merecemos paz

We deserve peace.

It was a sign - the first word in black sequins and the second on the back of the sign in green sequins - carried by a member of the Transunidos contingent at the May First march for immigrants this morning here in SF. I was so happy to see this contingent-- in my last job I worked hard on documentation and did other support for dozens of travesti asylum cases, and it is these immigrants who often come to mind for me when people discuss the pros and cons of immigrants in the US. The Transunidos contingent was only about six women, but they had a great big gorgeous banner along with a US flag and the "merecemos paz" sequin-bedecked sign. They were a beautiful sight. And while other contingents were angry or somber or intesely earnest, they were dancing and cracking jokes and laughing. In our quarter they were the ones piping up most often with chants, keeping rhythm with their safety whistles. I think they were more energetic and bouyant than others at the march partly because being out and present and labeled as transwomen was adding a dimension of joy and revelation and maybe even danger to their participation in the march. They were challenging the same powers that be that the other marchers were challenging, but also they were challenging the other marchers. This was not an explicitly safe place for transwomen, but they were taking the space and making it safe. A wave of pride and joy did hit me, watching this contingent of women flying the US flag and chanting in Spanish, and saying in sequins "we deserve peace." We all deserve it, but in particular these women deserve peace.


Quickly, other highlights:

- in the march, a middle aged white guy in glasses and a dress shirt and bow tie banging on a pot lid with a spoon, banging in time to "si se puede."

- girls with drums, it seemed like about one per city block of march, leading the chanting

- dykes heavily sprinkled about, kids of all ages sprinkled about

- the reclamation of the US flag as a symbol of resistance-- resistance to the government defining what makes someone belong here, contribute here, work here, deserve to be here

- "America Goes From Alaska to Argentina" and "Whose the Illegal, Pilgrim" and signs in various languages, mostly Spanish but also Chinese and Russian

- The chant (from the World Can't Wait contingent woman with a backpack and microphone): "who is the criminal - George Bush; are immigrants the criminals - hell no"

- running into an old pal from Challenging White Supremacy who said this looked to her like the biggest march she'd seen in SF. To go four blocks took the throng about an hour. It seemed like from start to finish the densely packed crowd took at least 3 1/2 hours to get entirely past the starting point. It reminded me - in size and density - of the anti-war march in March 2003, but this was a work day, so it seemed to me that it was more impressive, more powerful-- it will have an economic impact and therefore it might change things.

- noticing that while I'm happiest on a horse, I'm pretty darn happy marching in a mobilized throng of people down Market Street yelling and dancing.

- seeing someone I hadn't seen in many years, an Armenian refugee who I met as a 16 year old living at home and living in the closet, then just coming out as bisexual, now looking mature, strong and beautiful, wearing a suit and a smart bob-cut hair-do-- I didn't recognize her at first and had already gone past when I placed her. But the look on her face, watching this march from the sidewalk, probably taking a break from her office, seemed to be a mix of emotions -- something like joy and a kind of deep wonder.


Yes, Christina, this march was for you, too.

Tilichiki needs your prayers

Please pray for my colleague enviros who live in Tilichiki, Koryakia, which has this past few days been leveled by earthquakes.

There is no information but the video from news feeds show that nothing withstood the quakes and the 20+ aftershocks that were 5-6 in strength. Kindergartens, hospitals, power plants.

Here is the latest RIA Novosti article on the quake and evacuation.

Nobody is answering their phones there.

If you pray, pray.

A Beautiful Day for the Subjunctive

It's our first warm sunny day of spring, and the 100th anniversary of the great SF earthquake and fire today. That quake and fire is something that haunts everyone here all the time, but particularly today, when the subjunctive case-- "if this then that"-- is on everyone's lips.

So they decided to have a parade, which some think is weird, but on what other occasion do you get emergency services and trade unions all lined up to receive appreciation?

I got to clap for the SF police chief Heather Fong, and her mounted police escort. I got to clap for the firefighters, marching in dense formation ("formation"), replete with tiny children in arms, dykey types galore, and a very sweet but mangy looking black and white australian-shepherd-ish search dog. That will be the most beautiful dog on earth if I'm looking at him/her from under a pile of earthquake rubble, that's for sure.

I got to clap also for a sweet, earnest, out of tune junior high school band from Pacifica. The empathy that gushed out of me for those kids! I mean, the part of me that loves the Triplets of Belleville (the movie), the part that is so deeply touched by small acts of sheer absurdity, futility and earnestness, it just broke all open at their small, earnest out-of-tuneness. I even shed a tear at the beauty of it. As Eliot said "for us there is only the trying." Most perfectly embodied by a little tiny out of tune provincial marching band of prepubescents.

I got to clap for the long line of contingents of trade unions behind a single big banner "WE REBUILT THIS CITY." And the ILWU drill team, with their tap-adorned steel-toe boots and shiny chrome loading hooks.

As I walked away (the parade still going) I looked back to see the Red Cross marching by. As with the police and army and the firefighters who came before, when I'm standing holding my little tabby cat outside the burning wreck of my old 1920's apartment building after the next big disaster, I will be MOST grateful to see those uniforms.

At the tail of the Red Cross contingent was an old truck with the label "Red Cross Horse Ambulance." Right now, reading the Guns of August and getting a sense of the horse-dependency of the 1900-1920 era, I can imagine that truck was a welcome sight on many San Francisco street corners after the quake. But being an old horse person, some part of me saw that ambulance and felt that earthquake in an all-too-real way, imagining and quickly banishing the image of a burned animal.

So, both happy-gushy and provoked into disturbing thoughts by the sights of the parade, I returned to the office in time for a presentation by a visiting scholar showing us his horrible evidence of the vast recession of the glaciers since 1950. The ice core record showing exactly how human-made impacts are mounting (in terms of sulfates and other pollution evidenced in the core). Basically, after those firefighters, police, army and red cross workers do their best, and we still perish off the face of the earth, the other-worlders who come here to investigate what happened will have no doubt about what killed us.

A beautiful day with a very creepy aura.

[Note to the organizers: GET THE GAYS TO ORGANIZE THE PARADE IN 2106! If there's one community that knows how to organize a parade, it's them. And note to locals: did you notice the long hold ups and delays in this parade? This is how emergency services organizes a parade! Be afraid! Start those emergency kits NOW!]

Altaians in Ukiah

My three colleagues from Altai, Siberia, who I've been helping entertain, are here to learn about alternative energy projects in California. They went to Ukiah and got some front page coverage in the Ukiah Daily Journal this past Tuesday. In Hopland they didn't like the hoppy beer, but they sure liked the microhydro generators!

Hazards of Walking the Political Line with Russians

1. Overt racism. I work at an ethnically European-American organization that works with Ethnic Russians, Indigenous Peoples of Russia, and Asian-Russians. They have their bones to pick with eachother, but they are all pretty comfortable with European-Americans (hereafter "white people"). The white people they know are like the people I work with, often working in segregated circumstances, where the US NGO staff is primarily or exclusively white (due to traditional NGO elitism plus the nonprevalance of people of color with Russian skills). So not in ANY contact or circumstance do they have prior interaction with people of color from the US, and then they come to Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, DC, to visit. They are overtly amazed at the many different and often dark colors of peoples' skin, and will innocently ask for photographs with people who are exotic looking to them. Really! And really innocently. But to the grave discomfort of the well-trained well-intentioned white people that are trying to wrangle them.

Last night an Ethnic Russian visiting from absolute bumfuck nowhere Siberia was entranced with these two children the color of the darkest night sky sitting on a white bed in the bedroom display section of Ikea. He asked me to take his picture with them. I wouldn't, but I asked the Ikea employee who was talking to the kids, and who was African American, to stand for a photo with our guest. She was puzzled but not offended and hopefully I've averted a future disaster on this trip, since he now has his desired souvenir photo of himself with an African American. This definitely puts me in political grey area, as someone trying to live an anti-racist life, but I really felt like this urge of his to be photographed with exotic-to-him looking people could end VERY badly if it wasn't taken care of in safe circumstances. So, hopefully the young lady at Ikea thinks he spontaneously wanted a photo of someone who works at Ikea, and doesn't suspect the reality of the situation. Although, if I were her, I'd be suspicious. I apologized a little too much.


2. The reality that you might start fitting in with the Ethnic Russians. The questionable pedigree that Ethnic Russians have with regards to so many things-- treatment of minority ethnicities, minority religions, women, the environment, their neighboring countries-- leaves you with this question in your head when inevitably someone says "you're REALLY Russian now." Yes, working with a group of a certain language/ ethnic group you do try to fit in and not assert your own cultural expectations on the group. But do I REALLY want to thought to be REALLY Russian? This question comes up for me-- I try not to dwell.

Last night I briefly lost my car keys in the Ikea parking lot-- they fell from my hand into my trunk and got buried under some bags. So, I went from talking with my guests about my Swedish grandmother to being just at a loss-- here we are! Stuck in the parking lot! Oh well! As I unpacked things and eventually found the keys one of the Russians piped up-- "You're not Swedish-- you're Russian!" I know he didn't mean it in any way other than playful, and even complementary (see, you're just like us!), but it does leave me wondering if it isn't finally time to visit the land of my FarMor. Get in touch with some roots OTHER than my adopted Russian ones.

3. Of course the inevitable confusion with the Spy Names. And the Spy Rocks, getting clear transcriptions from our moles in Moscow.

KIDDING!

The Russian, the Eye of Shambala and the Dollar

Over dinner tonight with some visiting environmentalists from the Altai in Siberia, one of the guests brought up the rumor that the famous Russian artist Nikolai Roerich designed the back of the one dollar bill. We debated it a little and of course none of us knew anything about the dollar bill and its art. So, thank you Wikipedia, for clearing this up.

Roerich's influence on his devotee cabinet secretary Henry A. Wallace led to the inclusion of the Great Seal of the United States on the U.S. dollar bill known for the depiction of the Great Pyramid topped with an all-seeing eye — a religious, occult and Masonic symbol.

The FDR American Heritage Center backs this story up.


Nicholas Roerich, a Russian born artist, poet, writer and distinguished member of the Theosophical Society, led an expedition across the Gobi Desert to the Atlai mountain range from 1923 to 1928, a journey which covered 15,500 miles across 35 of the world's highest mountain passes. Roerich was a man of unimpeachable credentials: a famous collaborator in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a colleague of the impresario Diaghilev and a highly talented and respected member of the League of Nations. Roerich was an esoteric Russian painter, and went to Central Asia to become a lama. His earliest paintings, filled with Himalayan light, are in the astonishing Oriental Museum, also known as the Museum of East and West, in the Russian capital of Moscow, and others at Roerich societies like the ones in New York City in the United States and St. Petersburg in Russia. Roerich was credited with introducing the West to Agharthi and Shambhala. Nicholas Roerich was also influential in FDR's administration, and was the pivotal force behind placing the Great Seal of the United States on the dollar bill.

I wish that page had some anchors so I could just link around the page, and I don't feel like quoting the page further, but there are some amazing things in there about this Henry A. Wallace character and his obsession with all things Russian and also weird-ass mystic sects. Boy, nowadays you could NOT get to the heights of government this guy got to and still be openly obsessed with the Illuminati.

So anyway, Roerich didn't design the US seal (with mystic pyramid and Eye of Shambala) that is on the dollar, but he was behind it being placed on the dollar.

What's especially cool for me is that, looking at the Wikipedia examples of Roerich's art, I recognize his work. I have visited his paintings in the Russian Museum (in St. Pete) for years. He is an AMAZING artist. And I am very sorry he did NOT design the dollar bill's art-- that would be a fanTAStic dollar.

Check THIS out. One of Roerich's paintings I've been admiring for years.

Temporary Reprieve in Misfortune for Albanian Lesbian Asylee, Mother

You have to celebrate when you can, and this is just a temporary stay of deportation on human rights grounds, but since the US basically doesn't even recognize human rights grounds to begin with, my hat is off to the UK Immigration Court of Appeals Lord Justice Sedley.

The Long Perspective

This week I started and finished, in time for spring break, the third of four sections of a self-paced Intermediate Algebra class. And I got an A on it. It was a chunk of learning that is designed to take at least three weeks, if not a semester. I am hoping to finish the next section by the end of the semester. I'm pushing myself to get through the whole course in a semester partly because I need to keep moving toward about my eventual re-application to UC Berkeley's policy school, the career move that will end, blessedly if only temporarily, my long ten-year drag under the glass ceiling of non-profit generic catch-all jobs where I inevitably feel the weight of the egos of my heirarchical superiors driving me towards a future where I hope to someday be their boss. The late nights, doing math until 2 or 3 am, feel like an indulgence in my dream of a better future. My current non-profit low-20's glass ceiling drag is feeling particularly futile right now-- battling the clock to get small $1,000 to $17,000 grants to small vulnerable environmental organizations in Russia. In one week the new Russian NGO law comes into force which will suspend my work on processing these small grants, perhaps indefinitely. I complain about what I'm paid, but looking at the payrolls in the project budgets for these little enviro projects... it gives some perspective. And if throwing these peanuts into the cage feels like an exercise in futility, what must it feel like to the recipients in that cage-that-is-Russia...

And some more perspective. Feeling like I'm in this embattled nonprofit organizing world at a dead run -- such that looking out the BART train window I tend to wonder whether I'm going home or going to work -- I've been grounding myself by reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. The story of the first month of World War One.

Wikipedia gives the summary.

By the end of August, the French Army had suffered 75,000 dead of which 27,000 were killed on 22 August alone. Total French casualties for the first month of the war were 260,000 of which 140,000 were sustained during the climactic final four days of the battle of the Frontiers.

Tuchman's book quotes some reports from the Battle of the Frontiers where the pile of dead was being compared to the image of a tidal wave falling at a 60 degree angle. Germany's conscripts were marching in dense formation and were mowed down in such a way that the French defenders were finding that the wall of dead created cover for the oncoming battalions. The world at that time was such that officers wore white gloves into battle. The cavalry with its swords was deployed against machine guns and heavy artillery. The old world and new world collapsed into a putrid wasteland of trenches and wire. And, most appalling of all, the presiding monarchs of the three prime players in this war were all cousins. One could say this bloody debacle was a family spat gone terribly terribly wrong.

So in my moments of feeling like I'm in a long uphill drag in a vast exercise in futility, I like a little perspective. The building I walk by every day to and from BART - the Kaiser Auditorium - has a gorgeous facade of Beaux Arts relief with the allegorical themes of a land at peace: the joy of effort, the consolation of the arts, the wealth of the earth. An agrarian, intelligent view of the world. The facade is dated 1914. I get chills looking at it, knowing that perhaps the very month that facade was installed the world changed forever, the ferocity of modern warfare erupted and-- to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"-- "the dancers [went] under the hill."

Back in undergrad study, I imagined something like the hill home from a Tolkein hobbit village as the hill that the dancers were gone under. But the hills, the earth-- it was where you buried those villagers caught in the warfare that was waged in fields of wheat. I read "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the principal repeating image you are given is that the earth is solace. You want to crawl into it to get away from the death, stench, bombs. You have the taste of it in your mouth, and you want to become earth, wide and broad and low and dead. And safe. You want to be gone under the hill.

So, here I am. Still alive, still racing around, making my futile gestures at bettering the world, while bombs go off daily in a country my country destroyed in a gesture at fixing it, and yet there is not, and will not be, the kind of war of attrition that was World War One. The modern war is deadly but there are no battles where 27,000 die in one day. Tsunamis, yes, but not battles with that kind of human impact.

It is grim but it is still something for which I can be grateful. War has evolved, still a monster, but evolved.

"Eerily Effective Psychographic Matchmaking Software"

After coffee but before any other important events on this April Fool's Day I made sure to check out what Google has in store for those hapless folks who don't read calendars and trust Google to handle every aspect of their life. This year Google targets the lonely hearts.

Oooh ooh look - they have links in one nook of the soulmate search spoof to previous years' April Fool's jokes:
GoogleGulp
Lunar Job
Pigeonrank
Mentalplex

Chicago, Not The Musical

In my writing group we try to say something nice before we lean in for the close read. So, first off, people in Chicago are better drivers than Californians. Secondly they have a street called "Wacker." That is amusing.

That said--

Has anyone told Chicago that segregation is over!? Good lord, the ethnic mistrust and prejudice and - at best - WARINESS is as tangible as that horrible face-freezing wind. My (Swedish) grandma's house is on the South Side in a little enclave of university-related folks living in falling down old 19th century Victorians. It's not an all-white neighborhood, but it is compared to every square inch of neighborhood to the south and west for miles and miles. Just going to the local Walgreens felt like I'd stepped into another decade. The looks said 'does that white girl know where she is?'

And the wedding I went to was so white-- 120 people and one person of color (SE Asian) that I saw among the attendees. The wedding band (which was AWESOME) - The Gentlemen of Leisure - was all people of color (by appearances/ speech African-American)and the catering staff was mostly POC (by appearances/ speech Latina/o). The bride was an ex-debutante and her side of the hall was chock-o-block full of pretty white 30-somethings and their successful husbands. It really did feel like I'd been transported to another time.

And then after the wedding I managed to get the one cab in Chicago driven by a guy who is African (West African, by speech) who is a Physicist and who has two discoveries to his name and who takes mortal offense of someone DARE ask him where else he's driven cabs, implying that he is a CAB DRIVER. He insisted I apologize, finally threatening to stop the car unless I apologized. I told him to pull over. I got out, throwing the $16.05 I owed into the front seat and walked off into the 1:00 am South Side. I didn't take his cab number-- I didn't want to make a federal case about it-- it felt like more of that ethnic tension that I'd been sensing, just boiling over in this one guy who feels totally humiliated by his station in life, in Chicago. And how dare this young white woman imply he is a cab driver, when (as he put it) he could be anyone.

Best things about Chicago besides the better drivers, and the one amusing street name? The lake. We went geocaching out by the lake and found a couple in the balmy-for-this-time-of-year 34 degrees grilling up some chicken, sitting in their lawn chairs, watching the lake. It looked very peaceful and romantic. We (my parents and I) found our cache and wandered around Promontory Point, where they got all misty-- that was the park where they romanced eachother the summer they met. That's a good thing about Chicago. There are a lot of good family memories there.

But returning to Oakland I felt like I could breathe again. The life-giving humidity. The sense of (in most cases) ease between a widely diverse bunch of people. Sure we look at eachother sideways sometimes, but we really can't touch Chicago for street static.

A Must for the Bar on Your New, As-Is Cash-Only 737

Gun, meet tequila. Tequila, meet gun.

Made in commemoration of the children of the distillers -!?

Pimp My Wings

The US Export Import Bank has an extra Boeing 737 on its hands. As-is, cash only.

How many NGO bank-reform campaigners do you think are going to put in joke bids on this?

Just the Headlines

Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket writes a play for adults, called 4 Adverbs - Young fans everywhere already cringe at the thought of Lemony without the Irony

The celebrated dyke band Nochnye Snaipery (Night Snipers) from Russia will come to San Francisco March 8th (International Women's Day, the second biggest holiday in Russia after New Year's, by the by)

Nerd Goddess Sarah Vowell is going to be on the Geek God Jon Stewart's show tonight-- will the heavens open up and all the geeks and nerds ascend into nirvana?

Hmmm, what else caught my attention today... oh yeah, the polar icecaps.

My coworker just came back from the Alaska Forum on the Environment and Climate Change - which was mostly funded and attended by EPA and other government types - i.e. it was pretty sanitized, and didn't talk about the CAUSES of climate change such as hydrocarbons and other things sacred to the Bush Administration - but people STILL managed to talk themselves into a cold sweat about climate change. And one woman apparently reported some chilling (or not, as the case may be) facts about the polar icecap retreating from being in contact with all continents to being surrounded by open water (i.e. room for tanker shipping routes and offshore drilling derricks, yippee) in the course of only FIVE OR SIX YEARS! And then apparently she said that - oh well - we won't all survive, but the human race will survive.

And to boot, someone else said that NO MATTER WHAT WE DO the climate change we've been seeing will continue (in a best case scenario) for the next 100 years based solely on the impact we have ALREADY rendered... so, go ahead and get that houseboat you were looking at, because 6-7 meters of water is headed your way in the more and more immediate future!

I really want to know, are they working out a design for a Prius that floats? I mean, the oilies are fully apprised of our soggy future-- they must be engineering for it.

Doing a casual google for "prius" and "floats" I found this... shadow of the future?

The 2005 Prius has enough air bags to float you safely across the ocean. In addition to the usual driver and passenger air bags, it has side-impact air bags in the front and rear, and “curtain” air bags that deploy from the roof supports.

More From the Lesbian Front in Croatia

Apparently, according to my friend, who is catching me up on the gossip courtesy of Google chat, these billboards are up around Zagreb. When has San Francisco ever had a widespread lesbian visibility billboard campaign? I mean, besides the Lesbian Avengers' billboard beautification campaigns? This is Zagreb's SECOND lesbian visibility billboard campaign that I KNOW of, which means they probably have them every other year.

Croatian Androgyny

Dear readers,

If you haven't had enough Croatian androgyny in your life lately, you may want to check out this blog.

Nerdgirl Heaven

Well, I found myself blessed in nerdgirl heaven tonight. I was running late from work to go see Sarah Vowell read at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books. The crowd was just getting to the point where nobody filling in the back was going to get more of a show than the sound of her muffled voice. But I scrambled up front and found a spot on the floor (the last spot on the floor, where I would practically be sitting at Sarah's right foot), when someone in the middle of the third row stood up and called my name. I knew I'd know SOMEone there, but what luck-- the woman she was sitting by had saved two seats, and her friend wasn't coming, so I ended up sitting next to a friend in the third row. Whoever is looking out for me up there- the patron saint of literary readings- thank you!

I noticed one other person I know - not someone I'd call a friend but someone I know, a friend of a friend - Lemony Snicket aka Daniel Handler (yes he has a Wikipedia entry)! He is friends with S.V. He was scooting out of the venue just as the massive throng in the back was getting surly.

The crowd was rapt. I mean, nobody moved. When I bent down to get a cough drop from my bag I felt like I was mooning the congregation at a wedding. She read from the beginning of Assassination Vacation and then from an op-ed she's about to publish in the New York Times about the need for having an outlaw secret service on prime time and the equal need to NOT have an outlaw secret service on the evening news.

Then the questions. My friend wanted to ask if she'd ever gotten a driver's license. But that was too personal and too stigmatized, she said, to ask publicly. She asked her privately when we went up to get our books signed, and turns out S.V. hasn't gotten her license yet. I wanted to ask her if she would take me up on my proposal (already e-mailed to her some months ago) that I be her guide on a European Assassination Vacation to the sites of the assassinations that came as a prelude to World War One in the then-Kingdom of Yugoslavia. So, I decided that wasn't a good public question either. I clarified her answer later. No.

What I *did* ask was - as a volunteer at 826 Valencia having just heard that she's on the board of 826 - could she talk about her role at 826? That was fun. She even said that at a reading last night - in LA - someone asked her what would give someone hope in this day and age: 826 Valencia. Her work is at the NYC 826 - the Superhero Supply Company (as opposed to the Pirate Supply Store we have here in the Bay Area). Apparently they have a "cape tester" there where kids can put on a cape and stand with their arms out in front of a big fan. This brings the kids in, and then when they find the hidden door to the tutoring lab they start coming every day and finishing their homework when maybe they had never finished their homework before. She was fairly gushing. She ended her response by giving a little "yay!" (with jazz hands).

One of the first questions was from a guy in the grumpy pushy nerd section in the back. He said that he had heard that male writers have more groupies than female writers, and was she bothered by this. So there she was, facing a completely - to the point of fire hazard - packed book store, with people crammed in who could only hear her voice from around a corner, being asked if she felt she lacked groupies. She was kind of dumbstruck for a second, doing what all good speakers do in such a case, repeating the question, then: "Well," she said dryly, "I suppose you could be forced to stand outside on the sidewalk- that would make me happier."

Now I have to run off to stalk the book S.V. recommended I read, about the assassinations leading up to WWI, The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman.

Notes on January

I am in disbelief this is my first post in January. See, bosses? I have been working at work. I really don't just putter around on the internet.

As for work, the campaign my job supports on Sakhalin Island against a Shell gas and oil project just had a massive (300+ participant) blockade of the hugest ever LNG plant in the world.

As for school, I'm back at the math thing. I am doing "intermediate" algebra which is so far review of "elementary." The new version of the open lab course I'm taking (sans instructor, plus computer) is a breeze. I hope. Either it's a breeze or I'm failing massively.

I went into the community college (Laney) today to get my student ID, and on the way up in the elevator I noticed that listed among the departments on that floor was "Vending Machine Refunds." It's a humble college, but what customer service!

My city, Oakland, has sucky sucky thrift shopping, I just rediscovered. I can't believe how very picked over the shops are. And the prices they ask for the filthy broken crapola that's left behind! I have to go to the 'burbs to do some good thrifting.

As for my neighborhood, Lake Merritt, Oakland, I've been traumatized by all the tree removal permits (fluttering an angry red in the wind, stapled to every tree along my daily walk to BART since mid-December). There has only been one drunken crying tree-hugging incident so far. I went on a couple "tree walks" held by Oakland's Public Works Agency, and got some faith in the process as they explained it. I still wrote my protest letter asking they try to preserve the lives of the 15 (beautiful, healthy) magnolias lining the approach to the 12th Street pedestrian tunnel. I don't know what possible good it could have done, but I had to say my say-so.

As for my home life, my favorite products keep being discontinued, forcing me to new heights of creativity. Last year EO discontinued a wonderful lavender-honey body scrub and then repackaged it in a container half the size and doubled the price. So, today I put together the five ingredients (why did it take me this long?) and it makes a perfectly passable substitute for the $4-an-ounce version they are trying to sell. Honey + kaolin clay + fine-ground brown rice + lavender oil + glycerin. Try it!

My first batch was made with this recipe:

2 T kaolin clay
1 T organic brown rice meal (long grain, fine ground in a coffee grinder)
2 t organic orange blossom honey
1/2 t glycerin (a liquid skin protectant/ soap)
5-7 drops lavender (lavendula officinalis) essential oil
1 drop eucalyptus oil
1 drop rose oil

I will probably play with the mix of oils in my next batch. Maybe another kind of lavender oil.

I'll try to remember to post my recipe to deal with the disappearance of the mucho delicioso frozen ginger-butter-carrot-almond mixture from Trader Joe's shelves.

North Country Briefs

These tidbits were selected for me by my father from the past few months' Watertown Daily Times, and now I'm passing them on to you. None of them are as good as the windchime theft article (a windchime had been removed from a porch; "no suspects [had been] identified"), and no way do any of them come close to the DWI case of the guy driving his lawnmower home carrying a pizza who fell asleep stopped on an overpass on the way home. Still carrying the pizza. He had lost his license for DWI (in a car, one presumes), and also had been arrested once for trying to "direct traffic" while intoxicated. Nor do these match the item that covered a sad weekend when a woman both threatened her husband with a hammer and then later smacked him with a pair of pants, landing her in custody. But they will do.

Woman Cited in Assault In Frying Pan Incident

LAFARGEVILLE - Paula E. Snyder, 46, of 36768 Sprucedale Ave., has been summoned to town of Orleans court following a domestic fight Saturday night when she allegedly hit a man in the face with a frying pan, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department. She is charged with third-degree assult of Christopher Gushlaw, 35, same address, deputies said. Mr. Gushlaw declined treatment for a black eye, deputies said.

Frying pan assaults seem to crop up in the North Country Briefs often enough that my father has a tidy collection of them, spanning years.

Man Charged in Theft Of Beer Bottle in Pants

A Watertown man was charged Friday afternoon with petit larceny after he tried to walk out of a grocery store with a bottle of beer in his pants, city police said. Earl Tooley, 59, of 653 State St., Apt. 1, attempted to steal a 22-ounce bottle of beer from the Great American supermarket, 672 State St., police said. He is to appear in City Court on Oct. 27, police said.

Part of the fun of these briefs is how very much info they pack in about a tiny, tiny incident. Quotes from the pants-slapping victims, the high school the DUI-suspect attended, the number of ounces in the beer you shoved down your pants, EVERYone's exact apartment number. I mean, this is such a small town community, when you lay out a photo montage of North Nosebleed AKA Adams Center, my (and Melvil Dewey's! our celebrity can out-librarian your town's celebrity!) home town, taken from the local grain elevator, the whole thing fits in 6 photos (handily fits). The area is full of tiny hamlets like this. Even with Fort Drum expanding now and then, the whole county only has 100,000 people, maybe. The only public transport connecting us to the world, the Greyhound route from Massena to Syracuse, has been cancelled due to lack of ridership. I used to know that bus schedule by heart, catching the bus at the end of my road to go somewhere (anywhere). Shouting over my shoulder "I've got my key, don't wait up!"


And lastly, from the very place where I went to school (the next field over from the high school):

Golf Cart Found Sunk

ADAMS - A golf cart at Tomacy's Golf Course was found submerged in a water hazard Sunday morning, according to state police. Somebody removed the cart from the area of the pro shop between 11 pm Saturday and 6 am Sunday, police said.

Part of the fun of this one is that - you may notice - it's a crime being handled by the State Police. Not the local police. Why? Because there are no local police. No professional fire fighters. A smattering of EMTs. When my horse kicked me in the head a local EMT happened by some miracle to be driving by and see me fall in the manure pile, so I got primo care and a fast ambulance ride. Otherwise, who knows when I'd have gotten help. We only get about about two dozen cars on the road all day. When my sister and I set up lemonade stands we always had to eat the costs. No customers up this way.

Speaking of my sister, she is also passing through the Nosebleed and today we went cross-country skiing, which put us in the mood to reminisce about how we had to do this for gym class throughout our school years. We skiied around the elementary school track, noses and eyes tearing-up in the wind and cold, and talked about how stinky and awful the shoes would be by the end of the day. The way they'd conduct the first couple classes every year without poles, a great hilarity for the many students with weight problems. The way the school would be pondering whether to close early because of terrible wind and blinding snow, but we'd still be out there on the ski trail, doing timed laps. One year I had a first period gym class (i.e. skiing in the dark AND the snow AND the wind), and honestly the skiing section of the year was a little more fun-- dry shoes, a clean trail (instead of a plaster-smooth sheet of skid marks) - even the chance to break the trail, which I got to do once or twice. But this time I was with my 3-years-elder big sister, and we didn't even discuss it-- she broke the trail.

She is, after all, stuck in a condo in Manhattan the rest of the year. I get California.

More News from North Nosebleed

Our local newspaper publishes the inadvertantly entertaining "North Country Briefs." One recent highlight: a woman was arrested for walking in the road. When she was arrested, she threw the chair she was cuffed to through the wall. One of her charges was then interfering with the administrative governing process, or something. I guess that's the new fangled way of saying "resisting arrest."

The paper also publishes the "news from 100 years ago."

Apparently in 1905 on this date the revolution in the Russian Empire was causing concern to local folks because New York Air Brake (our only local factory) had a componant factory in a village outside Moscow. A "platoon of dragoons" was dispatched to check on the US Americans working there. Nobody from Watertown, NY, was working there at the time.

Meanwhile, in other news, these past few days the obits have had a beautician, a farmer, a mechanic, and a slough of "homemakers." It really isn't fair to have the job you held be the first thing after your name in the obits, at least not up here, where there is so little in the way of employment. I mean, the farmer is a dying breed and it's good to know when one goes the way of the elves, but those other folks probably had other identities they were proud of, maybe prouder than the thing they did to pay the rent.

I also saw a photo spread of noteable local gingerbread houses. Someone did a trailer park in gingerbread.

In local snowman developments, there is now a huge lady snowman with a big yellow bikini up on the top of a hill on the outskirts of Watertown. A little further down the road someone has, as their only holiday decoration, a lit-up plastic palm tree stuck in their front snowbank.

Today I finally got to see a house with Tyvek insulation panels instead of siding. That is our signature dish on the Northern New York architecture menu (usually with s a side of slumped-over burned-out barn). In the sunlight (which I haven't seen yet this trip, but when it happens) these foil-wrapped insulation panels really gleam beautifully across the wind-blasted fields of snow.

Happy Christmas from North Nosebleed

I'm home in North Nosebleed (25 miles south of the Great White North, population 2,500 if you count the larger farming area, 500 if you just count "downtown"), and we just got back from our Christmas morning church service. The minister was phoning it in, so he read a story from Reader's Digest and then read this piece of shite from the internet about how each of the 12 days of Christmas has a Christian symbolism behind it (11 ladies dancing = the 11 faithul apostles... the sad ultimate conclusion of which analogy is jesus in a pear tree, as in nailed dead to a pear tree). So of course stuck in my head for the rest of the service was the Great White North Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 Days of Christmas, which ends with a beer ...in a pear tree.

Another highlight of my Christmas morning-- seeing that one of the many local snowmen has a very straight and tall pine-branch mohawk.

Now, PRESENTS.