Crazy Heaven of a Life

One year ago today Tom and I tied the knot.



I love this man.

no more posting here.
sorry, folks.  just not worth it.  send me e-mails or give me phone calls if you'd like to catch up.

We are going to Ohio this January.
My deferment went through. They are excited to have me there. We are looking forward to it.

Hey folks, just a reminder...
I love you.
I care about you.
And I also care a bit about my privacy. Which is why you have to log in to read the bulk of the entries to my livejournal.

I'm starting to think that people don't realize this and that's why no one bothers to read (and respond to) my entries anymore. Of course, the non-responsiveness could have more to do wtih people being overwhelmed with schoolwork.

And this is how I got here...








More photos if you feel like looking:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tina_joyeuse/sets/72157604229194126/

I was home just in time for cherry pie with the whole family, niece and nephews included.

Part of the governor's massive state-wide budget cuts includes a significant reduction in aid for our California state parks.

Here's the official stance of the state parks on this issue:
http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/712/files/budget%20fact%20sheet%20w-graphics%20-%2001-14-08.pdf

*Most* of these parks will be closed to public, and placed in a "caretaker status," which requires fewer full-time employees. Many will be closed without any care. The parks they have chosen have the least amount of traffic, generate the least revenue, and are dependent on volunteers. Previous budget cuts have made it impossible to do trail maintenance anyway, so why not shut them down (ACK!!!! If I had known, I would gladly have chipped in extra for admission!)

It is horrible, but it's good to read that the parks tried their best to find the parks that will make the least impact. I'm super sad, though, because Topanga State Park was a favorite for Tom and I to go backpacking. It's on the cutting block, along with several others that I've visited and loved, like San Simeon State Park, Benecia, Railtown, Sutter's Fort, Bolsa Chica, and Tomales Bay. Tomales Bay was one I visited recently with a class. There was some interesting geology there and unbelievably beautiful wetlands.

Here's a website where you can write a letter to the governor about your sentiments on the issue:
http://www.environmentcalifornia.org/action/preservation/state-parks?id4=TAFsent

Here's a map with the affected parks:

Is it not common knowledge that it is inappropriate to speak above a whisper in a library?
Is this something they're not teaching children these days in school?

It naturally seems to follow that you don't pick up a cell phone in a library, nor carry on a conversation when those around you are studying.  That's just common courteousy. 

What has happened?

Thanks, Josh, for pointing me in the right direction about the chess player in the last entry. Apparently he's not a bum!

He's a beloved Berkeley street musician. Don't I feel out of the loop!
In 2005, students Sean Staub and Ben Hadden made a 14-minute documentary about his life, called "Future Past Remembered."

Here's an article written about Fizer's vision in The Daily Californian:
http://www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=17840


Faces of Berkeley: A Voice of the '60s Plays for a Peaceful Tomorrow

BY Catherine Yang
Contributing Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005


John Fizer, a self-proclaimed "peacenik," sings and plays guitar in front of Dwinelle Hall. "I try to be there every day," he says.

He may look like country crooner Willie Nelson, but John Fizer-better known to students as the man who plays the guitar outside Dwinelle Hall-would rather think of himself in terms of Bob Dylan.

The 59-year-old Virginia native has traveled across the country, from the cafes of New York's Greenwich Village to the streets of Santa Cruz, hoping his music will inspire students as much as Dylan's music inspired a generation of peace advocates in the 1960s.

"My hope is that with you and me and the music of the past, (we can) say 'no more war,'" he says.

Fizer can be found on the benches outside Dwinelle most afternoons, strumming along to Dylan's tunes, often drawing crowds of students who shut their books momentarily to stop and listen.

"I try to be there every day," he says. "So far, I haven't played for millions yet, but I have played for thousands."

Born in 1945 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Fizer-who has lived in and out of Berkeley for the past 40 years-says he never felt his hometown was right for him.

"I knew there was life on the other side of the mountain," he says. "It was so narrow-minded and oppressive (where I grew up)."

With help from a scholarship to the University of Virginia's Engineering School, Fizer was able to leave home. But, dissatisfied with his field of study, he left two years later to join the Air Force, hoping to study Russian culture.

The Air Force, however, assigned him to Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies to study Chinese for the next two years-from 1964 to 1965.

But as the Vietnam War raged on halfway across the globe, Fizer again began to reconsider his surroundings.

"I started thinking about the war and I started thinking it isn't right," he says. "We saw the horrors of (the war) until grannies were radicalized against it."

After leaving the service in the fall of 1965, Fizer made his way to UC Berkeley to join the activists, students, artists and musicians in the anti-war movement, performing and protesting along with them on Sproul Plaza.

"After the shitstorm is gold," Fizer says of the time. "It was the most liberal atmosphere. The arts and music just jumped."

Since coming to Berkeley, Fizer has accumulated an on-campus fan base and formed lasting friendships.

UC Berkeley student Nicole Moskowitz, who befriended Fizer over the last few weeks, says it is his story and personality that make him a draw.

"He's really friendly and super sweet," she says. "We went to lunch, and he has the most amazing life story."

Fizer, who says he feels a deep connection with the students here, often lives with students who have a spare room in their apartments, and is hoping this year-as in years past-to record a CD of his music for students.

He says he is now waiting to recapture the energy he experienced in Berkeley in the 1960s. In the years since the Vietnam War, he says issues of war and oppression-from what he calls the tyranny of the Bush administration to the greed of today's power structures-have become even more relevant.

"Just because the sixties didn't sustain, doesn't mean that we weren't right," he says. "I'm waiting for the arts and music to jump again. That's what I'm here for. After this war, maybe, there will be a millennium of peace. An old guy like me will be walking hand in hand with young people like you toward peace."

Contact Catherine Yang at cyang@dailycal.org.

After returning from Paradise, I started walking around campus and realized what an interesting place it is. It's as though the past two months of gazing at beauty everywhere gave me a desire to search for the beauty in my every-day. Berkeley offers an unexpected culture of contrasts, along with occasional snippits of the breathtaking.


Morning sun blasting off the granite walls of Hilgard:


Winter's grasp:


Bustle of Sather Gate:


Chess game with a bum - guitar and voice:


Acapella nonsense:


Weekly organic mini-market:

Diversity is everywhere. People are generally polite. Lots of homeless
people, which is a shock at first. The few white people you meet
on campus will most likely be from some unexpected country. There's this
awesome grocery store called "Berkeley Bowl" (odd name) that has tons of
cheap produce. 2 botanical gardens within jogging distance: Tilden and UC
Bot Garden. Redwoods all over campus, Eucalyptus all over the hillsides.
Tons of nice places to go hiking: Huckleberry preserve, Redwood Park, and
5 others within a 10 minute drive of campus, and you can usually catch a
bus to most of them. Crime definitely catches people by suprize. Don't
leave your backpack sitting unattended in the library or sometone will
snag it. Get a secure lock for your bike. People ride bikes like crazy
everywhere around here. Tons of little cars, hardly see an SUV. Expect
to see people wearing clothes you thought people stopped making in the
1960's. Sensible Asians, burnt out hippies, artists selling their work on
Telegraph and bums harassing you for change at every intersection.
Incredible selection of international food. Every kind of food you can
think of, you'll find, and it'll be reasonably priced. North side of
campus: "Holy Hill" with a representative church or educational facility
for every religion and denomination that has had contact with the Western
world. Calm, peaceful streets that are steep. Sidewalk cafes shaded by
trees, an insane number of copy shops.

Hey there,

Just a reminder.
99% of my journal entries are friends-only. This means one must be signed in, and on my friends list, in order to read my entries. I have gone through my friends list in the past month and removed "friends" that seem to not exist. If you happen to notice that you were one of these seemingly imaginary friends, please respond to this posting so I may enter you as a friend.

From,
That girl you know in Berkeley

I enjoy herbarium work.

I love Paris.

I enjoy listening to retired professors and my current professor remninisce about old times spent collecting plant samples in bizzarre tropical places for lab work.

Sunday I leave for the Netherlands, where I will work with the same research through Thursday. Dr. Specht is an incredibly generous person, and I am grateful that she allowed me to tag along for this trip. I have learned more than I could have learned otherwise about Botanist culture.

This field includes each of my passions:
Plants
Drawing/Painting
Linguistics
Travel

And Tom can always tag along with his camera.

I'm in.  Whoo hoo!!!


Dear Moorea Applicant:
If you received this message, you are one of the 22 students selected
for the Fall 2007 course.  Congratulations, this was a very
competitive process.  We will hold an organizational meeting within
the next two weeks and I will let you know the day and time.

What a great article from the New York Times! I just had to post it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17angi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
 
By Natalie Angier
Published April 17, 2007

Show somebody a painting of a verdant, botanically explicit forest with three elk grazing in the middle and ask what the picture is about, and the average viewer will answer, “Three elk grazing.” Add a blue jay to the scene and the response becomes, “Three elk grazing under the watchful eye of a blue jay.”
What you’re unlikely to hear is anything akin to, “It’s a classic temperate mix of maple, birch and beech trees, and here’s a spectacular basswood and, whoa, an American elm that shows no sign of fungal infestation and, oh yeah, three elk and a blue jay.”
According to Peter H. Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, many of us suffer from an insidious condition called “plant blindness.” We barely notice plants, can rarely identify them and find them incomparably inert. Do you think that you will ever see a coma as vegetative as a tree? “Animals are much more vivid to the average person than plants are,” Dr. Raven said, “and some people aren’t even sure that plants are alive.”
But the antidote to plant apathy is at hand. As an unusually cool, sodden April edges toward May and spring’s cheeky blooms can be bridled no longer, botanists urge everyone to venture outside and check out the world through nature’s rose-colored glasses — and the daffodil, cherry blossom, dogwood and lupine ones, too. If this view doesn’t move you, you’re pushing up daisies.
As it happens, plants are not only alive in their own right. They are also the basis of virtually all life on earth, including ours. The core feature of planthood is autotrophy, that is, the happy ability to make one’s own food. Plants essentially eat the sun, transforming solar energy into sugars and starch through the stepwise enzymatic stitchery of photosynthesis. Animals, by contrast, are heterotrophs, defined by their need to devour other organisms — the hard-won fruit and fiber of the suneaters, or the once-removed flesh of herbivores.
Moreover, because plants release oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, plants also give us aerobes leave to breathe. Our atmosphere is currently about 20 percent oxygen, all of it the bounty of the planet’s green-skinned autotrophs. “The most important chemical reaction on earth is photosynthesis,” said Robert DeFeo, chief horticulturist for the National Park Service. “We are all parasites upon it.”
Essential though plants may be to our survival, Dr. Raven emphasizes that they are a radically different form of organism than are animals. Plants and animals have evolved along separate paths for hundreds of millions of years, ever since single cells began pooling their talents into multicelled beings. “Plants have evolved their multicellularity completely separately from animals, and any direct comparisons between the groups are wrong,” Dr. Raven said. “It’s as if plants evolved on Mars, and animals here.”
In addition to their caloric self-sufficiency, plants can be envied for their eternal youthfulness. A plant elongates itself through constant cell growth in two zones of its body, at the very tips of the roots, which grow down into soil or other surface to which the plant clings, and the outer tips of the shoots, from which new leaves, flowers and fruits sprout. Whereas an animal, upon reaching maturity, has almost no young cells left in its body, Dr. Raven said, “in plants the ends of the roots and shoots are always juvenile, always growing, always babies.”
A plant is also always drinking, slurping water and nutrients the only way it can, through its roots. Everything needs water to survive, but another radical difference between the faunal and floral crafts is that while we can drink water and keep it circulating through the body via the bloodstream, water moves through a plant’s body in a continuous stream, entering through the roots, crawling up the stem and evaporating out through little openings, or stomata, in the leaves. In fact, the upward tug of evaporation is what pulls more water up from the soil, as the clingy water droplets follow each other skyward through the hollow capillaries of the plant’s stem and leaves, shinnying as high as 300 or 400 feet above ground in the case of the giant redwoods.
No, there’s no rest for the weary, especially if you’re immobile. Beyond feeding style, perhaps the biggest discrepancy between animals and plants is that animals can move, but plants are of necessity stuck in place. Unable to defend themselves by running away, plants have instead become crackerjack chemists, evolving a vast armamentarium of insect repellents, fungicides, microbicides, ultraviolet blockers and other defensive compounds that human chemists have just begun to tally.
Rootedness also complicates a plant’s love life, which brings us back to the blooming bounty of spring. Plants, like everybody else, want to spread their seed around and diversify their genetic stock through sexual reproduction, but it’s hard to meet fresh faces when you don’t have legs. A number of plant species like pine trees, oaks, cottonwoods and grasses rely on wind to blow their pollen around, with the hope that some of the male sperm contained therein will land on receptive female parts of their far-flung kind. Or if not the same kind, at least something in the same general group: the boundaries between plant species are far more porous than they are in animals, and different species and even genera of plants cross-hybridize with each other surprisingly often.
Nevertheless, wind sex is highly iffy and inefficient, and many species of modern plants, the angiosperms, instead manipulate members of the animal kingdom to serve as yentas in a more discriminating style. The plants offer up brilliant blossoms to entice a specific pollinating insect or bird, which gets drunk on the blossom’s nectar and wants more and so seeks out other blossoms of similar shape, color or scent. And as the bee or hummingbird flits from one favored flower to the next, it incidentally delivers pollen pockets to just the right spots. “We say, isn’t that beautiful, but the precise forms and shapes of flowers are adaptations to attract individual pollinators,” Dr. Raven said. When we eat, we are parasites on the foundational labor of plants; and when we “say it with flowers,” we are plagiarists, too.

The Newts are going crazy mating in the Botanical Garden. They're all over the lily pond in the Asian section.
Aren't they cute?



Check them out here: http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/program/temp/newt.shtml

Looking for photos of plants in a certain county of California? Here's the ultimate search page. http://www.calflora.org/occ/ CalFlora searches an incredible array of herbaria, land surveys, Forest Service records, and other literature. Here's another search that they have with photos and distribution maps for each plant name you type in. http://www.calflora.org/

Hehe.  I love Star Trek.
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Ok. This is just far too fun to not share.

Whew! I have been working this weekend.
and it feels good, but I'm tired.
Oh well.

1 midterm to go.

Hope everyone is well!

So, it is apparent at this point that this blog is designed entirely for close friends and family. If you're unable to read my recent entries, but still interested in learning about what's going on in my mind, feel free to check out this site. I update weekly.

http://nature.berkeley.edu/blogs/freshfaces/featured_bloggers/tina/