Category Archives: Uncategorized

We had some heat today. We’ll call the high here in the refined northern reaches of Berkeley 91. The official Berkeley record for June 18 is 90, set in 1895. Because one must turn cartwheels to get the data from the official station, which is on the UC Berkeley campus and overseen by a Department of Geography employee who has heretofore ignored my queries about getting data from the station, I don’t know whether that 122-year-old record was broken or not. I’ll try to remember to look for the number when it becomes available in a month or so.

But other high-temperature records were broken in the Bay Area today. To wit (data by way of the National Weather Service):

The quality of Bay Area heat is different from what I remember of Chicagoland heat: It can be scorchng if you’re out in the sun, but it’s not so bad if you can find some shade (and stay there). My recollection of hot days growing up was that there was no getting away from it; the humidity just draped the heat around you. Great if you’re looking to get a good sweat on, though.

Anyway. When the heat broke early this evening, I took The Dog out for a walk. We went to his favorite pet food store — his favorite because he gets treats every time he walks in the door. The place was closed — I knew it would be, but it was a nice walk with the evening started to cool down.

On the way home, a mockingbird was putting on a show; enough so that several passers-by, including The Dog and I, stopped. That’s the little audio clip above. In addition to the bird, there’s a siren and the sound of the dog panting. Real street sound.

A false black widow, or
Steatoda grossa, in our backyard shed. It scrambled for cover after this one shot.

OK — so that arachnid above got my attention when I went into our backyard shed this evening in search of WD-40 (exciting scenario, right?). I didn’t know what it was, and I’m always thinking I’m going to bump into a brown recluse. If you know what those look like — well, the specimen above isn’t remotely similar.

But it was dark and shiny, sort of like a black widow. Our neighbors believe they spotted one of those in their mailbox late in the autumn. But this spider tonight lacked the black widow’s distinctive red marking.

With that one photograph, I went online to see if I could find a match. This UC Berkeley page suggests it’s a false black widow, Steotoda grossa (you need to scroll down at that link to the seventh species listed).

Excitement concluded. I posted the picture at iNaturalist to see if someone more expert than myself corroborates the sighting.

An oak along Orr Springs Road, in Mendocino County west of Ukiah.

OK — a break from post-election stuff.

For my birthday earlier this year, one of my kids gave me what probably qualifies as an antique film camera. It’s a Canonet — a little rangefinder camera made by Canon in the mid-1960s through the late ’70s.

I haven’t shot any film in years, and while the camera is fairly simple to use, I had no idea how pictures would come out. After ruining a couple rolls that I apparently failed to advance or rewind correctly, I finally managed to shoot some color slide film, extract it from the camera, and get it processed.

The results are fun and gratifying — here’s a Flickr slideshow of images that the lab digitized and transferred to a CD. I’m ready to go out and shoot more.

Pinot noir grapes, Toulouse Vineyards, Mendocino County.

“I suppose I don’t really care why the Cubs have such a plethora of devotees, I know only that I am one and that I find it impossible — inconceivable — to give my heart to another, however talented or untalented, bunch of ballplayers performing in whatever city in this country or any other.”

–Barry Gifford, “The Neighborhood of Baseball,” 1981

(Having cited the above, I will freely confess to what some witnesses saw at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer of 2013. I cheered against the Cubs and their sloppy, incoherent play against an exciting, inspired Athletics squad. Then — go ahead and call me a front-runner — I was back in the stands this past season cheering for the Cubs against the not-quite-up-to-the-challenge A’s. I just need to say that for the completeness of the historical record.)

For years, this blog has been hosted on Typepad. The virtue of publishing it there has been I could pretty much write my text and slap my pictures into a post editor, hit a button, and forget about everything. The service has always worked reasonably well and in recent years seems to have had far fewer of the outages and hiccups that once afflicted it.

And I’m not sure why I’m going away from it now, except for the monthly bill of 13 dollars and something. Do I  really need to spend that money, or could I do better?  Especially when I, like so many people, have moved to other platforms for sharing our favorite links, insights, bons mots and car-crash videos. I’ve thought about going to WordPress, and today and tonight, that’s what’s happened. I opened a web hosting account, installed WordPress there, and am in the process of importing my Typepad files there.

And speaking of those files: I am hardly the most prolific of diarists or bloggers, but the posts go back to November 2003, and there are 2,600 of them, along with 3,600 comments. If nothing else, a pretty significant chunk of history. For a while, anyway, I plan to keep it going. Maybe this will just be an archive, or maybe I’ll figure out some other direction to take this long, long project.

Thanks for still reading.

Walking to work early this afternoon, east on 16th. At Harrison the light is green. A white pickup makes a left turn as a fixed-gear rider comes down the hill toward the intersection. No problem–the fixie guy slows himself down and eases past the truck. I’m halfway through the crossing now, and I hear a voice, a male voice, say, “What a beautiful day!” It is. It’s cloudless and blue, sunwashed. The man who says this looks at me from behind the wheel of a blue Corolla.”Beautiful!” He repeats. “I can’t believe it.”