Towse: views from the hill

Well, actually, parrots in a pyracantha tree.

Came home from bulk-item trips to Safeway, Trader Joe’s and Costco yesterday and did our usual double-park so we can carry things down the stairs. As we got out of the car, we saw our young next door neighbor Sadie and her uncle Marcus standing on Montgomery watching this sight. The birds squawked above and munched on berries: Sadie bounced with delight as bits of berry splatted on the ground around her.

  The red heads of the cherry-headed conures and their green bodies blend in almost perfectly with the berry bushes. I took my camera out and turned it on. By the time the camera booted and I took this click, the parrots had noticed a camera pointed at them and half of them had taken flight. 

[correction: conures in a cotoneaster tree. Sorry to be so compul^H^H^H^H^H^Hpersnickety.

I went back and forth. pyracantha. cotoneaster. pyracantha. cotoneaster. I couldn’t tell from the pic, really, and I’d never checked the tree out before I saw Sadie and the conures yesterday. Parrots and pyracantha had a nice alliteration. … Tonight, as we walked home from dinner, I checked it out. Cotoneaster it is, so conures and cotoneaster it is.]

After the farmer’s market last Saturday and before a looksee at the preview for Bonhams and Butterfields SOMA auction, we stopped by the dump for the Open Studio show for this quarter’s artists in residence.

On our way in from where we’d parked the car, we found this public art outside the SF Recycling and Disposal office.

   [22Oct2005]

The art was interesting. Unusual. The artists have three month gigs and it must be something, those first few days or weeks, trying to decide what to do, what to salvage, what to use. The possibilities are endless and yet, you wouldn’t want to do something that someone else has already done.

Out in the open area courtyard outside the gallery area, I found this.

Found art.

   [22Oct2005]

  [22Oct2005] 

Today, obviously, I’ve been playing around with my blog. I fiddled with the layout. Added a pic! instead of just a text link to towse.com.

A few hours were taken up with formatting and FTP-ing two articles I’d written for Computer Bits over so that I could link to them [1] [2] from Internet Resources for Writers again. When Computer Bits closed up shop, they also took down their website and !there went my archives! I do have copies of everything I wrote for them for the five or six years they ran my columns and articles, but it will be a bear to get them all in shape to put online. Part of the exercise today was deciding on a basic layout for the articles and that format can (and will) be used over and over. …

The last bit of time today was spent moving the huge set of links that had accumulated on my blogrolling Random Blogs of Interest list (where I stash blog links I decide to save) into the “real” blogroll in my template.

Mission accomplished!

And while I was clicking and moving and clicking and moving, I discovered that Clotilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini has a book deal! Congratulations, Clotilde!!

After the lengthy churn when Blogger republishes the updated blog and template, I discovered I’d forgotten to move Clotilde’s [F] (for foodie) link down with the other [F] links. The alphabetizing and sorting of the template blogrolls are hand-done, you see, and mistakes happen.

But it takes too dang long for Blogger to republish the blog after updating the template so that update will just have to wait until the next time I’m fiddling with the template.

Found today: Eric Benson’s NaNo Report Card updated by Bec for use in 2005.

How cool is that?

Bec is NaNoWriMo ML for Brisbane … Australia (not California).

[n.b. The report card is an .XLS file with auto-calculating cells. If you don’t do Excel, this morsel is not for you.]

re the Yang Ming Wealth

Spent more time poking around and found a press release re the christening of the Wealth in March 2004 with the following commentary

Dr. Frank Lu, chairman of Yang Ming, and Dr. Chiang Hsu, chairman of CSBC, presided the christening ceremony and Mrs. Constance D. White, wife of Mr. Stephen W. White, vice president of Dollar Tree Store, Inc., one of Yang Ming’s most important customers in Pan-Pacific market, was invited to be the Sponsor of the new vessel. Dollar Tree is a large retail chain store in the US, which has cooperated and maintained good relationship with Yang Ming since 1994. The total volume of its consigned cargoes reached 16,000 TEUs in the recent two years.

Dollar Tree! Of course!

Yang Ming Wealth came into port last night around 6:30, gliding at glacial speed past the piers and the Ferry Building, before hooking a left after it passed under the bridge to head over to Oakland.

(The Wealth was moving verrry slowly and the ferries had to dart around it coming and going …)

His nibs used the telescope to check the ship for a name, Yang Ming being a shipping concern out of Taiwan, and discovered the ship was named Wealth. How lucky a name is that?

This morning, when I was checking to make sure I remembered the name correctly, and hadn’t misremembered Prosperity, Plum or Orchid (just a few of the Yang Ming ships), I discovered that I could go to the Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp. site, pop in a vessel name, and find out where it had been and where it was going.

Vessel Name : YM WEALTH ( MWLH ) (click to view Vessel Information)
Current Lane : KY- PSW2 SERVICE ( PSW )
Current Comn Voyage : 17E / 17W
Current YML Vsl Voy : 57617E / 57617W ( PSW539E / PSW539W )

Current Voyage
Current Data –
Lane : KY- PSW2 SERVICE ( PSW )
Comn Voyage : 17E / 17W
YML VslVoy : 57617E / 57617W ( PSW539E / PSW539W )

[ports w/arrival date, departure date, &c.]
1 YANTIAN
2 HONG KONG
3 KAOHSIUNG
4 KEELUNG
5 PUSAN
6 LOS ANGELES, CA
7 OAKLAND, CA
8 KEELUNG
9 KAOHSIUNG

Vessel information includes
General Detail –
Flag Liberia
Operator YANG MING LINE
Lloyd’s Code 9278088
Call Sign A8EI4
Port Register MONROVIA
Delivered Date 2004/03/22
Alternative Vessel Code 576
Build Detail –
Gross Tonnage 64005 Tons
Net Tonnage 34700 Tons
Service Speed 25.9 NM
D.W.T. 68615 Tons
Capacity Detail –
Reefer Capacity 400
Total Capacity 5551 TEUs

400 Reefers! Zounds!

Now if I could only figure a way to know what the bill of lading shows ’cause that’s a heap of reefers visible up on deck for the plimsoll line to be that far above water. Those containers can’t be empty, can they? What would they be picking up in Oakland? Used paper to make into cardboard cartons? 

 
The ferries are coming and going, into a bank of fog in the north bay.[20 Oct 2005] 

Sun setting behind me to the west. Mount Diablo visible just to the right above Yerba Buena. [19 Oct 2005] 

I started trimming the wisteria that winds up our fire escape earlier than usual this year, before the bulk of leaves had fallen. I’d only made a little progress before we left. When we returned two weeks later, we discovered that the combination of balmy fall weather and naked branchlets made the wisteria think it was spring, SPRING! (as Babar used to say).

Photo tweaking courtesy of Picasa, as are most recent blog posts that include photogs.