Hi guys! I'm back in the field, this time for my Ph.D. research and for ONLY 3 months this time! I'm staying in Quail Ridge Nature Reserve (https://naturalreserves.ucdavis.edu/quail-ridge-reserve), a site located on Lake Berryessa in between Davis, CA and Napa, CA. Yeah, it's a pretty great location 😍
Andy drove with me to Sacramento where I dropped him off at the airport yesterday. I think we had a great trip-we stopped in Balboa Beach and sat on the beach (I went in the ocean). I'm not sure if I'll be able to take time off in July for the annual family beach trip so I wanted to make sure I got to Balboa on this trip. We stayed in West Hollywood for the night at a super beautiful Best Western with bougainvilleas galore. We ate across the street at Carney's Restaurant, a unique renovated railroad car. Then we walked down the street to go to the world famous Comedy Store. I didn't know the history, but Andy said he had always wanted to go there and the line up for the night was really good. Once we were there I learned all about it. It was opened in 1972 by Mitzi Shore, Pauly Shore's mother. She happened to passed away last month so people are still celebrating her memory there. It was the first all stand-up comedy nightclub in the world! Johnny Carson moved the Tonight Show from NYC to LA that same year, so comedians followed and would practice at the Comedy Store. Richard Pryor worked on new material there night after night in the 1970s. Many of the greats from multiple generations got started there including Robin Williams, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey, and Whoopi Goldberg. The first comic of the night was Argus Hamilton, he first got his start at the Comedy Store in the 1970s when he would run errands around town for Mitzi, helping her set up the the Comedy Store. We saw Tom Segura, Chris D'elia, Natasha Leggero, and Moshe Kasher (and a few others). It was a really cool night.
We left LA on Sunday morning for Sacramento. Andy is a really good passenger because I can ask him to pick a place to eat and he'll always find something interesting. We went to a place called Joe Marty's Bar and Grille, named for the baseball player. It was actually a surprisingly classy sports bar (there were cloth napkins). I had a yummy local IPA from Track 7 brewery and a great salad and sandwich.
I really enjoyed Sacramento. I visited with my mother's cousin Mary Rita, who I had never met before. We were able to walk to a restaurant just a few minutes from her place, and even walked through a little nature area. The restaurant was right on the river. I had heard my mom joke about people calling Sacramento the "armpit of CA"- I think anywhere in the central valley is called that. But if there are rivers running through your downtown, you're called the "city of trees", and you're known for the growing beer scene (including the largest craft beer festival on the West Coast)...sounds like a great place for me to look for faculty jobs in the future!!! They have great farmer's markets, they are known as the "farm to fork capital", it's close to other places like Davis, SF, and a short flight to SoCal beach destinations!! I also learned that Harvard found Sacramento to be "America's Most Diverse City" back in 2002. These all sound like good things to me!
On Monday I drove out to my field site, but stopped in Davis for groceries. They have a chain called Nugget Markets that are amazing. Kind of like a Whole Foods sized Trader Joe's or something. It won't be somewhere I shop every week but it's definitely a treat. I headed out from there knowing I would soon lose cell service (plus side is I do have WiFi at the field house). If you remember from my Chile days...we had internet once a week 😨 So this is a big step up. I knew I would drive through Winters, CA, which is the closest town to my field site. About 7,000 people, and I've heard they have cute festivals in the summers. I purposely didn't get much fruit at Nugget because there are supposed to be amazing fruit stands close to my site. I stopped at one for strawberries and cherries. You see people literally picking strawberries in the field to sell that day at the stand. Maybe I'm not that picky about strawberries- they were really really good- but the cherries are definitely the best I've ever had in my life.
So I make it to my field site and I get out of the car, do a little stretch, look at my house, look at the sky- I'm taking it all in. I hear a rustle in the woods to my left and I assume I've startled a deer. I've visited the site briefly two times before, and often deer scatter from around the house when we start moving. But no, instead, a hawk flies out of the woods about 20 feet from me and dangling from it's talons is a snake that is at the very least 4 feet long. And they just go flying away. I'm still holding a Starbucks iced latte, fresh from Davis, CA, which is so sterile and not wild at all. I was not prepared to be introduced to my wildlife so soon. I've trapped at this site before, I've seen the rattlesnakes, I've seen the hawks, I've seen the deer, I've seen the mice, I've seen the bobcats, etc. etc., it shouldn't have been a shock but I was like oh damn! I'm really back in the field now. These things will become the norm for me.
So, I'll hopefully be maintaining this blog pretty regularly, especially given the fact that I have WiFi this summer. I have a really good feeling about the field season and I think I will be able to collect a lot of really great data to start my research 🐭😎
Thanks for reading!
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I did not take this photo, but we did drive past this water tower |
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Again, not my photo. It actually reminds me a lot of Chattanooga
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Sitting on the beach in Balboa is pure bliss |
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Carney's Restaurant! |
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The Comedy Store |
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I was obsessed with the hotel |