anthropometaphors

I arrived home from work yesterday to find a box from Amazon on the porch.  Inside was a layer of newfangled bubble wrap (the kind made of a several large areas inflated with air, not the kind with an expanse of little pustules full of air, ripe for the popping).  Beneath the bubble wrap was a gift wrapped in cheerful yellow paper with a wide white ribbon around the middle.

I was intrigued.

Having no idea what the package was, I picked it up and thoroughly inspected its shape, heft and thing-ness.  I concluded it was likely a book, but I had no idea which one.  Returning to the wrapping, I found a small card; a small blank card.  It was clearly a present, so I decided to open it.

It was indeed a book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton.  I considered the book.  As I had just arrived home from work, I was tuckered out and wanted nothing else than a glass of water and a nap.  Instead, I picked up the book-present and brought it with me as I climbed beneath the down comforter.  Hiding amid white pillows and fluff, I read the first chapter.  What I encountered was a homage to those invisible warriors who transport goods around the world to feed our whims and hungers.  Every other page held a photograph — brutal, real and entwined with the chapter’s theme of cargo shipping.  The experience was akin to reading exceptional pieces in Harper’s or Granta, or perhaps an eloquently crafted graphic novel.

Cargo ships (Richard Baker, 2008)

I read most of the second chapter, before sleep won me over and I was lost in another world entirely.

Francoa ramosa (bridal wreath)

Category: Perennial

Family: Saxifragaceae (Saxifrages)

Origin: Chile (South America)

Evergreen: Yes

Flower Color: White or pink

Bloom time: Summer

Height: 2-3 feet

Width: 1-2 feet

Exposure: Cool Sun/Light Shade

Irrigation: Medium Water Needs

Winter Hardiness: 20-25° F

Notes: This is an evergreen, herbaceous, clumping (1-2 feet across), spreading perennial which produces large basal leaves and multi-branched flowering stalks (3-5 feet tall) of white or pink flowers in summer. The one foot long leaves are fiddle-shaped with deep lobes and slightly sticky to the touch. Plant in part day sun (takes full coastal) to light shade in warm location in well-draining soil and give average watering.

Blushing bloom of unknown species

I’ll ping Julie Gordon and see if she can name the second plant.  There are a few of them in the yard and I’d love to know more about the massive blooms it creates.

The hubs pulled out the new power drill yesterday, and installed a new mailbox and numbers for the house.  All went well;  the decaying wooden box that was serving as a mail box is now off duty, and our house is numbered for the first time since the front gate went down in July.  Luckily, our postal carrier is not easily fooled.  We can take down our home numbers, move our mailbox across the yard, and then buy a different mailbox and mount it on the side of the house…and we’ll still get our mail.

In no particular order I’ve accomplished the following:

• Napped.
• Designated a bucket for “gray water” collection. Any water that would normally run down the drain is now being collected in a special bucket. For example: the water run down the drain as temperature heats up for showers or washing dishes, pre-soap. At the end of each day, I take the bucket outside and water my (non-edible) plants.
• Read a book: The Pharmacist’s Mate by Amy Fusselman. A most satisfying McSweeney’s selection from 2001, TPM is a memoir written in the time following the death of Fusselman’s father.
• Created a workshop en plein air. Within the confines of a somewhat enclosed patio I’ve placed a pair of benches. The current configuration allows one surface to be used for repotting and other gardening tasks, while the second is set up for painting and finishing furniture.
• Transplanted the dozen (or so) ferns from the side yard into containers in the back yard. The containers have been topped off with river rocks to keep Winslow “Dirtmouth” Gray from digging up the fragrant earth.
• Napped.
• Painted a holder for the gardening hose that’s been relegated to a pile on the ground for the past year. Next up: installation!
• Spent some QT in the great outdoors that is my backyard, which included multiple bird sightings and hearing the racket that is a pair of crows mating in the redwood overhead.
• Hopped around the internet a bit. Found Dutch photographer Peter Funch’s work (via BoingBoing); screamed with appreciation for his thematically composited photos. For example:

Following Followers, Peter Funch

London’s Science Museum has a new multimedia site called Brought to Life.  I took a fancy to a gallery of retired medical devices that I can only describe as bizarre.

For example, spirit bubbles!

Although sometimes used in scientific research, historically they were used mainly to test the alcohol content of spirits such as gin, whisky, rum or brandy.

Numbers 22 and 23, for instance, would be used to test the proof of a double whisky; if it was the correct proof, the glass ball would sink to the bottom.

Set of 13 spirit bubbles, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1801-1900

Or consider the Jugum penis:

“…intended as a treatment for “nocturnal incontinence” and to prevent masturbation. It was designed to deter nighttime emissions by causing enough pain to waken the sleeper if an erection threatened.”

Jugum penis, United Kingdom, 1880-1920

Ouch.

More nature photography awards!

This time the competition is owned jointly by Bird Watching magazine and Warehouse Express.  Awards were given to photographs in the following  8 categories: Birds in Britain, Birds of the World, Birds in Flight, Bird Behaviour, Birds in the Landscape, Amateur & Amateur Digiscoping, 18s & Under (New), and Best Portfolio.

Below are my two favorites:

Whooper swan by Mart Smit, Netherlands (Overall Winner)

Black Woodpecker by Marcus Varesvuo, Finland (Winner of the Birds in Flight category)

If my mood over the past few days were an image, it would look like this guy:

To try to put it into words: What adjectives do you think of when you see this picture?

I lost my cell phone at the dog park over my winter stay-cation.  Too bad, so sad.  The phone was pretty crummy all around, except that it had my entire phone list inside.

As a replacement I got an iPhone.  I wonder how I ever survived without one!  It has a few flaws, sure.  But the functionality far outweighs any drawbacks, IMHO.  I have web access to my work email and calendar so I no longer have to lug around the work Treo.  I can browse Etsy while waiting in the pharmacy or find restaurants on Yelp while in the car (as a passenger, of course).

The most fun is with the camera!  The pictures are decent and can be emailed directly to flickr, which make taking snapshots loads of fun.  Gone are the days of transferring image files from camera to computer to flickr.  Here are a few live action shots (taken minutes ago) of Winslow hunting her cat stuffed animal:

Action shot: Winslow vs Linus

Linus, defeated

Winslow (and puppy kongs)

I’m happy to have such a delightful companion tugging me outside each morning for a brisk jaunt through our hood.  Part of the fun is our regular walk to the neighborhood coffeehouse/dog rendezvous.  Winslow is quickly becoming dog- and people-socialized.  Children find her just as exciting as she finds them.  Adults smile at her goofy charm.  Dogs sniff her timid frame intensely; she’s just learned she is allowed to sniff back, which has changed the dynamic considerably.  Still cautious, Winslow is always on the lookout for a friend to chase and run with.

After I’ve coffee’d up, we walk a bit further to a nearby park.  While on the small side, the park has just enough grass to keep up with her eager legs as she runs wide circles and speeds ecstatically along the straightaway.  For now her exercise consists of on-leash walking and brief amounts off-leash running at the park.  When she’s older — and her joints fully formed — we’ll start running together.  I’m really looking forward to it!

The fam went out on the town today to take advantage of Boxing Day sales in Hayes Valley.  Pup and I stayed in the green meeting dogs and neighbors; Winslow was fantastically polite thanks to the extra run she had this morning.

A tired dog is indeed a happy dog.

A girl and her kongs

As an undergrad at Cal, I worked part-time in the Essig Museum of Entomology.  The work was of the grunt variety: counting and pinning specimens or topping off ethanol in the jars of preserved soft-tissue specimens.

I spent many stiflingly hot summer days in the basement of the museum — a narrow, circular room lined with hundreds of specimen jars — doing the latter.  The close quarters, summer heat and volatile organics used as preservative left me nauseated and light-headed.  True to my Process Development nature, I’d soon devised a procedure to minimize the amount of time a jar was left open, exposing me to fumes.  Despite my technique and the limited amount of time I’d let myself work in the basement, I’d often leave work with a painful headache, reeking of tissue preservative.  To this day a whiff of formalin or ethanol brings to mind images of partially decayed limbs floating about in murky liquid.

When out of the basement, I had the opportunity to meet several graduate and post-doctoral researchers using the museum as a resource for their work.  One afternoon, I was pinning bugs (Hemiptera, the “true bugs”) beneath a dissecting scope, alongside a post-doc.  Tedius work inspires conversation, and we got around to talking about what we want to be when we grow up.  The post-doc admitted he chose entomology as a field because it allowed him to perform “interesting” population and behavioral research without sacrificing vertebrate animals.  He wasn’t the last entomologist to tell me this.

All this came to mind when I saw the collection of animals in formalin at hemmy.net.

Three-toed sloth (Bradypus linnaeus)

Flying squirrel (Sciuropterus volucella)

Based on Ben Pearce’s RETRO stream on flickr, it seems the 1970s generated a lot of NSFW content (turn SafeSearch off).  The collection is chock-full of “pre-feminist” images.  Exercise-mania (and the requisite flashy workout fashion) seems to have been all the rage.  Speaking of which: