Sketched at lunchtime today, a path in the UC Davis Arboretum. I had wanted my first sketch of the day to be of the space shuttle Endeavour piggybacking a jumbo jet on its way across the Californian sky. But I missed it. IT flew over the State Capitol in Sacramento, and then headed towards the Bay Area, before flying to LA forever. From Davis, you could make it out but it was pretty far. I had a meeting, and when it was over I rushed up to the stairwell of my building to see if I could spot it. I didn’t stay there very long, I heard it was already flying over Stockton, so I left it be. Still, nice to know it was out there, making its final journey. The space shuttle, dudes, gone forever. Still it’s not like it was the Millennium Falcon or anything, it didn’t exactly fly back and forth to Saturn or warp to Alpha Centauri, being more of a bus into the upper atmosphere. But what a ship! It fired my imagination as a kid, and I still remember vividly the day Challenger blew up in 1986, with that awful two-headed explosion. I had cut a picture of it from the paper and put it on my wall, along with a group portrait of all the astronauts, back when being an astronaut was pretty much the pinnacle of human existence as far as I was concerned. I don’t know if I ever wanted to be an astronaut (the space suits and the food put me off) but I loved the Shuttle, loved space. (By the way, UC Davis has produced at least two NASA astronauts, Tracey Caldwell and Stephen Robinson) Alas, today was not the day for me to see it.

So I sketched at lunchtime in the Arboretum and listened to a podcast about Proto-Indo-European instead. All about Grimm’s Law! With a little bit of Verner’s Law! Philology, comparative linguistics, consonant shifts – now that’s my real space shuttle. Been a while since I studied that but listening to the podcast, it all came back, and I had the old urge to start grabbing some foreign dictionaries and making lists. Instead, I just finished my sketch, and went back to work.