third of Germany. An excursion to Bingen to stay in the Benedictine convent for three nights is particularly appealing: I’ve been reading a lot about Hildegard and have to figure out how to say what I’ve learned in German in case a nun sits next to me at breakfast and asks me why I find her so compelling.
I’ll plan to blog here on the usual schedule but it might be brief and very sketch-heavy. Short stay in Copenhagen at the beginning to see some friends from Sweden; hoping for some lingering winter seabirds!
29 March 26
Wikipedia At Home
Both Pica and I had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home when we grew up, always at hand to dig into some topic of interest. Nowadays Wikipedia plays that role, the jewel of the Internet, a master reference only one bit of typing away. But what if…something happen to the Internet? A tech enclosure movement or collapse of the root level domain name system or rampant cyberwarfare?
It turns out one can download all of Wikipedia pretty easily. Since 2007 there has been a project called Kiwix that has created a system for taking extremely large knowledge stores and compressing them into single files that are easily viewed with special software offline.
This software is not difficult to run and is available for all major platforms. Their catalog lists 3458 different works that have been compiled into this file format in many different languages. I’ve had a go and have downloaded the complete English Wikipedia, Wikispecies, and resources from iFixit. The Wikipedia file is 115 GB in size and took several hours to download.
It’s a comfort having Wikipedia on my own hard drive. You never know.
28 March 26
No Kings, Again
This morning we went to Winters to attend a No Kings rally. We knew it would be small and easy to get to compared to the much larger march from West Sacramento to the Capitol. Winters was very accommodating of people with mobility problems and featured a lot of sing-along music.
In the afternoon Numenius also went to a family-friendly gathering here in Davis (this photo is his and features local celebrity Whymcycler Peter Wagner).
From all accounts the turnout at today’s rallies set a record. The trick will be to have a massive turnout of voters in the mid-terms. Assuming they don’t get cancelled… at this point anything seems possible.
27 March 26
Riverfront Outing
Today I went on a little outing to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, walking to the museum from the Sacramento train station via Old Sacramento and the riverfront. Old Sacramento is the most touristy area in Sacramento; it developed during the Gold Rush. Since I have been reading a lot about Northern California history in the latter half of the 19th century and pondering the Gilded Age fortunes that were made during that period, it’s neat to see the actual storefront where Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins made their wealth off miners needing supplies. This is a sketch looking west across the Sacramento River downstream from the Tower Bridge.
26 March 26
A New Short Row Technique
Short rows in knitting are used when you want a different amount of fabric in one section of a row than another without adding length at the end of the row. Typical uses include knitting a sock heel to make the L-shape of a foot, adding length to the back or front of a sweater (this can be extreme to accommodate a dowager’s hump or slumping shoulders or a large bust), or to shape a sleeve knit horizontally, as I’m doing with my Fort Amherst sweater.
For years the only short row turn I knew was the wrap-and-turn, where you knit to the desired stitch, yarn forward, slip next stitch, yarn back, turn work (in the middle of a row). It’s clunky and inelegant except in garter stitch, where the bulk of the knitting hides a multitude of sins… With the internationalization of knitting I learned, and much preferred, the “German” short row, where the stitch is yanked hard over the needle making a “double-stitch” which you then knit as one on the next row. This has been invaluable in the swing-knitting technique where short rows are flung around with abandon to make some very interesting effects (I’ve knit the Dreambird shawl several times using this technique, pictured at right draped over my late-lamented bicycle which got stolen a couple of years ago).
The Fort Amherst project has introduced me to a third method, the Japanese short row (though designer Jennifer Beale calls this “Sunday short rows” in her pattern). Here, a removable stitch marker is placed over the working yarn, the return row is knit, but on the way back, you pick up the yarn held by the stitch marker and knit it together with the following stitch, removing the stitch marker. It is all but invisible! It might become my go-to method.
26 March 26
The Ghost Airport of Aragón
There was an good piece yesterday about the epistemic collapse of the Iran war: nobody has any idea of what the facts are on the ground, and the information bubbles we all (separately) occupy are not communicating across to each other. Some interesting stories are emerging though, sometimes on the periphery of it all.
One of these stories concerns the airport of Teruel – Caudé in Aragón. This is not an airport for passengers. Rather, it’s a facility for aircraft maintenance and storage. When the war broke out, it began to receive big jetliners from the fleets of the Gulf States airlines to take refuge from the war. Planes from Qatar Airways, whose home base is Doha, are especially represented as part of the new arrivals, with about 20 of their widebody jets having come in by last Saturday.
24 March 26
Sketching Along with Jill Lepore
I like audiobooks, especially since there is a good selection of them at either the Yolo County Library or, even better, the Sacramento Public Library, which any California resident can join. I can knit complex patterns because the narrative isn’t competing with a chart (though I do pause the audio when I’m counting stitches!).
I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s The Deadline, a collection of essays read by the author, always a pleasure. (It’s great that they know WHERE to put an inflection, and where the emotion of a memory cracks the author’s voice.) Lepore is a historian at Harvard and has a knack for capturing events past and present succinctly and intelligently, but even more, is good at capturing the feeling, the zeitgeist, that gives rise to these events.
I drew these sketches while Lepore was reading her essay about gun control and the power of the National Rifle Association, sitting at a café in downtown Davis; I found the four-leaf clover on the way home.
23 March 26
Grapevine in the Spring
The landscapers have trimmed back a lot of the grapevines near the edge of our backyard, but there are still a few. Here is a sketch of one of them leafing out.
I am enjoying working with my new 72 color set of Derwent drawing pencils. It is interesting how I rotate through different combinations of media. Here I am experimenting with doing an underdrawing with the Derwent drawing pencils (it’s great having Fresh Green as part of the colored pencil set), adding in a bit of line work with black waterproof fiber-tip pens, and then doing a watercolor wash over the drawing.
22 March 26
La Volta al Món a Peu
Numenius, somewhat against my inclination, has been studying Catalan alongside Spanish for some time now (I have an aversion to learning languages that are too close simultaneously). He does consume a lot of content in both languages, and has joined the Easy Spanish conversation group on Friday mornings.
He discovered the YouTube channel a while ago of Enric Luzán, a Catalan who is walking around the world, as much as is possible (a great deal of Asia is not practical either because of war zones or visa restrictions). His rules include a minimum of 26,232 km on foot; a minimum of four continents, coast to coast, in a consecutive manner; rest days should not exceed six months or 25% of total time.
I started watching his first few days this evening, and it’s surprisingly compelling watching! He is currently in or about to enter Greece. I find I am able to knit while listening to the Catalan commentary, not following every word but definitely getting quite a lot of the sense of it all. His plan for North America is to enter San Francisco from Sydney and I hope we can meet him on his route and buy him a coffee or some lunch!