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?
23 December 07
Seven Weeks After the Oil Spill
Shining, the bay. Out to the horizon.
(This is my contribution to Illustration Friday’s theme, Horizon.)
21 December 07
Wild Dude, Wild Dog
Jonathan Papelbon’s dog ate the World Series ball. The Boston Red Sox closer, who became famous during this year’s post-season for dancing jigs to a tune of the Dropkick Murphys, lost the ball given to him by catcher Jason Varitek after the final out of the 2007 World Series when his bulldog Boss jumped up on the counter and started using it as a rawhide chew toy. “He tore that thing to pieces,” Papelbon said. One New England dog trainer is wondering why the ball was on the counter where the dog could reach it. “Bad dog owner. Bad, bad, bad…” she says.
20 December 07
Typography and Other Design Delights
In a do-or-die attempt to master positioning on web pages with cascading style sheets, and taking advantage of a relatively slow time at work, I’ve been availing myself of the courses available at Lynda.com, which were paid for by my employers earlier this year but which I’ve not had a chance to get to. There is a bewildering number of online courses on offer, and while I’ve been working steadily through CSS2 Essential Training, I couldn’t help but have a gander at InDesign CS2 Professional Typography, or Typographic Principles (or Audio or Podcasting or Alpha Channels or dot dot dot).
This all comes at a good time, because I found out today that Robert Brinkhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, an essential book that came out after I’d trained as a graphic designer, is being applied to web design by Richard Rutter. Hints on how to control spaces between words and kerning using style sheets are going to be a huge help to me.
(Language Hat referred me to Rex Sorgatz’s Fimoculous and his Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading, which provided the above link through Drawn; it’s a fantastic list. A couple of particularly quirky finds: Strange Maps, whose maps are fascinating but whose typography in the text is a bit lamentable (hope they look up the Rutter, above), and Quotation Marks, to which all comers are invited to submit photos of inappropriate use of quotation marks.
19 December 07
But When Should Be The Holiday?
UC Davis researchers have calculated that the solar system is 4.568 billion years old, give or take about a million years or so. They established this figure in a study of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, comparing ratios of chromium-53 to manganese. They do not report the day of the week it all began.
17 December 07
Christmas Bird Count
Too too tired to post this last night… Yesterday Numenius and I hiked Thompson Canyon, northeast of Lake Berryessa, to the ridge and back, spending most of the day in oak woodland and about an hour and a half in chaparral, where we failed to find our target bird, sage sparrow (though it was blowing cold and hard up at the ridge by the time we got there).
My feet are not good hikers and I decided to sit out the side trip up to the spring, armed with a handy-talkie and my tangerines and a sketchbook. I had a close encounter with a pair of wrentits that kept emerging from a brush pile, swishing their long tails this way and that. I’ll post sketches later on Bird by Bird.
It was a beautiful place to hike. Too bad we had the company of some dirt bikers and guys with chain saws cutting up wood (makes hearing bushtits somewhat challenging) but were rewarded at the end by a beautiful varied thrush, one of only two seen the entire day.
We were both weary but had thought to bring along some of the Xocolatl that Linda sent; definitely the best way to revive flagging energies!
13 December 07
Black Cat Ale
You thought you were coming home with a case of your favorite microbrew…
12 December 07
Little Things
For the “Little Things” theme in Illustration Friday. This creature emerges from decomposing piles.