So far today

I woke up at none: I had been up till 3 making seamless textures for no good reason.

It'sa bit after 10:30. I have made appointments for myself, the dog, the car, and the trees (more about that in a minute), half-assedly cleaned up a bit in the front yard, fed the animals, taken my medicine (there is an issue there, sometimes I forget till afternoon and that is not good), and applied for another, more interesting job. I have not eaten yet because I woke up feeling stuffed and fatter, as if maybe I've gained yet more weight, which would not be surprising.

So, the tree guy came. The almond tree that is scraping Hannelore's garage has to come out. It is a major limb that is doing the scraping which would mean that the tree would lose a very large portion of its canopy, and the tree has been overwhelmed by the wisteria and may die within a decade, and it has heart rot which would eventually make it fall over (probably not for a long time: it's not the deciding factor). The garage was only built a couple of years ago. Hannelore got kind o bad advice about how to build it. If it had been built a few feet back, or a couple of feet shorter (it's very tall for a garage), it would have been okay on that count. And honestly, I might have been able to control the wisteria if I had another foot or two of maneuvering room, not that I probably would have. Between the head thing and my hands and the fact that the tree is very large there's not much I can do with it.

The good news is that I don't need a heritage tree permit for the removal. If the tree is fourteen inches in diameter at 54 inches (the guy had the gall to call that chest height. It is not. It is chin height) you need a permit to remove it. At 54 inches the tree has two trunks, one of which is twelve inches and the other is ten. In some communities the heritage tree law states that the requirement is thesum of the diameters of the trunks of the tree at that height, but not in Santa Cruz. But they're going to change the rule in three months, so it's a good thing that the tree guy came when I called him. Because if he didn't I might have forgotten about it for another few weeks, and I might have gotten myself into that whole process which costs money (not a lot, but we're getting into close times here( and takes time, potentialy a lot of time if the city arborist is busy or disagrees with my tree guy (in which case there's an appeal process where you get to make your case: I have observed this when I was observing the planning commission and the city council for other reasons. Both bodies are inclined to agree with the arborist but they can sometimes be swayed).

The tree guy is originally from New Zealand. We get a lot of New Zealanders here. I wonder why? Is there a special connection between Santa Cruz and New Zealand that I don't know about? I know there's a special connection with Hawaii that goes back to the nineteenth century when there was a Christian college here that a lot of Hawaiian royalty went to. The first mainland board surfing occurred here and then, introduced by those guys. Which is one of several reasons why Huntington Beach shouldn't make an issue about owning the title "surf city." The most important reason is that it's a dumb, dumb, dumb thing to waste money on lawyers about, and the second most important reason is that it's a misuse of trademark law.

The best news for last.

I played a thermemin yesterday, and I have an invitation to play it again!

It was the 50th of the son-in-law elect's father and he has a friend who's been playing it for a year. He's not so perfect with tunes but his tone is great. I couldn't get a tune out of it the first time but I could get the pitch to rise when I wanted it to rise.

It's fun. It's disconcerting because the only tactile feedback is your own body: so tactilely you have to be aware of your positioning in reference to yourself, not the instrument: but at the same time, kinetically, you have to be aware of your positioning in reference to the instrument. It's not like walking blindfolded, because you do have all your senses, but that's the closest I can come to it.

Maybe like drawing pictures onscreen with a mouse, which I have not mastered, because I have a regular old mouse that has to be coaxed to move a pixel sometimes and other times overshoots by a long ways (a tablet is on my list of indulgences, now that I have the camera. And that I think is all the indulgences I want: I want to go on the water, but I can rent a kayak). With computer graphics, my workaround is to do collages, geometrics, and pixel by pixel drawing, all of which are fine for some purposes but not all.

But. Gee whillikers, a theremin!
(it turns out they're not rare, after all, as I had been solemnly assured many times).

Oh, and in the four hours since I started this post, I have called two mills besides spending all this time electronically recreating old linoleums (pixel by pixel).

Well, that was interesting, or something

There's a park I take my dog to. It's the only offleash dog park that's offleash all the time. It's at Frederick Street Park, which is where some of my children's birthday parties were. It's in a neighborhood that has recently become tony. It used to be a kind of middling working-class neighborhood of small houses, contiguous to a slum ("The seedy Yacht Harbor district"). Now the slum is gone, and most of the small houses closest to the park and harbor, replaced with monstrous condominiums and "townhomes" -- many of these residences are gated, which looks really odd on a poky little urban street.

Anyway. There's a bod we always hope to meet there, a black-lab-and-something: locals know the type, we used to call them the "Santa Cruz Black Dog," they're more gracile than a true black lab but they have the labrador affability and playfullness. Titan wasn't there today, nor any dog that Truffle could hit get involved with (later on, another of the SC Black dogs was there, but Diesel and Truffle only just hit it off about half the time).

However, there were a handful of snooty old ladies. Pearls and bleach round frizzy hairdos and pretentious accents and excruciating posture and all. I was disposed to be friendly. There was a plump old lady with a New Zealand accent (see? they're all over the place: Zeborah, is this a sign that you should emigrate to here? Fair warning, there's not much work here) being friendly to all the dogs and, now I think back on it, avoiding the ladies at the bench.

So the snootiest, oldest, most excruciatingly straight-backed and pretentious-tongued of them all initiated a conversation. She said her dog seemed to think she owned the park. "Do you live around here?" she asked.

I allowed as how I lived downtown but I came here because there is no offleash dog area I can walk to from my house. I said we come only a few times a week because we have to drive here. I said we go a different place almost every day, actually.

She said. She really said this: "Lately we've been getting a lot of people who are not from here and they don't know how to take care of their dogs and they don't clean up after them. Oh well, I guess they have the right to be here. We should just be glad we have it."

Since I had just approached the bench after having cleaned up after my dog, and my dog was just sniffing around, and I was standing so I could see every move she made, and I was keeping voice contact with her, and she wasn't going very far from me (unlike the fancy-groomed Westies who actually wandered off and had to be found), this was obviously not pointed at me and meant to make me feel unwelcome at her dog park, right?

Really, I'm just too sensitive sometimes.

So we went away, walked around the yacht harbor and back, and when we got back Diesel was there and a bunch of other reasonable people and their reasonable dogs.