Peeking into the rock

We went to Lighthouse Field.  I've been doing this thing where I go out to the beach in the morning on Saturday and on the way back we take a half hour to go round the field and I take pictures at six preset locations, long, medium, close, and macro shots, to document how certain plants and their communities pass the year.  I've been doing it for about a month.  I started to do it a while back but the car died and it was not practical to keep doing it.  I don't expect to get every week, but I figure if I set up a weekly schedule that's easy to keep I will end up with forty or forty-five sets of photos.  But I missed the week before last because I was sick and the car wouldn't start: and this week I missed too, so I decided that since I have today off we could very well go to the field and take out pictures.

There was a problem.  The field was stinky today.  Like a feedlot, only a lot milder.  And Truffle -- that dog, she sure loves herself a big old stinky roll in something unspeakable when she gets the chance.  So she ended up, despite my best efforts (which are feeble, I tell you, feeble), smellng a lot like a feedlot, and not as much milder as the field, since she is only a dog and that stuff was concentrated on her.  It was difficult to drive home.  I had to keep the windows open and while we have nothing like snowcopalypse weather here, it's not a summer evening either.

I brought her home and immediately bathed her (I also bathed the cat, which he took as a vicious betrayal and a dangerous move).  Thoroughly, I thought, too, since she started smelling like shampoo instead of a feedlot.  But now she's just about dry and -- she smells like a feedlot again.  Milder, but still enough that I don't want her too close to me.

Going out to Carneros Creek to do water monitoring at seven or so in the morning.  It's a four-hour jaunt all told, longer on a lab day, which this wont' be.

And I have written!  A lot!  But on several of my ongoing less serious stories, not on one big thing.  So I don't have a lot to show for it.

One of the things about Lighthouse Field that bugs people with dogs is the foxtails that ripen in the summer. These nasty grasses -- also called wild barley -- make sharply barbed seeds that can really wreak havoc on a dog's nose or ear or eye. In the summer, parts of the field are covered with them. Other parts are covered with another exotic, wild oats.

This year there's something different going on. Perhaps because of the very wet winters we've been having, and the bonus rain we had after the rainy season was over, we've got a different balance of grasses. There's always been a wide variety of grass species in the field, which I have meant to study before this, but not having any real knowledge of grasses to start with I was reluctant to dive into Jepson cold (Jepson is not really so great for actually identifying plants. It's better for getting to understand the general way that plants are related, and ranges, and stuff). The foxtail colony this year is pretty small, and the wild oat colony even smaller, and the rest of the field seems to be overtaken by --
( some kind of bluegrass )

On another front, I've been plagued by an idea for a story about gender engineering, probably because I'm reading the Tiptree anthology, but it's only ideas, no character, conversation, or plot, and it's almost as annoying as the painful lump growing below the hairline on my neck.

The buses rolled again last week. They signed a "compromise" contract and the Metro -- which says it did not lose money during the strike despite the fact they were paying everybody but the drivers (probably because the University, which provides the greatest ridership, also pays up front from student fees)-- has offered a free ride day to get people back on the bus.

Medicare decided, after years of lobbying and negotiation, not to change the status of Santa Cruz County from rural to urban. This means they will continue to reimburse the doctors at a signifigantly lower rate than doctors in urban counties, though Santa Cruz has among the highest costs in the country because of land costs. It's not because of any principle, though -- at the same time they lowered the reimbursements that doctors and hospitals get nationwide by four and a half percent. So one of the bigger clinics (which is ownedby a big corporation, I didn't know that) sent letters to 700 of its patients dropping them from their rolls (out of 5000: which means, I guess that fourteen percent of their clientele was poor enough or old enough to qualify, and that only counts the citizens, I think). They reinstated them a few days later because of the reaction they got.

Coastwatch says it will rain measurably today, tonight, or tomorrow. Meanwhile, the season forecast is for a decidedly wet year, with an unusual number of "pineapple express" storms punctuating longish dry spells. Those "pineapple express" storms originate in the tropics and bring a lot of water and, you guessed i, wind, with them, and because they dump the water fast are much more likely to cause floods than our usual storms. This rain we're supposed to be getting now is supposed to be one of those storms. Which means we're going to have to be pretty careful when we climb down into those drainage ditches and storm drain outfalls and I really hope it hits during the day.

The saga of the dog park continues. In 1977, the City Council made an administrative decision to allow offleash dogs at Lighthouse Field and Its Beach. In 1984, under some pressure from somebody, some entity said well, leashes only, in the general plan for the area. At some other time, somebody said, no, it's really offleash. There have been hearings and hearings before the Parks and Recreation board, the City Council, and I forget who all else, and they always end up saying, yes, this is a reasonable use for this park. Gradually the neighborhood, which like the rest of Santa Cruz used to be rundown and populated by students, retired Italian fishermen and their families, and the persistently unemployed, has been made over by yuppies who build houses too large for their lots, bring in double SUVs, and complain about strangers parking in front of their house and think that Lighthouse Field and the beaches are their own front yard (having sacrificed their actual yards in building houses too large for the lots). They want no dogs at all at any time of the day (dogs are currently allowed offlkeash before 10 in the morning and after 4 in the afternoon, onleash at the field between and not at all on the beach between), they don't like the plans for fixing up and expanding the restroom because they think its tacky. So this organization of people who want to keep dogs out of the field have sued the city because the latests General Plan for Lighthouse Field and the beaches does not have a proper Environmental Impact study for the offleash dogs (I think they missed out on that because it was a continuing condition and not a new one, and because various smaller, informal environmental impact reports have said the dogs have minimal impact on the environment: though honestly, I would have to say that the increased foot traffic does, at the very least: but it's a city park and I don't know how you're supposed to have minimal use of a city park). The city agreed to do a new environmental impact report,

But that's not all -- the same group went knocking on doors in Sacramento and got the State Department of Parks and Recreation, which has an interest because the park is also a state beach as well as being a city park, to say that the city must prohibit offleash dogs by November 2007, because the 1984 statement outweighs the 1977 statement and all the subsequent statements (don't look at me like that, I don't know why). The 1977 statement had a thirty-year lifespan anyway. So more hearings and more fuss. A hearing today.

And then Halloween. This has become a big holiday in Santa Cruz, because, I think, of all the young people here -- the University students, the vacationers from over the hill, the baby boom's babues, the kids who wash up here after drifting or running away from wherever. They like to congregate on the "mall" (it's actually Pacific Avenue, an ordinary upscale tourist town downtown street, with some landscaping and benches) on Saturday nights and holidays, particularly one dedicated to costumes and stuff. This year there was Halloween night on the avenue from Friday night to Monday night. The police hate Halloween. Kids get drunk and disorderly. (not, I must say, as much as iun some other towns, but we like it peaceful and safe here) So the cops got a huge grant to do extra policing and safety measures downtown this year. What did they do? They put tall chain link fencing around the street itself so no cars or pedestrians could use it. Pedestrians were confined to the sidewalks and the intersections. Reports are that it was too crowded to move. Result -- six stabbings. "Gang related."

I'm sorry they did it that way. When I read the plan in the Sentinel, my son assured me that that was an error in reporting because nobody would be dumb enough to do it like that. The thing to do, he said, was close the street to cars, and close the sidestreets for a block on each side so emergency vehicles could drive in close to the action when they were needed. Myself, the thing I saw coming is that our little gang punks do a lot of maddogging -- sort of like Hawaiian stinkeye only it's not just a comment, it's also a challenge -- and the only way out of a fight when people start maddogging is for one of them to say, contemptuously, "Forget you, bitch," and walk away, and if you can't move you can't do that and we were lucky the brats were only carrying knives.