Meeting scribbles

 In addition to being in the office 5 days per week, I am now required to have daily meetings to report on my progress. I stay sane by sketching. Thirty minutes to 2 hours of sketching per day sure feels good. I can almost tolerate working a day job this way.

dangerous tweets

More meetings, more sketches.

Bridges of Eggs from Peru to SF

Puente de Piedra, Lima, Peru. photo from creative commons.

In 1608, the architect Juan del Corral designed and built a bridge over the Rio Rimac, connecting Lima to the district of San Lazaro. The bridge is still standing today. This is cool just based on time itself. Cool that a bridge can be built of stone and still be standing, still be being traveled upon over 400 years later. What is even cooler is that the mortar for the bridge was mixed not with water, but with an estimated 10,000 egg whites. Not chicken eggs, sea bird eggs. People went out on cliffs and to islands, harvested ten thousand sea bird eggs with the intent of mixing mortar for a bridge. Though officially the Bridge of Stones (Puente de Piedra) it is sometimes referred to as the Bridge of Eggs.

In the 1840s & 50s, a man named Doc Robinson decided that the Farallones Islands, located 27 miles off of the coast of San Francisco, were the perfect spot to harvest bird eggs. San Francisco grew in leaps and bounds during the Gold Rush years - years in which eggs were scarce. Folks got to the golden coast either by taking a boat all of the way around South America, or overland. In both cases, any chickens would be eaten long before San Francisco showed on the horizon. Shortages lead to high prices. One chicken egg sold for $1 each - the equivalent of thirty dollars in 2019 money.

Doc Robinson and his hired men would take a small (less than 20 ft) boat across the choppy, shark-infested waters, to the Farallones. There are no beaches on all but one of the jagged rocks, just smaller rocks to haul the boat up on to. Then they would scale the cliffs to pull eggs from the nests of Common Murres, Urea aalge.

my quick sketch of Common Murres, both in and out of the water.

Goofy-looking, penguin-shaped birds, the Common Murre always seems to need to run across the surface of the water before their small wings achieve enough lift to pull them from the ocean waves. Their eggs are blue with yolks twice the size of chicken eggs - and also fiery red in color. The bird numbered in the hundreds of thousands before Robinson's enterprise led to the near-mythic San Francisco Egg Wars. Italian eggers headed out to the "Islands of the Dead" to cash in on the Egg Rush. Robinson's hired men held them off of the beach with guns. Men died, fortunes were made, and the legends became the stuff of comic books (literally - check out this out: https://sfnhs.com/2011/08/31/eggs-and-more/)

a pile of stolen eggs waiting to be loaded on the boat. Despite the fact that the rough seas caused the eggers to lose as much as half of their plunder during every trip back to the mainland, they kept at it.  Photo by Arthur Bolten.

It was not uncommon for eggers to fall to their death from the cliffs. Common Murre populations plummeted to less than 30K. The western faction of the Audubon Society was founded to help these sea footballs, pushing through a government mandate in 1881 prohibiting further egging on the islands. It still happened for years after. The Nature Conservancy estimates that murre populations only really began to recover in the last decades of the 20th century.

I keep trying to picture going to the equivalent of a diner in Gold Rush San Francisco and being served a plate of pink scrambled eggs. If Clark Gable & Jeanette MacDonald's 1936 film San Francisco (set during 1906) had been filmed in color, would anyone have gotten the egg color detail correct? A pink Hangtown Omelet* anyone? (*eggs, bacon & oysters).

References:
Bridge of Eggs https://hruk.biz/bridge-of-eggs-in-peru/
http://www.augnet.org/en/history/places/4205-ecuador-quito/
Gold Rush Satirist https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/Gold-Rush-satirist-impresario-and-Farallones-13509804.php 
High Egg Prices http://time.com/4149595/farallon-egg-wars/
Girabaldi and the Farallon Egg War http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/
San Francisco's Egg Basket http://faralloneggwar.blogspot.com/

Word of the day: ZALAMBDODONT

Za`lamb´do`dont

a.	1.	(Zool.) Of or pertaining to a tribe (Zalambdodonta) of Insectivora in which the molar teeth have but one V-shaped ridge.
n.	1.	One of the Zalambdodonta. The tenrec, solenodon, and golden moles are examples.

Tenrecs are the bomb. Why did I never learn about these as a kid? Punk rock hair, detachable spines, earthworm eating balls of adorableness - what's not to love? Seriously.

I came across a fact about tenrecs having 32 nipples (I can't find a source that corroborates this, though) and the next thing I know I'm reading scientific papers about their ultrasonic communication methods.  Turns out that the Lowland tenrec has 7-16 specialized spines on their lower back, with an underlying musculature that allows them to rub the spines together. It has been hypothesized that this is how they communicate about good foraging spots or the location of predators, but no one really knows. I love the fact that there are so many things we as humans still don't know about the world around us. 

References: 

Animal Diversity Web, Lowland Tenrec. Accessed 7/23/2018.  http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Hemicentetes_semispinosus/

Cal Photos, Hemicentetes semispinosus; Lowland Streaked Tenrec. Accessed 7/23/2018

https://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?enlarge=0024+3291+2008+0063

Endo, H., Koyabu, D., Kimura, J., Rakotondraparany, F., Matsui, A., Yonezawa, T., ... & Hasegawa, M. (2010). A quill vibrating mechanism for a sounding apparatus in the streaked tenrec (Hemicentetes semispinosus). Zoological science, 27(5), 427-432.

Webster's 1913 dictionary. Accessed 7/23/2018

http://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/zalambdodont

Library Fun Fact #2

In 1774, the Scottish physician, James Lind, then an officer in the British navy, conducted the first systematic study that proved that vitamin C cures scurvy. The navy then made barrels of lemon juice a mandatory item on all ships. By 1880, they placed 1.6 billion barrels on board. 

All of these lemons had to come from somewhere. Citrus is native to southeast Asia. It traveled trade routes, being cultivated in the Mediterranean climate. Lemons, which are a cultivar cross (citron x sour orange) were mostly grown on the island of Sicily in the late 1700's. Far enough from mainland Italy, Sicily was not directly affected by Italy's war with Napolean. Instead, they fell into political turmoil of their own, being mostly run by families in a feudal-type arrangement. 

Lemon growers often fell victim to neighboring families, who would sneak into their orchards at night and strip the trees. Growers built walls around their trees. They increased the height of the walls. They added rocks or glass shards on top of the walls. They had guard dogs. Even if they got this far, shipments to the warehouses were often robbed. Guards were hired. 

Then the family guards began to extort the farmers to provide lemon crop protection. If you didn't pay, your crop would disappear and you would be left with nothing. And *that* is where the Sicilian mafia began. Really.

When life gives you lemons, create your own mafia.

References

Dimico, Arcangelo, Alessia Isopi & Ola Olsson. (2017) Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons. Journal of Economic History, v.77(4).

Stone, Daniel. (2017) The Citrus Family Tree. National Geographic magazine, accessed online https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/02/explore-food-citrus-genetics/

Winter Retreat

One sketch and a bunch of photos from my recent work retreat. About 35 folks headed up to the Granlibakken resort near the west side of Lake Tahoe. The weather was amenable - not too cold, yet still, there was snow.  I hiked trails, read books and was social at breakfast. The drive was long. I listened to The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick.  I had a good time, but am glad to be home.

More photos below.

The two faces of spring.

It may not be spring where you are. February in NorthAmerica usually isn't thought of as spring. Here in the Bay Area, we have had many lovely days of 70' degree weather, which will probably lead to drought later on. Meanwhile, the jonquils are popping up in my yard, gifts from a former self. If you are like me and deal with depression, planting flower bulbs in the fall can help when the darkness descends to spite the weather. 

journal sketches to share

I have reached the end of another sketch journal. I always page through them before I place them on the shelf with the others. Here are some of my favorite pages from the last several months. Enjoy!

random sketches from another journal

It has been a hard couple of months to get in any sort of serious art work. I still try to sketch or doodle something everyday. Here are a few worth sharing.

random sketches

I begin another wonderful, hand-made sketchbook today (thanks, Anna!). Here are a few sketches from the last book worth sharing. Enjoy!

ok. this is from the sketchbook before last, but I couldn't resist. :)

pen pals who don't write back

My grandmother is almost 95. Arthritis keeps her from writing back. When I lack interesting tidbits to share about my children, she gets a quick sketch. 

Send me your address, and you too might get a hug in the mail. :)

visiting an Oakland landmark

Went with my girls to see the Oakland Ballet & the Oakland Symphony perform the Nutcracker at the Paramount Theatre. The theater is a fabulous example of art deco. Above are some rough sketches from the walls in in the lobby and the theater proper.

Memory sketches done during intermission. The set designers did a great job of carrying the art deco theme onto the stage. After a while I began to look, not so much at the dancers themselves, but the negative spaces  highlighted by their moves. 

no *@$^*% turkey, thanks

We continued with our no-turkey Turkey Day tradition of eating Dungeness Crab. By the time I thought to sketch, there wasn't much left. :) Thus, I turned my sketching skills to something less edible - 

We finished off the meal with pumpkin pie (from pumpkins I had slaughtered myself) and pecan pie. Yum!

Then today we had a lovely drive to Cow Girl Creamery in Point Reyes Station for a picnic of cheese, bread and fruit. The weather was lovely and though I drug my supplies everywhere, as the only driver, I didn't get much of a chance to sketch. I have a head full of pretty sights and a yen to paint in my studio, which is what a vacation is for if you ask me.