A Gentleman Naturalist.

My gentleman naturalist persona got a boost this week.

I've been designing a vest that will hold my compass, x-acto knife, fountain pen, and so on. But a vest is fitted and structured, and without a sewing machine or a pattern it is beyond me. But Casey passed along this awesome classy vest. Actually it is so classy and fits so poorly that I might have him try it on to see if a small alteration would make it wearable for him. If not, I will cut it all up and fill it with pockets and wear it everywhere and be the fanciest naturalist. 

I gathered these in Vermont. The green one is serpentine, I think the white one is quartz, and I don't know what the black one is so I have to hang up my naturalist hat. We thought it might be mica because it sparkles. I was thinking I could have a rock collection sorted by region, and then when I go places I could bring back a rock for my rock album. 

 At the San Francisco airport there is an exhibit about microscopes through the ages. I liked them since they were brass and lenses, but I was extremely excited to see the way these specimens were displayed. Each wooden strip is like a glass microscope slide except it's for opaque things. The sign said the specimens include dolphin scale, seeds, thistles, mosses, corals, and minerals. Wooden slides like that will be super easy to make the next time I have drill press access. I could gather specimens when I go letterboxing or traveling, and keep track of them in a little leather log book.

Marlboro Graduation

I went to Marlboro, VT, with my boyfriend's family for his graduation. We flew to the East Coast then drove to Vermont. Vermont is the nicest! 

 I went there for the first time in Fall and thought it was such a perfect fall place, with jack o lanterns and forests full of color changing trees. So I was surprised to see that it pulled off springtime beautifully. (In my part of the world we have rainy, dry and fresh, hot with intermittent hot spells, then dry and dusty. We have orange leaves in fall and snowflakes in winter because children cut them out of paper. So I am familiar with seasons in theory only.)

 Right away after the sweet graduation everyone had to move out of campus housing. This little guy turned up when Cottage 2 cleared out their freezer.

 There are sugar shacks all over. A sugar shack makes maple syrup out of maple sap. This one is in someone's yard and it works on the honor system.

We weren't close to this Norman Rockwell Exhibition/Sugar Shack (and our days were very packed) so we didn't go, but I imagine it is sweet as anything. 

I took this little narwhal along. He's really at home anywhere.

I don't have a particular reason to go to Vermont again, since Casey has moved back to California (yay!!) but it is very green and comfortable and lovely.

Longitude

I spent 8 or 10 or 15 hours listening to the audiobook Longitude, and most of that was how much trying to make a clock that worked at sea consumed John Harrison's life. All of this made me itch to take advantage of centuries of development and buy a practically free, practically perfect pocket watch. It takes two clocks to work out longitude. Here is what you do: Keep one set to the time at the Prime Meridian, where it is 0* and they use Greenwich Mean Time. Then, at local noon, set the other clock. After you subtract GMT from local time and divide by twenty-four, multiply your result by 360* and you are all done! The only thing is, Greenwich uses Mean Time, averaging all the noons in a year, and we are using solar time directly. There's an Equation of Time for that, but I haven't learned it. I made a little reference card for myself and put it into the locket watch.


*You can multiply by 15 but then remembering that the sun takes 24 hours to visit 360* of Earth wouldn't help you remember how to calculate longitude.

Fresh Hindsight Insights

This week I had an impression from my youth invalidated, and a different impression validated. It's funny that it happened in a row like that. 

Friday was glorious, so I took an unscheduled half-day and went for a bike ride. And it was awesome. I went to a part of the marina that I didn't know was there, and it was sunny and breezy and gorgeous. And since I'm living in the town I hated growing up in, I was confused. Back then I had a bike and everything, but I just didn't want to bike around my boring, dumb town. And it turns out I was the boring one? I am glad I didn't know that; I was having a hard enough time thinking I was too interesting and special for this place. 

Today I resumed my ice skating lessons after an 18 year hiatus. I picked out a level from the chart on the Oakland Ice Center website. I decided I am a Beginner 3, because I can't do backwards crossovers. I think that chart might apply to children's lessons only or else I am just bad at self assessment because the beginner's class wasn't for people who are comfortable on skates. Luckily, the intermediate class is at the same time and I fit in fine in that one, except that I was dressed like a child. Not like the children learning to speed-skate in pink and black polar fleece who shared the rink with us, but like I dressed when I was first in ice skating lessons, before my Mom bought me a heap of beautiful leotards: short ruffled plaid skirt over leggings, short sleeved sweater, long green-and-white mittens. Ice-skating clothes. 

I knew how to approximate everything we did today, which is good because I basically couldn't understand what the instructor wanted me to do. Follow something, inside edge, don't push with toe, thighs together, arms square, drive with the shoulders, bilateral something. It was amazing, just how I remember lessons (of all sorts) when I was young. I don't know what the instructor wants or why, and there is no time to play around until I get the hang of things. It was pretty validating to realize that I wasn't unmotivatedly playing around and not focusing when I was in all sorts of lessons- learning to do body things in a group lesson is hard. 

Swimming @14: stretch as long as I can, something something flip turns, push myself, no breathing between designated breaths, something about knees.

Cello @13: pronation, rock on fingertip, stay on the pads of my fingers, f# is third finger but b is second finger, from now on I will practice my scales. 

Gymnastics @5: I for sure don't have to listen to a woman who is 1/4 as stretchy as I am. 

Ballet @4: An enormous mirror is exactly what I need now that I've got all dressed up in pink sparkles; these people don't mess around. 

March Resolution- Cello

When I set resolutions this year, I decided that in March I would Go On An Adventure. But then, I didn't want to, so I swapped with the month whose resolution is Play Cello For 30 Hours. So far, I have got 1/60 of that done, and March is 1/3 over. 

Stringtown, OK, sent my postcard back in a special envelope, probably so their postmark wouldn't get marked over at the Tulsa sorting plant.

I started playing cello in my first year of middle school, but I just learned to distinguish notes last summer. It's hard to stay motivated since my playing sounds really bad. Cello is my favorite instrument, though, and mine glows in the sun. Once I live somewhere permanently and have a consistent budget, I will start taking lessons again.

The Bays

The last year that I lived in Santa Cruz, I was preemptively sad about leaving the ocean. I took a rowing class in the harbor, I took a single surfing lesson, and I went swimming/wading in the ocean every single day for five months. Sometimes I brought my camera and took pictures of the sand, of my legs in the sand, of Monterey, even though I already had identical pictures, just because I felt so lucky to be there. 

And moving away was hard. But I went back this weekend, and I found that I didn't like the traffic and the shops and the population very much. I went to the beach closest to my old house, and ran into my old housemates, which was lovely. I wanted to visit a particular sea cave that probably holds fond memories for every couple in Santa Cruz, but at 5pm yesterday it was only accessible by swimming or by climbing sheer wet stone, so I just sat on the rocks next to it and watched the water. I felt sad that I live so far from the Monterey Bay, but not as sad as I anticipated. 

When I got home, I worried that I might miss the San Francisco Bay someday, so I set out to enjoy it. I didn't enjoy growing up here, but that's not Alameda's fault. It really is pretty. I drove out to the naval base for letterboxing at sunset, and it was really nice. 

I didn't find the letterbox. I did find a huge amount of plastic trash that looked interesting, but it was getting dark and I was pretty far from my car so I didn't investigate it properly.

Little Triumphs

I had a lot of little triumphs today.
1. I sent off my National Parks Service internship application a day early. And, it made me sound really competent and engaged, and I made it out of true things. I have indeed studied Urban Planning and Contemporary Architecture, fixed all sorts of things, and made stained glass windows. Well, one stained glass window. I always forget about my accomplishments after they're a few years back, as though they happened to someone else, and only this week's accomplishments can be attributed to me.
2. I found an old, undelivered piece of mail at work. I always hope this will happen, but the USPS is really good. Right now I am assigned to get all this grime out from the crevices of the mail sorting cases. A mail sorting case is like a metal desk with a metal bookcase on top, and all of the shelves are subdivided with metal tabs, like an alphabetizer. Cases are the worst to clean because there are like 500 of them, so once you've got the last one cleaned you have to go back to the first one. Except no one has been doing that, because the undelivered piece of mail was from 2008.
3. I thought I missed my chance to start my March Resolution on the first day of March, but I noticed  the date at 11:25pm and just got started. The resolution is to play my cello for 30 hours, and so far I've tracked down some sheet music and made the postcard that will get postmarked in Stringtown, OK.
4. I sold a piece of my art for the first time. It was $4 shipped. Only one person viewed it (on etsy) and that person bought it. This is also the only piece of my art that I've ever offered for sale.
5. Reading a website about triathlon training, I learned that runner's feet can't always curl past a straight line from their shin, whereas swimmer's feet can. Runners who want to be triathletes have to stretch their stiff ankles really slowly over time if they want to have good swimming form. I never run and my feet can curl right up. So, without even doing anything I got to be proud of a new thing.

Yesterday I put a coat of paint on my car, and then it rained and rained. But the paint looks great^, and was totally fine. So, that was more "something dumb that I did that didn't have any consequences" than "a small triumph" but I was glad anyway.

^Not objectively great- great like metallic, oil based enamel applied to a giant surface with a tiny paintbrush.