Saturday, December 06, 2008

A Site For Sore Eyes

Try this site for a bit of non-family style entertainment, a Real Time Side Show!
http://www.adamsblock.com/

What is THIS? Well friends it is LIVE video with sound from a certain neighborhood in SF. To say "seedy side of town" is not to cover how actually terrible a location it is. Avoid at all costs...even in your car! Carjackings, robberies and mayhem of all sorts emanate from this place. It has been this way as long as I have had an affiliation with the wonderful city of San Francisco, California and I don't see any change these days worthy of mention. The denizens of this section of the SF forest are in dire straits and thier various needs can cause great personal calamity to the general public. BEWARE! And be wary at the same time. To view this from afar is a GOOD thing. Up close it is tragic, frightening and otherworldly all at once. I used to venture into this "hood" now and again because of my line of work at the time, it is very near City Hall and there was a large computer center therein. Parking was always a hasstle, especially at night and it forced people off onto certain streets in that all so familiar hunt. I've had bottles, 1/2 filled, empty and full thrown at me, my truck and can hear the echos of the tinkling glass shards as it bounces off the sidewalk. A hell of a place. Whores of all sorts, some with fancy business cards with rates on the other side of the card frequent the stop lights and corners. Pimps ride around with the ever loud Thumpa, thumpa, thump from their over speakered back seats. Bums ly idle on the sidewalks day and night, some with tins out to collect thier hard won alms, others just sleep it off. Broken glass, old newspapers, 1/2 drank beer bottles...a real San Francisco Post Card that you will never see in the shops in Union Square or Pier 39. This is The Underbelly.
See any police cars? Wait...and watch.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

The Dredges Are Coming! The Dredges Are Coming!


Yes they...rather IT is. Soon to a cul-de-sac near you...really near us, our cul-de-sac of water and mud and birds and docks is to be dredged sometime between now and the weekend. The dredge and a mile of pipe behind it is roaring away a watery cul-de-sac away from ours back towards Pierce Island where the dredge tailings are being pumped onto. What a project this is, this time is our third since first being dredged some 12 years ago, seems like yesterday. You see whomever dreamed up these 43 homes on this island-become-peninsula had no plan to keep the water feature created by their fine earthworks from becoming clogged with the inevitable silt from a creek that flows into the bay nearby. That was in 1978 or so, the same year most of these houses were built in the Marina district of Suisun City. Of course, the silt came and by the time we bought this place in 1988, some 20 years ago, the water that makes up it's backyard was ever so much shallower (is that a word? Well you know what I mean) than it started out to be some 10 years before. We enjoyed it then too as the herons, egrets, ducks, geese, sandpipers all came at low tide to fish and gambol at the tide line twice a day. It was quite a sight. High water then was a barely adequate for boats of 3 feet (1 meter) or so. At this same time (1988 fall) our fair city began to contemplate a huge renewal project that would encompass not only many features of the buildings of our little gem of a city but also its watery front step in Suisun Slough.

Because our subdivision (The Marina District) was on private property (the 43 home owners) we had to convince the City of Suisun of the necessity of dredging our backyards when they dredged their waters. Kelly and a neighbor, Jim took on the many interested agencies, the EPA, The Army Corps of Engineers, The State Lands Commission, The Bay Conservation and Development Commission et al. It took them literally YEARS to obtain all the necessary permissions and then there was the ongoing difficulty of keeping Suisun's own government interested in our plight as well. Needless to say Kelly and Jim were a force to reckon with, the timing was set and the first dredging took place in the fall of 1996. There was a second dredging 6 years ago that further cleaned out the cul-de-sacs of the accumulations and now, once agian it is underway and about to do ours. Here's Suisun's Home Page:
http://www.ci.suisun-city.ca.us/About/Profile/CommunityProfile.html

Monday, December 01, 2008

A Long Time Ago In A Land NOT So Far Away...


Ring goes the door bell, brrring....brringggg! I rush to the door pulling on my pants as I go, not a nudist but I typically are minimally clothed when I get up for my morning coffee such I am. Figuring the pusher of the doorbell MUST be the new (third) stove having arrived I openned the door. I looked and stared and the brain reeled! My Gawd! Steve! My olde friend Steve, long a companion via email, he my buddy from days in the distant past. Amazing! "Come in, come in!", I didn't know whether to shit or go blind! (pardon the expresion please) A complete surprise of the best kind! And it was just as though we had seen each other yesterday though it has been at least 28 years since these eyes have laid actual SIGHT on him! We aren't the same age anymore. I last saw him in Seattle in the spring of 1980 when I had my son Mike with me coming back from a CDC school in Minneapolis. I stopped to see how my old buddy Steve was and found him well and busy running a computer maintenance service. We stayed a couple of days and then climbed back on the train to SF. Now here he was at my kitchen table all chatty and in healthy looking happiness. We spoke of our kids and reviewed our present lives against each others, in depth soulful talk about families and kids and work and play. All good. I married him and his first wife Sherry on a cliff high above Stinson Beach long before his first children arrived. Now he has many children scattered like chaff throughout America and grandbabies too, like Kelly and I. Oh how time flies when your having fun! We chatted away for a couple of hours and many cups of strong black coffee from our Jura Espresso maker. Somehow the talk got off onto Energy, it's cost and how cold we keep our houses...and we soon found ourselves on Highway 12 headed towards Rio Vista to see the Wind farm at Colinsville. Amazing these things are, A hundred feet tall to the generator with blades 75 and 100 feet long, three of them, graceful and quiet almost supernatural, certainly otherworldly. We got out of the Prius and stared at the towers and spoke of how beautiful they were in this rolling scenery. Then back into the car and along the winding dirt road to spy a sheep farm filled with ewes and thier little lamb charges.


Wonderful! So very cute and frisky! Steve took photos with his cell phone and we headed back to Suisun.
I gave him a cup or so of sourdough starter and my recipe for Whole Weed Nut Bread (not sour dough) to use in his bread machine. And amid many goodbye and so longs and promises to visit again he was gone. What a wonderful thing friendship is. Thanks Steve, thanks!