14 December 08
Grinding through the Mud: Christmas Bird Count
It didn’t rain the whole time. But the rain there was was cold. We rode and walked our bikes up the 4.5 mile road to the top of the ridge (it was very slick and the mud made it hard to get a purchase on the surface). At the top we were inside the clouds.
We saw very few birds as predicted with this cold front coming in, but it was a good experiment. I’d do a count by bike again, particularly on a stretch where you have to walk in a ways and retrace your steps. It made the return trip much, much faster…
The bikes are caked in mud and it’s raining now, and dark. We’ll deal with it in the morning. The compilation dinner was enlivened by Joe and Ron’s shoe-fly pie and by the thought that there’s a chance, a small chance, that we will lead the nation in northern pygmy-owl…
11 December 08
Bird Book
Yesterday was the Yolo Audubon Society’s annual Fall Drawing and Bird Identification Workshop in preparation for Sunday’s Christmas Bird Count centered on Putah Creek west of Winters. In addition to the grand prize (a framed print of a Terry Isaac bird painting) we were all encouraged to donate prizes for the event. I made a blank book and decorated the cover by calligraphing the names of the birds on Yolo Audubon’s Watch List for the county.
Cold winter weather is coming, just in time for Sunday’s count. Our portion takes us up to the top of the Blue Ridge mountains, north of Putah Creek. There are rumors we might even get a snow flurry or two up there.
10 December 08
Done, Not Done
So very much is Not Done Yet in these weeks — hectic at work, lots of Audubon stuff, knitting is consuming me (current project, for instance, pictured at left; it’s not, in fact, a bra). I haven’t posted a bird for a week. Yet:
From Rana, by way of Pilgrim/Heretic:
Things I’ve done are in bold.
1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice (No. I was asked to by a gondolier, but I declined on account of being “sola.” “Anch’io son’ solo!” he replied. “Si, però,” said I.)
29. Seen a total eclipse (Of the moon, not sun)
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors (Some of them…)
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language Several, with limited success, including Irish, Morse Code, Classical Greek, and Hebrew. Only Hebrew can I read well enough to be able to follow prayers during Jewish services, but that’s because I have followed up the self-taught with paid-taught, or else I just learned the prayers… I have made it through 3/4 of the first Harry Potter book in Swedish which is enough to understand, as though I didn’t already know, that my formation in Germanic languages is lamentably lacking and ought to be remedied. It can get in line behind everything else, though. Maybe when I retire.
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
39. Gone rock climbing (Are you kidding? With my accident proneness? See #77, and that was just DANCING.)
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke (No, but I’ll confess I’ve been tempted, and I did sing in a blues bar in La Grande Motte in the South of France before karaoke was invented.)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa (Does Morocco count?)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted (No, but it’s been sketched many times, especially during Sketchcrawls)
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (No, but having just seen Ninotchka for the first time, I regret it)
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud (YEAH!)
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business (Nearly. Glad I avoided that one.)
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar (Ugh.)
72. Pieced a quilt (No, but crocheted a bedspread, thin cotton, which was enough of piecing thank you)
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades (If you’re a birder, you have no choice but to run the gauntlet of mosquitoes on Snake Bight Trail if you want to see the flamingoes out in the shimmer. Every North American lister I know who has been to Florida has done this. Each of them has their own “the mosquitoes were the size of B52s” story.)
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone (Nah, but ruptured my achilles tendon, which was quite as dramatic)
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (Many, but none written by me. On the other hand, I’ve made lots of books, which I suppose counts as “publishing.”)
81. Visited the Vatican (School trip. We misbehaved.)
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone’s life (No, but we apparently saved the feral kitten we trapped a couple of weeks ago)
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous (This was not all it’s cracked up to be.)
92. Joined a book club (Never, ever again.)
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby (No thanks)
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a lawsuit
98. Owned a cell phone (Don’t know the number, don’t really know how to get the messages off it, but it’s useful when I’m being picked up at an airport. I think.)
99. Been stung by a bee (Had a major allergic reaction back in the 70s. This ought to make me paranoid about living in a house surrounded by thousands of milling bees, but we’ve lived there for nearly ten years and so far, so good. They’re well-behaved.)
100. Ridden an elephant
6 December 08
What's New Is Old
Davis is home to a homeless bicycle museum. The California Bicycle Museum was formed recently after the university in 2001 bought a collection of bicycles dating back to 1823 that was owned by a rancher near Modesto. The museum is seeking a permanent place to display these bicycles, but in the meantime they are on temporary display in the community center adjoining Central Park, open during the times of the Farmers’ Market.
We finally made it to the exhibit today and were quite impressed by the collection, which ranges from the 1823 draisienne with no pedals (you sat over the frame and pushed it along) to the latest design in streamlined human-powered vehicles with a full fairing. What struck me was how little bicycle design has changed in the past century. Once the safety bicycle came along in the 1880s and pneumatic tires were added shortly after that, the bicycle looks quite modern. One of the bikes in the collection was a track bike used by the great American racer of a century ago Major Taylor, illustrated above. The lines of the bike resemble any track bike of today, though the wheelset was made of wood and he trained on a particularly massive set of wooden rollers (as seen below the bike in the illustration).
Of the evolution of bikes in the twentieth century Frank Berto in The Dancing Chain writes:
…around 1908 there was a fork in the road: English cyclists took the right fork and would pedal their three-speed epicyclic hub for the next 40 years. French cyclists took the left fork and rode their derailleur gears right up to the present. American cyclists fell down a hole in the road and continued to pedal single-speed coaster brake bicycles for the next 60 years.
29 November 08
Second Pair of Socks
I’m getting the hang of turning a heel. I have now taught myself continental knitting, and purling (!), demonstrated to an accomplished continental knitter who said “you’re doing it.” Look out.
Ravelry (still in Beta!) continues to astonish and amaze. Over 200,000 participants, it’s a much larger community than Daily Kos. There are sub-groups (I now belong to, in no particular order, the ham radio Knitters, the thrifty knitters [why buy yarn when you can get a great sweater at the thrift store and frog it, or rip it up and knit it again?], the Terry Pratchett knitters, the birding knitters, composting knitters, the Patrick O’Brian knitters, the Continental knitters, plus the defaults I’m not sure whether to get rid of yet. There isn’t just one Linux knitting group: there’s general Linux and Ubuntu. There are numerous baseball knitting groups (the Red Sox one is predictably huge; the Giants one less so). There are no doubt hundreds of groups of fans of TV shows I’ve never heard of. No shortage of cat groups.
I’ve started entering my stash and needles and future projects (one of which is taking shape now, some fingerless bike commuting gloves for Numenius).
Jeez. I mean, who knew?
27 November 08
Happy Thanksgiving!
Pica got me out of bed this morning to announce that our neighborhood turkey was in fact in our front yard. I’m sure he would be thankful to know that our feast this evening consisted of dal and rice.
26 November 08
Another Book, Another Blog
The project I was working on when I hurt my finger last week got finished this morning, a book for a coworker who is moving on after 20 years. I tried a new binding technique, “Belgian Secret Binding,” in which the stiff spine is encased by threads from the front and back. The pages are in turn woven onto the spine’s woven threads. It’s cool but fiddly — maybe I should try these new techniques when there isn’t a deadline, when I don’t have to fit taking a friend to the airport in and around weaving blue and gold cord.
A new blog I’ve been avidly following recently is Urban Sketchers which features a number of fantastic sketch artists including Davis’ own Pete Scully. There’s a lot of material and if you aren’t careful it runs away with you.
23 November 08
Books For Notes, Books For Sketching
As Pica relates, today we went to Stockton to catch Jack Laws’ bird sketching workshop at the Central Valley Birding Symposium. Despite it being too early in the morning when I got up, I actually came up with a coherent idea for how I would take notes in the workshop. Pica once got from the campus print shop castoff 7“x17” sheets of Endeavour Velvet Book paper, and we have several stacks lying around. It’s not very good paper for anything other than color offset printing, but it works as scratch paper and for practice projects. I took eight sheets of this paper, and folded these in half to make a 7“x8.5” single signature pamphlet. I took notes and made sketches on the signature in the workshop, hoping I had neither too few or too many pages. At home I made a little cover for it out of a sheet of ivy Canson Mi-Tientes paper, and bound it with a three-hole pamphlet stitch.
I was doing my class sketches with my Derwent Graphitints, and was thinking didn’t Derwent recently double the range of the Graphitints from 24 to 48 pencils? Some searching revealed this wasn’t the case (I must have been thinking of the expanded range in the Derwent Drawing Pencils), but I did come across a distressing blog post about lack of lightfastness in the Derwent Graphitints. This post however was in a wonderful new blog by Minnesota book artist Roz Stendahl, the themes of which being sketching, visual journaling, bookbinding, and dogs. She had a great post at the beginning of the month about a major reason I’m interested in bookbinding: how else as a sketcher can one be assured of getting a sketchbook that’s exactly in the format, paper, and design that one wants?
21 November 08
Badge of the Trade
When I worked for an architect in Cambridge, Mass., many of my coworkers had a thin slice taken off their left forefinger, the result of a dull exacto blade during a late-night charrette (deadline). I went through graphic design school, went through countless Exacto blades. I always, somehow, avoided this injury.
Until today. I stuck my finger in my mouth so I wouldn’t a) swear b) see c) bleed my guts out, ran into the main office, whimpered, grabbed some paper towel, then fessed that I might need to go to the hospital. But for what? There’s nothing to stitch, it got sliced off. I got chastised, rightly, by our front desk gal, who accused me of using a razor to cut card (she’s Italian), then ran next door to the vets.
“Do I put anything on this before a bandaid?” said I, bravely, to the first wildlife vet I found — she works on lead intoxication in condors but she used to be an equine vet. “Let me see.” (They’re ghoulish, veterinarians.)
“No. You weren’t around any animals, right? Clean blade? OK, bandaid now, tight but not too tight the blood has to clot, wash it when you get home then antiseptics, another bandaid. It’s going to hurt, later.”
“You’re letting a horse doc touch your finger?” asks the biodiversity/avian flu guy who is not a vet but might as well be at this point. “Better that than most doctors,” I say, and head back to the stash of bandaids.
Badged.
Update, 11/22/08: The cats were either super solicitous or cold in our first real tule fog of the fall (they almost never come onto a lap together). My PT sister-in-law whose specialty is wound care has given sound advice and asked for progress photos (on their way.)
!
19 November 08
Local Boy Makes Good, Part 2
Last year around this time we reported that Dustin Pedroia, Yolo County native who graduated from Woodland High in 2001, won the AL Rookie of the Year award. This year he did one better and won the AL Most Valuable Player award, hitting .326 with 17 home runs and 83 RBIs for the Red Sox. At a height of 5’9” at best he’s not your typically-sized ballplayer, either.
One of these months I’m going to have to browse through archives of Woodland’s local rag, The Daily Democrat, and read about some of Pedroia’s high school batting feats.