25 January 08
Vaca Dusting
We looked west this morning and saw several thin tracings of snow on top of the Vaca Mountains, which get up to about 2800’ in elevation, and a bit on the Blue Ridge to the north of the Berryessa Gap. It’s always lovely to see snow on the Coast Range mountains. Californians simply like snow — all the population in the state is down at low elevations and never get into any without a bit of travel.
The road up Mix Canyon that we want to climb for our Bigby would get us up into the snow, but it’s a little far to ride at our present level of fitness!
24 January 08
Viva Nicholas
I don’t know what led me there today maybe it was the bells or the gray weather we’re having that’s so like Bodega Bay’s or maybe the memory of Dad discretely pointing out the boy’s father at the post office but not wanting ever to intrude in that English way on the deep pain of losing a child so absurdly in a case of mistaken identity while driving to Sicily then suddenly thrust into the spotlight so much that even the Pope wanted to meet them all just because they said on brain death simply and without much reflection we’ll donate his organs and the whole of Italy reacting in tearful love and shame taking this family as theirs and the story of his grave at St. Teresa’s in Bodega where still now there are flowers and I think of Dad’s ashes that were scattered over the cliff not five miles away and sing with the pain of it all of love and death and of falling rain.
21 January 08
Lake Solano In The Rain
We stuck to our plan for the weekend to go on a Bigby ride out to Lake Solano, having just taken our tandem in for a major tuneup. Our target birds included hooded mergansers, Barrow’s goldeneyes, sapsuckers, and pileated woodpeckers. Our friend Barbara, taking a look at the forecast of a 40% chance of rain and showing more sense than we had, decided at the last minute not to tag along, but we still planned to meet Vance at his office on Putah Creek Road about two-thirds of the way out. Vance works for California Audubon with their landowner stewardship program and is a serious cyclist and sometime bike racer. When we arrived at his office there was a bit of drizzle but after checking the weather radar we thought it would let up soon so we carried on. I put on my raincoat at that point and was definitely happier.
We rode to the south side of the lake by which point it was definitely not letting up. Scanning from there we saw lots of common mergansers, a few hooded mergansers, double-crested cormorants, and Vance saw his first Wilson’s snipe of his Bigby. We pulled in at the boy scout camp at the southwest corner of the lake, where there had been a report earlier of a white-throated sparrow. We walked around there a bit, heard our first acorn woodpecker, and saw a couple of fox sparrows. No white-throated, and by this time it was not letting up even more.
We got back on the road, headed west to circle around the lake and stop in at the campground by the Lake Solano dam where pileated woodpeckers have been seen. No pileateds there. By this point we were wet, chilly, and 22 miles from home, so we took a bit of shelter under the eaves of a campground building while eating lunch of half a peanut butter sandwich and a mandarin orange. We then headed off on the five-mile run to the town of Winters for a chai latte and a hot chocolate at Steady Eddie’s. It actually let up by that point.
Thus warmed we headed east on Putah Creek road home. It wasn’t raining much at all by then, and we were moving at a good clip, but soon the fact we hadn’t ridden that far in quite a while caught up with us, and we limped our way into Davis, laughing our way through the final downpour the last mile. We got in the door at 3 PM after riding about 43.75 miles, and immediately headed for the hot shower.
New Bigby species for me included:
Hooded merganser
Oak titmouse
Wild turkey
Hermit thrush
Fox sparrow
Spotted towhee
Pacific-slope flycatcher
Acorn woodpecker
19 January 08
My Meeting with a Samovar
I went to MacWorld on the train yesterday, bigbying all the way down and back. MacWorld itself was odd — partly a function of separating the two exhibit halls even more than normal, but generally a bit underwhelming. I toured the aisles, talked to vendors whose stuff looked interesting and avoided eye contact with those whose stuff didn’t, and in general was glad I was alone so I could be on my own schedule.
The Samovar Tea Lounge opened a second spot just above the Moscone Center, so I planned to eat lunch there. I knew I wanted to try the Samovar, so I opted for the “Russian Chay Platter and Bottomless Samovar Black Tea,” which included baked ricotta wrapped in collards, tarragon-marinated beets, and smoked whitefish and horseradish (I wasn’t expecting much with the whitefish but it was exquisite).
The tea: a blend of lapsang souchong and a breakfast mixture. Went on to the tongue smoky, with a flowery, almost lavender aftertaste. You’d think that the ultra-strong concentrate would stew on top of all that steam, but it didn’t. I had three or four cups. I was wired for the afternoon and much of the evening.
This place is a temptation for tea lovers like me. Any tea room I visit from now on will be held to this standard. Fernanda, I would LOVE to go to this place with you!!
18 January 08
Printing In The Sun
I just got the book Printmaking in the Sun, by Dan Welden and Pauline Muir out from the library via interlibrary loan. It describes the process of using photopolymer plates for printmaking. Basically you create a transparency with your artwork, and then expose the plate under the transparency to the UV light in sunlight. Where the transparency is clear, the UV light hardens the plate material. The non-hardened areas are soluble in water, so you wash the plate to create the printing surface.
It’s an intriguing technique, and we may have to try it out. One can do both relief and intaglio printing through it, though the former is simpler, and could be done with not much more equipment than we have at home. It’s still pretty involved, though — I guess you just start small, and see where it takes you.
15 January 08
How to Stay Busy in Winter
We bought a copy of this massive tome yesterday at the UC Davis Bookstore. It’s awe-inspiring. Gulls seem like the last frontier in birding, even more than sparrows…
13 January 08
The Journey Is Half The Fun
The tandem went in for a tune-up today. This Bigbying means we have many miles to cover!
Birding is often not an activity that gets you lots of exercise. Frequently the pattern is to drive for a couple hours, and then only walk several hundred yards away from the car to see the birds. Doing a Bigby reverses that pattern. If we actually manage to get a mountain quail on our Bigby, we will have had to have ridden at least 50 miles round trip and then either cycle or hike up towards the top of the Vaca Mountains. Bird or no, it makes for quite an enjoyable trek.
12 January 08
A BIGBY Gull Jaunt
With all the reports of multiple gull species at the Yolo County Landfill/Oxidation Ponds, we rode our bikes up there to try and see some for our Big Green Birding Year (BIGBY). We ran into Marcel and friends and he was merciful enough to point out the distinctions between the various species and their various states of plumage, always confusing. A better-than-hoped-for gull tally: Bonaparte’s, ring-billed, California, herring, Thayer’s, glaucous-winged, glaucous (gorgeous white adult). We missed the lone Western but may go back for it tomorrow. (We also missed the ferruginous and rough-legged hawks, as well as the prairie falcon, nearby, which is more of an incentive to go back.)
While we were looking for the Western we ran into Roger who was out in his new Ford Escape Hybrid, looking for the same birds we were. He got so inspired he drove home and came back on his bike. Go Roger! Be careful! This is a cult!
Today’s bird list from our bikes (singles; the tandem’s having shifting problems):
Greater white-fronted goose
Snow goose
Ross’s goose
Canada goose
Cackling goose
Tundra swan
Wood duck
Gadwall
American wigeon
Mallard
Cinammon teal
Norther shoveler
Green-winged teal
Canvasback
Ring-necked duck
Lesser scaup
Bufflehead
Common goldeneye
Common merganser
Ruddy duck
Ring-necked pheasant
Pied-billed grebe
Eared grebe
American white pelican
Double-crested cormorant
Great blue heron
Great egret
Snowy egret
Black-crowned night-heron
Turkey vulture
White-tailed kite (doing talon-grabbing display)
Northern harrier
Cooper’s hawk
Red-shouldered hawk
American kestrel
American coot
Sandhill crane
Killdeer
Black-necked stilt
Greater yellowlegs
Long-billed curlew
Least sandpiper
Ring-billed gull
California gull
Herring gull
Thayer’s gull
Glaucous-winged gull
Glaucous gull
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
Burrowing owl
White-throated swift
Anna’s hummingbird
Belted kingfisher
Nuttall’s woodpecker
Northern flicker
Black phoebe
Say’s phoebe
Western scrub-jay
Yellow-billed magpie
American crow
Common raven
Bushtit
Marsh wren
American robin
Northern mockingbird
European starling
American pipit
Cedar waxwing
Yellow-rumped warbler
Savannah sparrow
White-crowned sparrow
Red-winged blackbird
Brewer’s blackbird
House finch
American goldfinch
House sparrow
Just to note: some people are doing a BIGBY in currently frozen temperatures, just on foot, and they are happy to find twelve species. It’s humbling to be able to go out mid-January on our bikes in light jackets and get a list like this, and there is NO EXCUSE not to when we live somewhere with so benign a climate….
12 January 08
From the Back of the Yards
Answer: Saul Alinsky.
Question: What mid-century radical activist and community organizer deeply affected the early political education of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton?
This is a story I just learned a couple days ago, though it has been chronicled in various places, for instance this report on “All Things Considered” last May.
A year after Barack Obama finished college at Columbia, he took a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and thereby fell in with with several old-time Chicago activists who taught Obama the ways and tactics of community organizing. These old-timers had in turn been mentored by Saul Alinsky, who had started off his career as an organizer in the Back of the Yards district in Chicago in the 1930s.
Obama has never left his identity as a community organizer behind. After his U.S. Senate win his wife Michelle said “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” To which he later responded “I take that observation as a compliment.”
The interesting twist is that a decade-and-a-half earlier, Hillary Rodham studied and came to know Alinsky. Rodham started off at Wellesley College as a Goldwater Republican, and ended up a supporter of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy. When she was scouting around for a senior thesis topic, her professor suggested Alinsky, whom she had met earlier on a youth church outing to inner-city Chicago. Her senior thesis was titled “ ‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”
Rodham was quite taken by Alinsky himself, calling him “a man of exceptional charm”, but in the end felt that Alinsky-style actions were too small-scale to lead to widespread change, and instead believed one could effectively change the system from inside. After graduation she had the options of going to India on a Fulbright, entering law school at Harvard or Yale, or taking a job offered to her by Alinsky at his new training institute. She chose law school.
10 January 08
17th Worldwide Sketchcrawl
Get ready! Saturday, January 19th, is the next worldwide sketchcrawl. We had a fantastic time in November with a group of dedicated crawlers at the Sacramento Zoo. This time we’re going to keep it local in Davis because there’s a lot going on that weekend and to be honest I’m trying to reduce the number of trips we make by car.
If you can’t find a sketchcrawl near you, start one! Even if it’s only you, it’s a great way to spend an hour or four: gets you outside your head. It’s the time of year where that might be a good thing to do.