9 March 09
Living New Deal
Last week I heard Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin and Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From The California Dream speak on campus. After working on those two books, he needed a cheerier project, so he has been involved with the Living New Deal Project. This is an effort to document the public works in California created through Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. These projects included schools, gardens, amphitheatres, infrastructure like power stations and airports, public art works, and many other features on the landscape, constructed by federal programs such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Their map of California New Deal projects is here — if you know of other sites that should be added do let them know.
8 March 09
The Accidental Turnips
I dropped a packet of seeds in the fall in the space between the beds. I tried to pick them up but it doesn’t always work and I forgot about them.
In November there was a fine clump of green things where I’d dropped the seeds. I dug them up and put them next to some chard. I had forgotten what they were. All I knew was they were a crucifer.
Purple-top turnips, it turns out. Into tonight’s soup, along with some tomatoes and basil from the freezer, this splendid kohlrabi, some butternut squash (these are getting a little off by now; better eat them up), and white beans.
Soup Sundays: my favorite.
5 March 09
Leaping Into Hardware
The two replacement parts for the bat detector arrived today, so I’m all set to finish the project up (assuming of course I can manage to desolder the old parts). Already I’m leaping ahead though. The kit I’m building after this one is a low-power 40 meter transceiver, the SW-40+. Leap one after that is learning how to build circuits without having a printed circuit board for the project. Leap two may be wading into working with microcontrollers — I am quite intrigued by the Arduino platform. Visions of building a sun tracking platform for the solar oven are in my head.
Meanwhile, a reader of ours has sent along an illustration showing kit-building in the early days. Thanks, Susan!
1 March 09
The Longest Capitol Corridor Train Ever...
… was what we rode on yesterday, some friends and I.
It was full of knitters.
A train with 486 knitters, one knitter’s husband, fifteen staff. Knitters got on in Sacramento (described as lemmings over the cliff by Yvette who got carried along in that current), Davis, Martinez, Richmond, Emeryville, Oakland, and got swept down the east bay to Santa Clara. They had to put two trains together to fit us all in.
I have now, gentle reader, fondled qiviut hair, which costs $90 for a small ball. (And bison, which costs $50.) I bought some luscious Blue Moon yarn (hand-dyed silk/merino worsted). I gave myself a budget and stayed within it (this was nothing short of miraculous, let me tell you; I could have spent ten times my budget within the space of say 10 minutes, and that’s including the queues for paying). (I have, as I believe I mentioned, fondled qiviut.) It was like Macworld on steroids, this place. I overheard the gal at the Calistoga-based button shop say she was really glad she wasn’t into yarn. Ha.
Mostly the fun was the trip down and back, with Mary knitting up her hay bale twine to the amusement of the news crew and Maria working on the mobius scarf Mary had started just because she needed a knitting fix and Yvette learning how to knit on two different-sized needles and Elizabeth bringing her wit and smarts to the whole proceedings. I spent many a slackjawed moment yesterday. I ran into two people I didn’t even know were knitters.
I’m still a bit overwhelmed. But I will dream of qiviut.
28 February 09
Building The Bat Detector
While Pica headed off to Stitches West today, I worked on my bat detector kit. It was a long haul — double-checking that the right parts were in the right place, soldering them in place, checking the soldering, clipping the leads, checking the step off in the instructions. The kit has testing instructions at various steps in the build, but the later testing steps are hard to do without a signal generator for a 40 kHz signal and ideally a scope. So I carried on. I somehow managed to do in the power indicator LED (it worked before lunch, it wasn’t working after lunch, I may have shorted it out with wire leavings underneath the circuit board), but didn’t let that stop me. The most troublesome point was when the leads to the 9 volt battery broke off the board. Cleaning out the holes in the board so I could resolder the leads was a major ordeal.
As shown above, the kit is now all wired, but not put in its case yet. Testing it (no bat required, rather it suffices to jingle some keys) revealed another problem besides the LED: the 10K thumbwheel pot for the volume control is internally loose, makes very poor contact, and probably needs replacement. I’m learning that electromechanical parts are frequent points of failure. At least all my soldering seems fine. So I’ll finish up the project once I get replacement parts.
26 February 09
Delighting in a New Vowel
Hanging around the hispanohablantes on Ravelry has introduced me to the gender-unspecific vowel that is apparently now being widely used in Spanish texting: @.
Spanish, like many Romance languages, has an obligatory masculine/feminine divide in nouns. Sometimes the endings are unintuitive (la mano [the hand], el drama [drama]) but mostly “a” is feminine, “o” is masculine. This being a culture where historically the masculine incorporated everyone, in the 60s if you said “hola a todos” it was assumed you meant hello world, or hello everyone, masculine feminine and neuter.
I’m delighted to see new spanish-speaking knitters chime in on Ravelry with the “hola a tod@s,” the ‘o’ encompassing the ‘a’ as a perfect, ambi vowel. It’s particularly heartening because in fact not all spanish-speaking knitters are female, nor are all of them straight, and I love the inclusiveness that’s implied…
25 February 09
Country In The City
I heard a seminar today by Richard Walker, a geographer at UC Berkeley, on the environmental history of the Bay Area, following the lines of his recent book The Country In The City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. The tale of how so much of the Bay Area landscape came to be preserved as open space is a remarkable one of grass-roots politics, and Walker gives a good telling of it. The bit that cuts to the bone for me is how much of my own identity (I who roamed Tilden and Wildcat Canyon when young) has been shaped by the results of their efforts. His book now rides high on my reading list (soon to be joined, I suspect, by Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco — Brechin is giving a seminar here in a couple of weeks.)
23 February 09
Drawing Davis
I’ve been meaning for some time to draw people’s attention to the staggeringly excellent Urban Sketchers blog, a place where talented artists around the world post, collectively, their sketches of urban life. This exciting project was probably inspired in no small measure by the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, which although not self-described urban has certainly featured a lot of urban settings. The work on Urban Sketchers, though, is extraordinarily high quality, and a welcome other window onto the world than the lens of a digital camera.
Long-time followers of Feathers of Hope know we both sketch, but these days I do mostly birds and Numenius does mostly cats. Another Davis sketcher, though, is a charter member of Urban Sketchers: Pete Scully.
Pete is featured in today’s Davis Enterprise. Big shout out to Pete! Keep them coming!
22 February 09
Academy Awards We'd Like To See
Somehow I found myself this evening at yet another annual Oscar party, the occasion of which coincided with a friend’s 65th birthday party. I did well this year: the only two movies that I saw which were nominated for anything both won: Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. Usually I spend the entire evening spending wondering who all those folks up on the stage are, most of whom I wouldn’t recognize if I were trapped in an abandoned elevator with them.
We clearly need a list of alternative Academy Awards, perhaps to honor the less glorious but hardly inessential roles in film production. Let’s see:
- there’s the obvious Best Best Boy
- and Best Gaffe by A Gaffer
- Can’t forget those who back up the renderfarms: Best Systems Administrator
- For those who stay for all the credits: Best Titling
- and Most Amusing Clip Shown After Nearly All The Credits Are Finished
- And what about Best Lettering Outside Of A Titling Role (The Tale Of Despereaux is a good candidate here)
- And everyone in the film crew should be interested in Best Catering On Film Site (or maybe not — maybe filmmakers don’t eat like bicycle racers).
17 February 09
The Great Parking Lot Bird Count
As Numenius said, we spent hours in the rain on duty on Sunday providing radio support for the start of Stage 1 of the Amgen Tour out of Davis.
I completely spaced this weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, but I can report the following birds from my six-hour stint at the east end of the City Hall parking lot in Davis, the first hour of which was in total darkness:
Cedar waxwing (max. 43)
American robin (max. 35)
Rock pigeon (max. 12)
Long-billed curlew (1, flying west-northwest).
The end.