192. Art & Soul

An SF eclipse

This is the morning of the eclipse. Here in SF it's only a partial eclipse, and it's still foggy, so you can't even see the sun. So I'm surprised to see so many people, many in little groups, out on street corners trying to see the eclipse. They either have the special glasses or are pointing their smartphones where the sun probably is.

I find this disturbing as what they should be doing is joining me in trying to locate a virgin to sacrifice before it's too late. I approached several tourist families with daughters who didn't look too skanky, but they were not as public spirited as I had hoped. We may be doomed.

Art & Soul

This weekend was the Art & Soul Festival in downtown Oakland. I worked both days (I'm tired) but it went just about perfectly, so I'm happy. I had intended to take photos but was so busy I forgot. Here's the only photo I took, as I was heading to my sector Sunday.

Our debris boxes. The big one on the left holds all the toters we were using for hauling and for vendor stations. Some of the toters are on the street side of the dumpsters. Oakland's Waste Management uses a nonsensical color system where landfill is brown, recycling is gray, and only compost makes sense with green. And while SF's Recology toters are clearly labeled, these say nothing. The best thing about this year was that they had just repaved the streets downtown -- wonderfully smooth for dragging filled toters over.

My sector was a block of 12th Street, with food vendors and some porta-potties, and two of the four stages, including the main stage. Some of our (Green Mary) people came into my area doing roving sorting, but they were mostly the useless people who sort but don't pull bags or what they've sorted -- rather like OCD people who rake up all the leaves in a wind storm, but don't do anything with the leaves, so they just blow around again. And Oakland provided a crew of haulers working under James. James and I have worked together for years and, by Sunday, we really had it down -- which means that his guys had instructions to leave my stations alone until I pulled the bags. With a very few exceptions, I pulled every bag for them to haul. But until the end of the day, when I sorted down the stations as I took them apart, there were very few bags actually pulled, as I just pulled out the compost into green, compostable bags, that only I was using, so it was even easier to spot my bags that can just be tossed into the compost dumpster. I went through about four rolls of bags over the weekend, not bad considering that the event is a bit short (Noon to 7:30) and started out slowly each day.

The vendors are always clueless, so the best you can do is to go by periodically and sort the mess they've made. Yes, this is the sorting-and-not-pulling behavior I was just complaining about, but they have large toters instead of small bags, so it mostly makes sense to wait until the toters get full to swap them out and dump them. It worked reasonably well. 

The other problem area is the main stage and back stage. The security guy at the main stage asked me on Sunday if we could move the two stations in the crowd area against the wall/fence and I realized that would be better for me, too. So we did, and that helped. By mid-day the crowds there are such that I can only get in there at set breaks and with a bag, instead of a toter. So I would carry my bag through, clear the compost out of the two stations, and then go back stage and clean up the stations back there. Musicians and backstage caterers have an intense competition to see who can ignore the trash sorting instructions the most, and as usual, this year everyone was a winner.


I'm running low on content (or I've been busy with other things) so I'm not sure when I will post next.