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So I seem to have left the jump drive that has the most current work on it at Gloria's house. Do I:

-- drive out to Gloria's to retrieve it? -- that's an hour of driving and at least an hour of extricating myself, and I have four hours till I have to be in Capitola testing water quality.

-- find something else to work on?

-- resign myself to no writing today, and clean the kitchen?

-- obsessively poke away at puzzles?

-- obsessively make the rounds of other people's online writing?

-- try to figure out where to send The Conduit? And/or other things that are currently not out?

So far, it's been the puzzles. This is me telling myself to get to fucking work in some way or another.

This is not leavened by the presence of extra people in the house and the nice fellow coming home early and telling me about Mel Gibson spewing anti-Semitic garbage during a DUI arrest. I never liked the guy even before he made the movie that inspired my students to tell me I killed Christ.

Nor by the Middle East analysis my favorite archaeologist gave me yesterday, which I'm not going to go into now because I Really Am Going To Just Open Up a Fucking File At Random And Work On It.

Urban Watch today

So the Coastal Water Commission does, besides First Flush when we see what comes out of the drainage ditches and culverts on the first rain of the year and Snapshot Day when we see what the water's like at the end of the rainy season, has a program called Urban Watch which is monitoring various urban streams through the dry season. Right now Santa Cruz City is not doing one, so I'm helping with the Capitola one, which is basically Soquel Creek and the stream in Noble Gulch, which is a tributary of Soquel Creek. What we're looking at is storm drain runoff into the creek. Although, parenthetically, one of these empties into the lagoon at the mouth of Soquel Creek and not into the creek itself. The lagoon is a seasonal thing: a sand bar forms across the mouth of the creek in the dry season and the water backs up to form a shallow lakey thing. It's not that it doesn't drain into the bay at all, but that drainage slows way down. In former times the lagoon was the site of numerous frolics including the Begonia Festival parade, which was rafts floating down the last bit of the creek decorated with sculptures made of tuberous begonia blossoms. I think they still do the begonia festival, though as far as I can tell there's no more begonia nurseries at all in Capitola.

So we test the water for specific pollutants -- copper, detergent, phosphates, and I forget what else -- and we evaluate color, smell, turbidity, pH,conductivity, temperature, that kind of thing. Usually it's boring, boring, all the water quality objectives are met. But yesterday the team that went out found so much detergent at the Capitola pier site -- the one that empties into the lagoon -- that they ran out of reagent before they could quantify it. Today there was no more detergent at the site, but there was really elevated phosphates. Which I think was left over from the detergent.

I must say that doing this I am constantly struck by the heartbreaking beauty of these little streams. They're just these little creeks, right, that run behind the auto plaza or the supermarket parking lot, but they're so lush and quiet and full of unruly life.

Science Newsw says that European wild bees are declining in diversity, and so are the wild plants that depend on them. There's honeybees at one of the water sampling sites. They have built a huge nest. It looks like they started out by colonizing a birdhouse or maybe a bathouse nailed to a tree, and then they've outgrown it. They're heartbreakingly beautiful too, even though they're invasive exotics. Our native black bymblebees are beaiutiful, too.

sometime soon I'm going to collaborate with Frank to produce a nutshell history of the Middle East since way back.

Is there any limit on the number of tags we can tag our posts with?