9 January 08
Vote By Issue Quiz
Last night’s election results show that this election campaign is going to have more twists and turns to it than a braided river in the Yukon. For those who are interested in trying to separate out candidates’ campaign platforms from their personalities, there is a very instructive quiz put together by radio station WBUR. The way it works is you read a set of unlabeled quotes by issue from each of the candidates, mark which ones you agree or disagree with, and at the end the quiz tells you which candidates have views most similar and dissimilar to your own. Don’t be surprised if you’re surprised.
8 January 08
Silverpoint!
Before Christmas I was hankering for a silverpoint tool. Well, my cousin Gainor took pity on me and sent me a small silver rod and three sheets of prepared paper. The package arrived today. I sanded the point down and stuck the rod in a mechanical pencil holder.
Your blackest black is never really very black, only gray, so the whole effect is quite washed out. But this is the tool of the Renaissance: no graphite yet. It’s a trip to sit at my kitchen counter and draw my thumbnail and muse on 500 years ago…
8 January 08
The Latest Baseball Gizmo
Never mind about wireless weather forecasting devices, what about something that will give all the up-to-date baseball line scores? The company Ambient Devices has decided there’s a market here, and will be releasing their Baseball ScoreCast device at the beginning of the upcoming baseball season. It does look slick, but it’s pretty high-priced ($125) for doing only one thing.
5 January 08
A Three-Falcon Day
A three-falcon day:
Kestrel, peregrine, merlins
Taking on the storms
4 January 08
Trees Down
The worst of the storm hit this morning, with rain and heavy winds gusting from the south to 45 miles per hour. I didn’t get very far into my day at the office when the lights flickered a tad. The power stayed on, but we lost network connectivity, leaving me aimless for a while. My officemate Jim looked out our window, and noticed that the acacia tree just to the south was swaying in the gusts down to its base. Even its exposed roots were moving a bit.
We got to see the tree fall. About an hour later, the tree was leaning heavily, and Jim had summoned in four other folks from the windowless computer lab across the hall. A gust, and it gently toppled as we all applauded. A brand-new Toyota Prius parked nearby barely escaped damage, as only the leafy bits of the tree landed above it. A campus landscaping crew came by and cleaned up the mess by three in the afternoon.
Pica meanwhile went home for lunch to find that one of the tall black walnuts across the street had fallen and completely blocked the road. By nightfall the Solano County road crew had cleared off the road, and all I saw of the event was lots of logs and cut branches piled on the eastern bank of the road.
2 January 08
Storm on the Way
They say this series of three storms may be as bad as anything since 1995. On Friday it’s predicted to rain 1/2 inch per hour. The question is, how long for? And with what strength winds?
I moved back to California in 1996. I remember huddling in our cabin in Santa Barbara, on the mountainside, as El Niño demolished Route 154 above us. If this is going to be worse, I’m worried.
But there are no mountains to fall on us, or for us to fall down on. It’s just us: the floodplain with levees. The water runs south from here, said the landlord yesterday. If it didn’t, we’d be in trouble…
1 January 08
Bigby By Tandem?
A birder in Québec named Richard Gregson recently came up with the idea of doing a Big Green Big Year, or Bigby for short: that is, seeing as many bird species as possible in a year without driving or flying. There are three categories, the walking Bigby, the self-propelled Bigby (walking, cycling, or canoeing), and the public transport Bigby (also adds travel by bus and rail). Today we took a little 13-mile tandem ride, and seem to have gotten started on a self-propelled Bigby, seeing 32 species over the day.
This will be a good way to get in shape. Significantly different habitats from where we live are a long way off (e.g. twenty-five miles each way to the hills). The ideal town to do this in is probably Santa Barbara, where we used to live many years ago, since it’s only a few miles between the 4200’ high Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. That is the reason why the Santa Barbara Christmas Bird Count consistently is one of the top several counts by species numbers.
The public transport option is quite favorable for us, though. The combination of Amtrak train, bike, and bus can get one all over California. It doesn’t end up being very frugal, however.
[Added by Pica, 1/2/08: The running list of our BIGBY is in the sidebar of Bird by Bird . The champion BIGBYs as far as I can tell, so far, are the Yukon-to-Florida-or-bust-by-bike team, Malkolm and his parents Wendy and Ken ]
30 December 07
Doom Of Gophers
As Pica relates, this harrier today grazed our back window, landed a few feet off, and started devouring a gopher which he was carrying after catching it out in the field. It wasn’t looking like a good day to be a gopher — the raptors were out in force today. In the space of a quarter-mile walk, we saw a red-tailed hawk, a harrier, a white-tailed kite, a kestrel, turkey vultures, a Cooper’s hawk, not to mention a great blue heron hunting out in the field.
29 December 07
Russian Caravan Tea
It’s been a long, lazy week. I had an hour to kill yesterday while waiting for the local monthly designers’ get-together at Mishka’s, which is a European-style cafe that roasts its own coffee and offers free wireless. It is inhabited permanently by veterinary and medical students as well as anyone wishing to spend hours and hours online. But yesterday there were also lots of people having real conversations.
It’s been chilly and has finally gotten wet, and few braved the tables outside. But the ones who did got sketched by me. There’s something about the glass barrier that gives me a bit more cover than just drawing someone inside the room.
I did eventually do some of those too, though. The thing about sketching faces: you notice just how beautiful people are, how different, how complex. It leaves me at the end of this year with, how can I put it, hope. I am filled with hope. Against an awful lot of odds, I realize…
29 December 07
Bliss of Winter Break
These past three days have technically been work days, though practically everyone at UC Davis takes these as vacation to end up with a 11-day long winter break. Today was sumptious. Chilly, overcast, rain arriving this evening. I took a long walk in the late morning out to West Campus (where clearly somebody was still on duty to feed the campus sheep), and then in the afternoon baked bread and hung out with the kitties. What could be more perfect?