Thursday October 15, 2026
Sedges Have Edges, Rushes Are Round
I went to the UC Davis Arboretum again this morning to make another entry in my perpetual journal. I’m not sure of the species of rush that I drew, but might share the sketch once I find out. I was sitting in the shade in the Australian section of the Arb (the far eastern end) and the area had been watered before I got there. Large numbers of birds — some resident, like the bluebirds, others newly arrived for the winter — were taking sips of water from the droplets that had gathered on the leaves and stalks. I drew them in my regular sketchbook as they appeared and flew off, often disturbed by people walking their dogs (always on a leash, I’m happy to report).
Like it says on the page: I’m basically never happier than when I’m drawing birds. Such a great antidote to what’s happening in the world…
Wednesday October 14, 2026
Post With Hat
I am continuing to experiment with my Neocolor IIs overlaid on top of ink continuous line drawings. This hat is hanging outside on a nail hammered into a vertical post at the front of our porch. With the Neocolor IIs I like having semi-opaque pigment to move about with a brush.
Tuesday October 13, 2026
Monochrome Memory
It was the winter of 1991, I think. I was living on Huron Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was heavy snow at the time and I heard a commotion outside. A sharpie was dismembering a mourning dove. Black, gray, white. It was striking: the only color in the scene at all was the bloodied corpse.
Another mashup…
Monday October 12, 2026
Contour and Neocolor II
On Saturday there was a sketchcrawl at the Amtrak station downtown. We went to it briefly but didn’t stay long since we wanted to catch the soccer match between the U.S. Women’s National Team and Spain’s side. I decided I was going to sketch the train station itself, a beautiful but difficult building to sketch, but do it in a hurry, so I opted for a continuous line contour sketch. Continuous line drawing leads to surprisingly interesting sketches, since doubling back on lines and adding disconnected details will increase the line mass.
Yesterday and today I continued with practicing continuous line drawing, this time using black waterproof ink in a fountain pen together with marks from my Neocolor II watersoluble wax crayons, trying to get some bold color into the sketch. Here is my sketch from today, a portion of the bougainvillea on one side of our backyard.
Sunday October 11, 2026
Perpetual
Today I started a perpetual nature journal. I’m going to do a drawing per week at the UC Davis Arboretum. I ordered a leather-bound journal containing Fabriano hot press paper from Lindsey Meares following a concept by Lara Call Gastinger. Since many drawings will fit on a two-page spread representing a week, this might take five years to fill… The advantage is to chart a defined location over time and follow the changes that happen in the plant and animal life there.
Saturday October 10, 2026
Resurrection of a Computer
At the beginning of September I wrote about trying to repair my computer, which over the summer went from having difficulties in booting to not booting at all. When I wrote that post I had decided the problem was the motherboard and had just shipped it off to the manufacturer for replacement under warranty. Two and a half weeks later the replacement shows up; a couple days later I put all the bits back together again which takes me several hours. I power up the system. It doesn’t boot. I check for obvious problems, like poorly seated connections, but nothing helps. The system still didn’t boot.
The reasonable inference at this point was that the problem is not the motherboard. But what was it? I was despondent. Well, try something. Maybe the CPU has failed. Yes, the CPU is still under warranty, so I wrote up the problem adding that replacing the motherboard didn’t help, and sent in the request to the CPU manufacturer. Kudos to the manufacturer AMD for turning around the request in a hurry. I put in the request a week ago Friday, got an approval over the weekend, shipped the CPU off on Monday (they provided a prepaid label for the shipping), and received the replacement yesterday. It was a lot easier to put the new CPU in than reassembling the system from the motherboard up, and it didn’t take long to test it. The computer booted.
I have no idea what would cause a CPU to give intermittent problems then finally stop working like it did. Especially mysterious was what happened on August 30th, when after a couple weeks of the system completely failing to boot it booted fine, and I was able to run the computer for several hours without a problem. But it never booted again. There are reports online of this particular CPU failing after a while when using this particular motherboard, so maybe some sort of unfortunate interaction between the CPU and the motherboard developed over time that led to the CPU failure. Anyway, it is very nice to have my main computer functioning again.
Friday October 9, 2026
Discoveries
Over the course of the past couple of months I’ve been delving back into the box of family genealogy, trying to find documents that prove a direct line from my maternal grandfather. But the box contains lots of things, many of which have been looked at many times without understanding their full significance.
Take this note from my grandmother to her cousin Henry, written some time in the 1970s. My German great-great-grandfather, about whom I know very little, is here declared to have been born in Hamburg and moved to St. Thomas in his twenties. He later moved to Baltimore and started a sugar processing business. My grandmother says it was bankrupted because of the civil war. He had married in Baltimore and he and his English-born wife moved north to Pennsylvania.
Family legends are often full of half-truths, myths and outright lies, whether through ignorance, snobbery or conscious deceit. What’s interesting to me here is that a) Adolph Ahrens was supposed to have been born in Hamburg, which I don’t think I knew, and b) he left Germany for the Caribbean instead of moving directly to Baltimore. Both of these things ought to be possible to prove with some determined digging.
Genealogy is all about provability… Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills goes into exhaustive detail about why. (For instance: the only “proof” I have of this grandmother’s birth date is an entry in the family bible, since birth certificates weren’t issued in Pennsylvania until 1906, eight years after her birth; this, plus the fact that she listed this date on every official document throughout her life. It isn’t really proof. It’s really only a series of strong, accumulated suggestions. But typos were and continue to be common even on important documentation such as a birth certificate, so even when you have one it’s not a guarantee of accuracy.)
Thursday October 8, 2026
Saving Science Slothfully
In May I wrote about attending a rally in support of California Senate Bill 895, which would put a bond measure on the California November 2026 ballot to create a California Science and Health Foundation, in some ways to be California’s version of NSF and NIH. The measure got through the state senate easily, but then ended getting tabled in the state assembly early in the summer. Despite California having a supermajority of Democrats in the legislature and a Democratic governor, there is nothing certain about the legislative process. The reporting was scant on what happened, but it seemed like the assembly speaker opted not to put the bill forth because there would be other bond measures on the November 2026 ballot they wanted to prioritize. I was quite disheartened by the news of the bill’s apparent failure.
But at the beginning of this week I was surprised to get an email about the governor signing the bill into law, with a $7.5 billion bond measure to appear on the March 2028 ballot which is the California presidential primary. (This was the very last bill Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law before his term expires at the end of the year; he did so from a high place, standing on top of the Golden Gate Bridge alongside the bill’s original sponsor, Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco.) Sacramento legislative machinations are a mystery to me, and I don’t know how the bill got resurrected. Anyway, California voters are going to decide on this measure, albeit sixteen months later than originally planned.
Wednesday October 7, 2026
Tuesday October 6, 2026
Defenestrations
Though I have been quite intrigued, I have never played any of the boardgames designed by Cole Wehrle, such as Pax Pamir, Root, and John Company. But the designer’s notes for his games have lead me to some interesting books, such as Return of a King by William Dalrymple and Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, so I trust his book recommendations. A few days ago on BlueSky, he mentioned that he was starting to learn to play Cuius Regio a new game on the Thirty Years War, and he was pairing it with reading the classic history on the war by C.V. Wedgwood. He writes: ‘ I’ve wanted to read this book for so long, and it does not disappoint. I can’t believe she was so young when she wrote it (late 20s!). ‘
Naturally, this got me to look for the book and I found a digital copy through the library. I am about a quarter of the way through it, sometime in 1621. The Thirty Years War got started in 1618 with the Defenestration of Prague, when an assembly of Bohemian Protestants threw a couple of Catholic regents and their secretary out a second floor window of a castle (they all survived). This event is more accurately termed the Third Defenestration of Prague; there were two earlier defenestrations in 1419 and 1483.
The Thirty Years War concluded in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia which is often cited as marking the origin of the nation-state system. There is much destruction ahead of me in the book.