dioramas

A real treat this afternoon.  Our sessions were in a room in the Natural History Museum, which includes this 1914 cyclorama of Laysan Island - one of the north Hawai'ian islands - which resulted from a university expedition there in 1911 - one of the first cycloramic bird displays in the US.  And there were cases and cases of mammals and other birds in their habitats, mostly from the very late 1920s and the 1930s, so far as I can tell from the Museum's website.

Note the very fine dandelion in with the buffalo.

I also particularly liked agricultural Iowa in 1880.

Indeed, all United States habitats were here ...

 

on the farm

Aren't these amazing huge cabbages?!  After a very academic morning, of the kind that reminded me why I love this profession (ideas! people!), off we went to Johnson County Poor Farm, just outside Iowa City.  This - reaching back to 1855 - was an asylum for the unhoused, and for those with mental disabilities, until 1988, growing their own food - up to 70 people were residents here at one time.

But now, the farm is a community-led space (space? 160 acres!), growing all kinds of things; encouraging people to become vegetable farmers; growing food for food banks and schools and farmers markets, and most wonderfully of all, perhaps, giving opportunities to local immigrants to grow their familiar foodstuffs, and practice familiar methods of cultivation - I wish we've overlapped with one of their markets.

Here we have okra - I had no idea it had such beautiful flowers -

and birdfeeder gourds.

And we were set to work!  I was part of the tomato patch crew, taking down twine and pulling up stakes and getting the patch ready for autumn;

I could have opted to prepare garlic that had been dried, ready for planting.

We finished up in the cow shed - a pioneering cowshed in its time - admiring the fibreglass cow.  This reminded me very strongly of - maybe 2003? - when I went on a four and a half day Rutgers tour of New Jersey for new faculty, which included (among many other wonders) a dairy farm, with very live cows... 

Also, so far as my career as an agricultural laborer goes, I have a blister from cutting tomato twine.

 

wallpaper

Quite an eyeful, here in the Graduate Hotel in Iowa City - my bathroom, and the hallway - from which one can tell that yes, I'm in the agricultural mid-west.   It's Vcologies time - my favorite workshop/mini-conference.  

There must have been some reason why I thought that Des Moines was the best airport for Iowa City.  It certainly wasn't the directions given by our host ... On the other hand, I did come on a direct flight from LAX, and I couldn't have forecast that I'd be greeted by an apocalyptic deluge that made driving a rental car down I-80 for a couple of hours less than a load of fun.  The wallpaper cheered me up!

 

hydration

whatever was wrong with me the other week (the last attempt to solve the puzzle, which is the peculiarly itch-making heart monitor that I've worn for the last seven days, will be mailed off tomorrow), I remain convinced that dehydration had something to do with it.  So, showing that I've internalized that lesson, this is me sitting at the bar in the University Club in the late afternoon as I wait to see whether the person I'm meeting will lead me astray from my puritanical choice ...

 

color for dinner

Dinner was ... bright (tomatoes, avo, onion, cottage cheese, herbs from the garden, grapes, and my latest serious addiction, chili crunch).  There may be few meals that are not improved by chili crunch.

 

Wil E., hunting

No, this isn't in a zoo - it's just through the fence at the Silver Lake reservoir.  There have been a lot of coyotes around recently - bold, fit ones.  There was one in our yard yesterday, just under my study window - probably saw the Dodgers game was on TV and dropped round to check out the score, watched with complete fascination by Moth and Gramsci.  There was one heading up someone's front path on Griffith Park Boulevard this morning.  And then this guy, who - completely unconcerned about passing humans, dogs, etc. - was doing a repeated pounce and dig on ... Gophers? Moles?  (do we have moles?) Rats?  something underground that burrows, anyway, and he looked very indignant that he didn't come up with a tasty breakfast.  I very much approve of this type of rodent control: he was decidedly at home.

 

rug rearrangement

One of Gramsci's many hobbies is burrowing under rugs.  Often he does this in search of his own tail: he can hunt that pretty grey and black appendage endlessly, surprise it, pounce on it - and then whisk it away and put it back into play.  It's a game of fort/da, without having to let go of the object at any point.

But he was up to something else this morning.  Here, he looks more in motion than he actually was: he rested his head against the rug he'd turned over for some time, in a way that made me suspect that this comfort-loving cat was constructing his own furniture for lounging on.