13 January 09
Flunking African Geography
When I flew back from Maine last November I sat next to two women who were studying a map of Africa, pointing to Kenya. “That’s where Obama’s family’s from,” one of them said. They struck me as people, residents of Sacramento, who had probably backed Hillary in the primaries but were now pleased to have voted for the first African American president and were eager to learn more about him. (We later played poker, badly, cooperatively as women do, which is not how you play poker.)
The current issue of Science News features unmarked maps of Africa showing first percentage of men circumcised by country vs. percent of people with HIV. The negative correlation is high — these maps are a great indicator of how government responses to demand for circumcision have helped slow the spread of AIDS — but to me it was a test. I knew all the countries, right?
Not quite. West Africa remains a jumble; I’d forgotten (how?) all about Liberia and Guinea Bissau, and what is Western Sahara? And how did I miss Congo separating out from Congo Democratic Republic? Oh dear.
My poor father is probably turning in his grave.
Edited to add this, in case you’re interested in taking a quiz…
11 January 09
Walking In Walkabout
This year, at the suggestion of one of our colleagues in the Yolo Audubon Society, we are doing a Big Green Birding Year on foot, rather than by bicycle. That is, we are attempting to see as many species of birds as possible solely by walking from home. I live just close enough to work (2.3 miles each way) that it’s feasible to walk in if I get sufficiently organized in the morning and leave at a reasonable time. This can be a challenge but last week I managed to do this twice and hope to continue this pattern. It’s a wonderful habit to get into plus it’s a good way to get birds on the Walkabout list!
6 January 09
Alpaca Koolaid
I found myself in this funky yarn store in Woodland with a scary McCain truck outside and plastic lining on the windows looking for bulky cashmere for my mother’s birthday scarf but all they had was baby alpaca so I took it and ran away but the color wasn’t quite right so remembering you could dye yarn with Koolaid I dove into Safeway where I never go and where I won’t be recognized buying koolaid for god’s sake but I don’t even know what aisle it would be on is it with spices or sodas or even controlled substances but a kindly mother helped me without raising any eyebrows which gave me pause because she ought to have unless she dyes her own yarn too and I got home and filled the crockpot with water and four packets of grape koolaid and the alpaca and the house stank of summer 1967 and I pulled out this bordeaux-colored handful of worms and rinsed it and dried it and rolled it up and knitted it and the cats would just NOT leave it alone worse than catnip it was and they pulled and snagged at it so I had to do it over and this time it’s blocking in the car with no way for cats to get in. But you should smell the car.
You probably can. From wherever you are.
3 January 09
Journal Rookery
No one shall now accuse me of having a shortage of chronologically-kept notebooks. We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a course from Carolee Gilligan Wheeler on making the personalized daybook. Pica was particularly excited about this course, and since I was in much need of figuring out a planner system for 2009, we both signed up for the class. As seen at left, we ended up with two books apiece, with six signatures of 32 pages each, good for making a six-month daybook with a page for each day.
Oddly, I’ve never actually tried to keep a page-a-day planner, for keeping track of meetings, events, and grocery lists. My Hipster PDA effort minimized the chronological aspect of planning, and I’ve never been too interested in DayRunners or their ilk. Carolee’s course was good fun, and ensures that I will have the most unusual planner in the office. (We also learned why never to go to Prague in January).
This brings my collection of journals that I’m currently keeping to at least six:
- My sketch-of-the-day book — I’m now using one of the many blank books I produced during last fall’s bookbinding courses.
- The notebook I keep for work. Happily the campus bookstore now stocks Clairefontaine notebooks, so I’m using one of those, alas they stock only the lined, rather than gridded version.
- An ancient bird field notebook. I’m not very good at keeping field notes, hence it is old and in fact in need of rebinding.
- My logbook of all the radio contacts I make on HF (a gridded Clairefontaine notebook)
- Today at Arch Drafting and Art Supply I bought another gridded Clairefontaine notebook which I intend to use for keeping track of miscellaneous radio catches in the wild world of shortwave radio (e.g. pirates and spies hanging out on the lower half of the 6900-7000 kHz segment).
- The daybooks we made today.
Have I reached the journal event horizon yet?
30 December 08
A Festering
The endowed chairs come bearing expensive overcoats, a studied ennui, and a secret hope that at least ten people will point at them in a whisper, the way people do in supermarkets in Van Nuys or Palm Springs when the famous actor du jour stands eyeing the tortilla chips.
The tenured faculty come bearing overcrowded schedules, the nagging feeling that after eight years interviewing the brightest young things in the country they are never going to land the hottest one (or even the hemidemisemi hottest one), and the gnawing suspicion that they are no longer young enough to show up at the Marxist cash bar without making a spectacle of themselves.
The untenured faculty come bearing hastily finished manuscripts, a bad hangover, and the guilty knowledge that they’d be far happier curled up in a good armchair with a novel that has nothing — NOTHING — to do with their field of research.
The university publishers come bearing crates of their new offerings and many more crates of backlist, hoping like the tenured faculty for the hot new thing over whom so many are salivating, bracing themselves for the onslaught of hastily finished manuscripts that will all end up in one of the crates that may or may not make it back to their press (but that will certainly never make it back to their desks).
The graduate students come bearing slightly dishonest resumes, enough clothes to ponder interview garb over four hours, and a permanent rictus that results from the awareness of their being on display to potentially any of the above categories in any venue: in the cafeteria, in the bathroom, in the dismal hotel corridors, in the seminar rooms, in any one of a number of good or cheap or trendy restaurants within fifteen miles, and above all in the exhibition hall where the publishers await them with a mixture of terror and vague hope.
What they all bring—without exception, from the four corners of the globe and the many cities and via the many airlines and taxis and buses and subway trains, given what time of year it is and where they’ve just been—is viruses.
This post is dedicated to all those who had, for one reason or another, to go to San Francisco this past weekend for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, and even more so to those who were supposed to go but decided, wisely, against it. (Here’s looking at you, Liz.)
29 December 08
Yard Coop
Last week I was taking Charlie Cat out for a stroll in the yard when he noticed a lot of sparrow activity about the stacks of bee box stuff. I saw that he wasn’t the only one fascinated by the sparrows: there was a smallish Cooper’s Hawk very intently perched on top of Pica’s cherry tomato stands. I eventually took Charlie back inside, returned to work on sketching the hawk, who after a while flew down to the ground to catch a sparrow, and then flew over the building with it.
Yesterday I returned from an overnight trip to see lots of black phoebe feathers scattered near the carport and around the bend of the path. A little while later I saw the Cooper’s Hawk fly in and perch on the lattice outside our front windows, and I had a chance for another sketch. I saw the black phoebe still about though, so I think he must have had a close escape.
24 December 08
Tvåändsstickning
Which is to say, the Swedish way of knitting from two ends of the same yarn, making a think double stitch and solid fabric on which it is possible to construct raised designs with clever positioning of the two strands.
Bit like burning the candle at both ends, though in theory you get something at the end of it (unless you have to rip it apart, no longer able to deny to yourself that if you were to continue to knit these gloves, they’d be three sizes too large).
It’s all a bit like my life, really.
I have many holiday cards left unwritten, unsent — forgive me if you’re one of the recipients, at this point it may make it as a new year’s card; the stacks of things to do around here don’t seem to diminish on their own. And tomorrow I leave to see a dear internet-free friend for a few days, leaving the cats in the capable hands of Numenius, who looks set to do a scary amount of radio.
But a wonderful surprise, today: picking up a copy of George Johnson’s sumptuously designed new book, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, I found four illustrations of mine I’d done for him, last year, following my trip to the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop. I know. It wasn’t writing, but it’s science…
Jennifer: I think this is pronounced tvo-end-stickning?
20 December 08
New Band and Some Beisbol
I’m on my holiday break now and am among things doing some radio. I just got the necessary bits to get my Buddipole antenna to work on the 80 meter ham radio band and tonight was the first chance I had to try it out. Success! I had two contacts on 80 meters Morse Code, one to Idaho, another to Banning, California, the latter signals being especially strong.
Tuning up from there, I heard what sounded like a baseball game in Spanish on Radio Rebelde on 5025 kHz. Pica confirmed my identification of the sport. Cuban baseball! Very cool to hear, especially since we are deep into the off-season here in the United States.
17 December 08
Drifting Toward Invisibility
Julie Zickefoose, a bird artist and writer whose blog I’ve been following closely for a while, just had a piece published on the NPR website on becoming invisible after 50.
I will turn 50 this next year. It is only over the past few months that I’ve been aware, as Julie puts so very coherently, that a) I’m no longer being noticed in casual in-the-street-type contexts, b) that I therefore must have been aware of having been noticed before, though this didn’t really ever register, c) this is not altogether an unpleasant experience once you get over the shock of a) and b).
It’s starting to become more clear to me why some women take such pains to appear younger than they are. I have dismissed this as vanity for a long time, but I don’t think it’s just that. I think they want to still be someone, a person, a noticed person—someone who walks into a cafe and more than one head is raised in their direction, which culturally has given them meaning. Julie raises the obvious example of the Red Hat brigade as a damn-the-torpedoes approach to the unnoticeability problem, one that neither she nor I is likely to adopt. But I am starting to understand it a little more.
One of the commenters on Julie’s NPR piece suggests that blogging is a powerful way for women to keep their voice and have it be noticed. I think we shouldn’t underestimate this.
I am just finding it so very odd to even remark upon it. And wonder whether wearing my hair long and defiantly gray is my own means of bucking the trend…. Others have written about this and I’d love to hear from my male and female readers of all ages about their experience of this phenomenon.
These blind contour self-portrait sketches were done this evening at Mishka’s in the reflection in the window onto the night of Second Street, in the company of Blue Bicicletta who had some wonderful “Ride a Bike” pins for me (let me know if you’d like one).
16 December 08
Volunteer Potatoes
Pica dug these potatoes up today from her vegetable garden after the above-ground bit got killed by a recent frost. She didn’t plant these; they grew from bits left in the ground from previous generations of potatoes. I sketched these using Graphitints in a blank-book-of-mine-turned-journal.