So long, old friend

It is with a heavy heart that I report the untimely passing of my dearest desktop companion, Emilio the Goldfish.

Originally intended as a feeder fish, Emilio was rescued by my former manager and presented to me on my 27th birthday. Unlike all but the rarest members of the animal kingdom, Emilio exuded an unmistakable lust for life. The impact of his raw, cheerful energy was felt far beyond his small fishbowl. He was a favorite about the office, his excellent swimming abilities and bubble blowing tricks being remarked on by anyone who passed by his corner of the desk.

Emilio enjoyed walks and scenic car rides as well as the occasional shopping excursion. Ever the good sport about having his tank cleaned and water refreshed, he took pleasure in his treat of a few extra fish flakes following a good rinsing. Emilio appreciated the simple things in life like his realistic aquarium plant, the castle drawn on the side of his tank, and the satisfaction of good company.

A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Emilio's condition declined rapidly following a long and somewhat stressful roadtrip to Los Angeles. He died of a broken heart after being separated from his lifelong companion. He is survived and dearly missed by his caretaker and close friend, me.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Emilio was hands down the world's best ever goldfish. I am glad we were able to share what brief time we had. I will remember you fondly, my ichthyian friend.

Quickly

Arrangements have been made to meet up at the USDA the Wednesday after T-giving. Pleased about that.

Buttermilk biscuits with greens and corn-cherry scones have been baked, potato-sunchoke-nettle soup and a new batch of vegetable broth have been made, and rice is on for tonight's thai basil eggplant with tofu.

I was rejected by the Red Cross for having too little iron on Thursday. I'm usually close, but I've always squeaked by in the past. This time I was way off, so I took it as a sign that I should indeed take my bus buddy up on his suggestion that we go out for sushi after class since I'd been wanting raw salmon and he was wanting to break his 8 year vegan fast with fish. We did well for ourselves. I have four weeks to pump enough iron into my blood to make a pint of it desirable to the Red Cross, which will probably mean increased consumption of meat or at least fish.

Looking forward to socal for Thanksgiving, which we're hosting this year. I'm in charge of the requisite Swedish Coffee Cake, and may take on mashed potatoes and one version of cranberry sauce, since my mother insists that there be two.

With any luck, next week will also fit a quick visit to John's, the viewing of The Fantastic Mr. Fox (!!!), a family game of pick up soccer, and a date with Maggie to our 10 year hs reunion. Good things, all.

Feeling a bitty bit overwhelmed by all the things that I have to do, should do, and would like to do, though.

On a roll

Awesome biotech lecture in my Plant Disease class this morning, which would have been great on its own (we talked about the tradeoffs of genetic engineering) but the woman who gave it is a researcher with the USDA, which it turns out has a giant field station in Albany. Determined to get the absolute most of this idyllic return to studenthood, I stayed a bit after class to chat her up, and she's totally down to hook me up. She says the USDA totally takes lab volunteers and may even have spots for summer internships With Stipends that I may even be eligible for as a full time student. I am to email her to one day have lunch with her and my soils prof (her husband) to talk about how to get into careers in science!

I am feeling excited about science and the future! Woohoo!

Academic bliss

We did our arboriculture presentation (read: skit) today during which I had four costume changes in about 75 seconds, one group member shuffled around in a bucket as a tree waiting to be planted and another girl dressed up like our prof, all the way down to her rattail braid. And can I just say, the class Ate It Up.

The prof wants us to go on tour and is going to mail us dates of the next couple San Francisco Urban Forestry Council meetings to see if we can get ourselves on the agenda. It could be public humiliation, but I'm down!

And not only that. I ran into my soils prof this morning, and he stopped me to say that I got the best grade on our last test. Booyah! He asked what my background was in, and I gave my proudest, Celtic Studies and Linguistics. Thank you, he said. My test was a joy to read.

Needless to say, I'm feeling a needed smidgeon puffed up. I even biked the ten miles home after class without feeling resentful about the bus pass fiasco.

So, thank you to the forces that timed things just so. I needed a lift.

Were you aware of it? vol. 23: The Knobcone Pine

Chapter VIII of John Muir's The Mountains of California runs you through the trees that make up the forests of, well, the mountains of California. To my untrained eye, the little black and white line drawings of the various tree genera and species may as well have been identical. Or, rather, all but one, this so-called Knobcone Pine.

John Muir has this to say about them:

Pinus Tuberculata
This curious little pine is found at an elevation of from 1500 to 3000 feet, growing in close, willowy groves. It is exceedingly slender and graceful in habit, although trees that chance to stand alone outside the groves sweep forth long, curved branches, producing a striking contrast to the ordinary grove form. The foliage is of the same peculiar gray-gren color as that of the Nut Pine, and is worn about as loosely, so that the body of the tree is scarcely obscured by it.

At the age of seen or eight years it begins to bear cones, not on branches, but on the main axis, and, as they never fall off, the trunk is soon picturesquely dotted with them. The branches also become fruitful after they attain sufficient size. The average size of the older trees is about thirty or forty feet in height, and twelve to fourteen inches in diameter. The cones are about four inches long, exceedingly hard, and covered with a sort of silicious varnish and gum, rendering them impervious to moisture, evidently with a view to the careful preservation of the seeds. [...]

The Grove Form and the Isolated Form (Pinus Tuberculata)
It is so little known [...] that it can hardly be said to have a common name. Most mountaineers refer to it as 'that queer little pine-tree covered all over with burs.' In my studies of this species I found a very interesting and significant group of facts, whose relations will be seen almost as soon as stated:

1st. All the trees in the groves I examined, however unequal in size, are all of the same age.
2d. Those groves are all planted on dry hillsides covered with chaparral, and therefore are liable to be swept by fire.
3d. There are no seedlings or saplings in or about the living groves, but there is always a fine, hopeful crop springing up on the ground once occupied by any grove that has been destroyed by the burning of the chaparral.
4th. The cones never fall off and never discharge their seeds until the tree or branch to which they belong dies. [...]

Needless to say, I was skeptical. This all sounds a little too fantastical to be true, something of a chimera of the plant kingdom. Except! We were clearing away a giant pile of Black Acacia logs from the base of an old Coast Live Oak, and I found this log about a foot in diameter With Pinecones Stuck Right To It. It was like chancing upon a unicorn horn, I swear to you.

And then! I was wrapping things up at the Botanical Garden the other week, having potted a bunch of vine cuttings, and on my way back to the N Judah, there appears from nowhere an Entire Tree with pine cones growing straight out of the trunk. And not only that, I found another one in one of the vegetable beds at school when we pulled out the sunchokes. I am a believer! However, I have done you the service of not providing any photographic evidence to encourage your skepticism and heighten the drama of your personal discovery. You are welcome.

The thirteenth, a bad luck day, on Friday

Boo to Friday the 13th.

It seems to have killed my phone, my bus pass, and my bicycle.

I can fix my flat tire, but still. Enough is enough!

Art crush

I discovered Mark Hearld wandering around Moe's this afternoon, and oh my god this man is amazing. I may even like him as much as Bernard Buffet.

Some of these kind of remind me of Nikki McClure, except better and with more feeling. No offense to Nikki McClure. I do like her stuff too, but I seem to have a predilection for block printing.

This is what printmaking should be.

Pigeons Park
White Hart
Starling on the Shore
Sea Change

Pheasant

I love the way he's able to take artistic liberty, putting his character into the prints, while being true to the essence of each animal. And, of course the sharpness inherent in block prints.

St Jude's even prints fabric of his Doveflight design.

Doveflight
Doveflight detail

Is he not amazing? I wonder to myself why decent prints like this are so hard to find at fabric stores. ...And then I checked the price tag -- £44.00 per metre. Ouch.

Still, I am inspired. Seeing these makes me want to turn my favorite plants into prints like this. And then learn how to screenprint.

Thank you, M. Hearld for getting the creative juices flowing!

Design #1

This is the first shirt I recall doing without a pattern. I've altered things before, but I believe this was the first thing I started completely from scratch. I've got to say I'm still pretty pleased with it.


I'd done a lot of button down shirts and wanted to try something with a slanted opening, mainly to see if I could figure out how to do it. The rest of the design sort of grew out of the white grid fabric, which I reincarnated from its former life as a sheet. I love working with sheets, by the way. They've got great thread count and last so much longer than standard cotton.

<shoulder detail

darts

hem

There's also a red side zip, which you can kind of see in the shoulder pic, that I added because I wasn't sure how tight it'd be to get over my head. It turns out I don't need it, but I like it for the color accent. Same thing with the contrast thread. Always a fan of functional things doubling as decoration.

Sweet potato & parmesan polenta

After a girl in my permaculture class was moaning over some sweet potato-parmesan focaccia she got at Arizmendi the other day, I was inspired to make an attempt at reproducing the flavor she was describing myself. I thought I'd try it with polenta in my attempt to find the few things I'm willing to by nearly pre-made from the store. Those tubes of polenta are one of them.

I added in tomato because I thought a little sauciness to it would be nice. The red onions give it a nice sweetness too, especially when they get crispy in the oven. Here's what I came up with:

Sweet potato & parmesean polenta

for this you will need:
one tube polenta
sweet potato
parmesean
red onion (optional)
tomato (optional)

suggested instruction:
Grease a baking sheet and preheat the oven to 350ºF.*
Slice polenta 1/4" thick and lay out flat on baking sheet.
Slice sweet potato and red onion thinly and lay out generously on polenta.
Slice tomato about 1/8" thick and lay out on polenta.
Cover generously with parmesean.
Bake for 30ish minutes, until the sweet potatoes are soft, the tomatoes are saucy and the cheese has melted.
Let it cool for a bit so you don't burn yourself and enjoy.

*Pyrex takes too long to heat and keeps the polenta moist. I like it better drier on the baking sheet. It also cooks faster.

Physical labour making its mark

It's not just the cuts that appear on my hands from nowhere. Or the giant slice in my knuckle from bamboo cutting in the rain during class.

Bamboo construction is rad, by the way. This exciting ravine in my knuckle took me out of commission before we polished things off, but I am highly anticipating the arch we are building. And the best part is that I think, given a pile of bamboo, a pruning saw, a short machete-type knife and a rubber mallet, I might just be able to recreate one on my own.

But, dude. I was wearing a tank top as I brushed my teeth in front of the bathroom mirror the other day, and it would appear that all this mattock swinging and terrace shoveling is showing itself as upper body strength. I can almost see muscles in my arms and shoulders, which is cool, but doesn't feel very womanly.

Tips for constructing with bamboo
- Make your cuts near a node for added strength when possible.
- Fill nodes at joints with concrete for added strength.
- Twist the bamboo towards you as you saw through it. Pruning handsaws cut on the pull (not the push), so keeping the bottom edge of the blade near the handle in a constant position (where the tip moves through new wood) helps make smooth cuts without a little lip at the end.
- When cutting lengthwise, you don't actually need a sharp knife. Any thin, longish knife and a rubber mallet for hammering it past nodes will do since the crack always originates a few inches below your blade. (Though a sharp knife is handy for trimming edges down to size after the initial long cuts have been made).
- When weaving bamboo, make strips as uniform in size and as flat as possible. 3/4" is a good width, 1/4" is a good thickness.
- When anchoring constructions with steel rods (or whatever else), lift bamboo off the ground with a rock so that soil microorganism don't rot it out.

Ruffles

I am really dying to get back into designing and sewing clothes. People seem to like the few things I've made in the past and an enterprising classmate was convinced I should be hawking my wares at Art Murmur. He even offered to help stitch a few up.

Impractical as it may be, given my current dirt bathing lifestyle, I want to make dresses. Shirts too, but there are a couple of dresses that have been floating around in my head for ages now. One looks not unlike this:

photo by Garance Doré
But with a different neck line. I'm still into the look of off-white on black. Sharp blacks can get really harsh, and I like the way a little detail like these ruffles can soften it.

photo by Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist
More ruffles here. I like the loose fold-over method on these. There's really no need to make them perfectly neat and aligned when you'll just be bunching them up anyway.

I really should get a sewing machine I know how to use. Or take either of the machines in my closet up the street to the shop to have them checked out (and explained to me). If only every day had 25 hours.

Were you aware of it? vol. 22: Back from the dead

As heard on Fresh Air Monday October 12, 2009

DAVE DAVIES, host: Well, Sanjay Gupta, welcome to FRESH AIR. I thought we'd begin with this remarkable story that you tell early in the book of this Norwegian skier who takes a plunge in the mountains and gets trapped in freezing water for something like two hours and manages somehow to recover. How?

Dr. SANJAY GUPTA (Associate Chief of Neurosurgery, Grady Memorial Hospital; Author, "Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds"): It is a remarkable story, even for someone like me who's been studying this for a couple of years, who's had the opportunity to travel around the world and talk to the foremost researchers in hypothermia, in extreme survival. This story is sort of the pinnacle of even that. This was a woman who has, I guess, the dubious honor of being the coldest-ever human being who subsequently went on to live. This is a woman who was declared dead in a hospital in Tromso, Norway, and now is a practicing physician at that same hospital.

She was found after she fell into a stream, a sort of frozen stream on a very cold place, and this is Tromso, Norway, which is north of the Arctic Circle in one of the northern-more points of Norway. What we know now is that she struggled for around 30 minutes or so. She was probably getting pockets of air, which is why she could last that long. And then she just stopped, and by the time they got her out of that frozen stream, she was dead. She had no spontaneous respiration. She had no spontaneous heartbeat. She had no blood pressure. Her pupils were dilated, indicating that her brain had become swollen. She was dead, and it was at this point that I think that a critical decision was made. The decision was to go ahead and leave her cold. The idea was that this cold could somehow be protective. It could somehow stimulate an almost hibernation-like reflex in the body. We know that there was no oxygen traveling through the body, but because she was cold, the body wasn't really demanding oxygen, either.

DAVIES: How cold was she? How cold was her body?

Dr. GUPTA: She was 13.7 degrees Celsius, so right around 55 degrees or so. And again, that's the coldest recorded temperature of someone actually surviving, someone surviving.

DAVIES: And how long did they decide to leave her in this hypothermic state?

Dr. GUPTA: Several hours. They did not warm her up at the scene, which is what often happens, even with blankets, and then warm saline and things like that. And they did not warm her up right away when she finally got to the hospital. They waited a few hours and then slowly, very slowly started to re-warm her using these temperature gradients, so just a few degrees at a time.

DAVIES: And what happened?

Dr. GUPTA: What happened is that, you know, they got her in there, and they realized that, you know, she really had no heartbeat. And sometimes you can't tell in the field, you know, it's tough to check a pulse, but now they have - they're doing an echocardiogram, directly looking at her heart, and she really has no heartbeat. So now they're very concerned, and they say we're going to slowly start to re-warm her, and we're also not going to give her any extra IV fluids.

One thing they learned is that when you start to go into this hibernation-like state from cold, from hypothermia, all your blood vessels become very leaky. They just leak fluid. So if you give a lot of fluid, that fluid starts to leak, and if it leaks into the brain or into the lungs, that can cause death.

So they gave no fluids, slowly re-warmed her, and then there was just this great moment where all of the sudden the heart, which was doing nothing - you had true, what's known asystole, that flat line on EKG, and all of a sudden it started to come back. And it was a magical moment as they described it to me when I was visiting them in Tromso, but I think they were still concerned that her brain had gone for too long without oxygen. How could the body tolerate this? But as I said, you know, she slowly recovered. At first, she was paralyzed, almost, in her entire body from lack of oxygen to her brain, but over a period of time, she continued to recover, finished her medical school, which she was a medical student at the time, and is now a doctor in that same hospital.