29 January 08
Prothonotarian Spycatcher
At a meeting of the Yolo Breeding Bird Atlas committee tonight it was mentioned that Alger Hiss was proved to have had association with Whittaker Chambers because he had once seen a prothonotary warbler on the Potomac in the 30s, which Chambers remembered. The person whose career was launched on the House Un-American Affairs Committee through this accusation of perjury in 1948 was none other than Richard Nixon.
This is why you need to subscribe to Birds of North America, folks. You learn all kinds of things.
27 January 08
The Story of Stuff
There was a front page post today on Daily Kos highly recommending a new video called The Story of Stuff. Annie Leonard, an activist who has been researching the flow and waste of materials through our consumer society, came up with the idea to present this tale in cartoon fashion overlaid with footage of her narrating. The 20-minute video is viewable at the link above.
In good simple living fashion we bicycled to Pica’s office this morning to watch the video (no broadband at home, it’s not worth it.) It is humorous and thoughtful, capable of entertaining five-year-olds and provoking those an order of magnitude older into thought and action.
We do pretty well here in avoiding accumulating and consuming stuff, though of course there are lots of little things to work on improving. One needn’t scratch very hard to find such critiques of consumerist society going back a long ways, but how will the values of simple living and frugality ever make it back into mainstream culture?
26 January 08
The Latest Poll Figures
Numenius reads me the latest poll figures. I think he’s joking. He isn’t.
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.