207. Dragon Boat Races

International Dragon Boat Races

The Lake Merritt venue for DBR is growing on me. It doesn’t seem to be as popular with dragon boat teams though, there were fewer teams this year than last year. For the first time I had time on my hands mid-day on Sunday. In the past this event has run me ragged all day, both days.

In part this was because I’ve gotten better and the other crew we work with has gotten better (they know to stay our of my way), but I think there were just fewer teams. Poor Oakland.

I do still miss the Treasure Island site. It was always fun getting there and just being out there in the middle of the bay. But Lake Merritt is at least as beautiful in its own way. It’s also fun for me because it just feels so foreign (in a Midwestern sort of way) compared with SF. I’ve learned the local bus situation now so I’m not making the long hike from BART. And just waiting for my bus on Grand at the end of the day is interesting. That stretch of Grand could not be mistaken for any area of SF. 

Of course the weather plays a part in this. We managed to dodge the worst of the heat this year (it’s been getting hotter each day since Saturday but isn’t going to peak until Wednesday). It was warm but comfortable both days this year, whereas last year it was scorching.

Here are the few photos I took on my Saturday lunch break:

This is the view from the building where they fed volunteers and staff. From left (south) to right (north):

Below there's a spectator area on the left and one of the two crew areas (with all the tents) to the right, with the modest skyline of Oakland behind.

This year I was the only one on the crew who had worked the event before -- this is one Mary, the boss, has never worked -- so I made several suggestions for how best to handle it. There were really just two issues for me: More than the usual landfill dumpster space, because most of the waste here comes from food vendors and crew teams, neither of which have any understanding of what is and isn’t allowed (lots of Styrofoam). And time at the end (and possibly assistance) sorting and taking down the stations at the end of the day. I have a nice paper-trail of emails in which Mary and I are on the same page about all this. And then comes reality.

Not only did the event not increase the landfill dumpster space, they reduced it across the board. Officially, we didn’t have a compost dumpster. Ja___, the manager for the other, hauling crew, (we also work together at Art & Soul) and I decided to ignore this and make one of the too small dumpsters compost and the other recycling. The bigger (but not big enough) dumpster was for landfill. Jo___ (the actual crew chief, who had never worked this event before so was following our lead) went along. 

End of day Saturday I was starting to fear we would get Jo___ in trouble if we ended up with a partly full compost dumpster while we ran out of room for recycling. I don’t think I’ve made it clear that in all likelihood, our compost dumpster is going to be dumped into landfill -- for reasons unclear to any of us. 

Fortunately for Jo___, when we left Sunday night the landfill dumpster was full to overflowing; (this is a problem when you’re hauling it away on a freeway. But not our problem) the recycling dumpster was also full to overflowing; and the compost/landfill dumpster was equally full to overflowing. 

There was no way we could have allocated the dumpsters provided that would have held all the waste the event generated. We at least had the satisfaction of doing our part as well as we could (see also Tibetan sand paintings) while the event was left with three messes on their hands, thanks to trying to save a few bucks on dumpster rentals. And if Waste Management (the company that owns the dumpsters) really do dump our compost into landfill, we will at least have the satisfaction of knowing they had to also deal with the nasty overflows. It couldn’t have worked out better, given the circumstances.


And then there was that other matter of my being left to sort and take down the stations at the end. Ja___, is one of my favorite people in this event greening world. We’ve worked together for years and know each other well. His crew is, at best, well-meaning but limited, but through repetition and practice we’ve learned to work well together. Closing down on Saturday went really smoothly. The dreaded black vendor/team bags came to conveniently located eco-stations where I sorted them into clear, labeled bags to go straight into the proper dumpster. We left an hour early with nothing left but a cluster of black bags a food vendor (not in my area) put out at the last moment. And Sunday was going just as smoothly... until the end. 

As I said, it was actually slow mid-afternoon. I started taking down some peripheral stations in preparation for the late rush in the center of the two crew areas. Ja___ reminded his crew to let me take the stations down. And then, out of nowhere, our third crew member, who had never worked the event before, came through and -- I think because all the crews were away at the awards ceremony -- thought everything was over and took down my key sorting stations. I was left with a couple poorly situated places to sort the black bags as they slowly appeared after the crews returned from the ceremony. 

The one thing I could never have anticipated.

In the end it worked out fine. In fact, it has occurred to me that this kind of worked to my advantage in one small way. Which leads me to a new term I’ve just coined, Greening PTSD.

When I was advocating for more landfill and some assistance at the end of this event, I had a vague sense of how nasty it had been last year closing down, but I seem to have blocked out the very worst experience. One team, I don’t know which one and I don’t want to know, used the worst trash containers I’ve ever seen in their little camp (I really don’t understand how I’ve never seen them in action, only at the end when we have to deal with them). 

I’m guessing normal people don’t have a “favorite” trash bag, but I do. Maybe three years ago now, at HSB, there was some screw up and we couldn’t get the usual trash cans, so we fell back on medium sized toters for all three waste streams. And we had these huge, heavy duty plastic liners that fit these toters. (I’m told we still have boxes of them in storage.) These bags are so strong they can stand on their own, so one person (well, me) can dump a partial load of landfill or even glass-heavy recycling from a toter into the bag without needing the usual assistance. I adore these bags and still rave about them if given half a chance.

Anyway, the team bags are just like this only instead of tough plastic they are made of opaque paper. So you can’t see what’s in them and the bottom is almost certainly pulp. And the contents are whatever anyone has tossed in over two days. They are an order of magnitude worse than the dreaded, black plastic vendor bags.

Because my co-worker had unaccountably closed down my sorting station, when these bags showed up -- mere feet from where my station had been! -- I said screw it, and had Ja___’s crew haul it all back to our dumpsters unsorted. It was only last night, while thinking over the events of the day, that it came back to me what it had been like sorting those bags last year, and how the experience had cruelly touched me in my special place. (I’m pushing the Sexual Trauma angle of PTSD here.) 

If my station had been up, I would have sorted the damn things. And while I have to admit I hope they came back to the guy who took down my stations so that he had to sort them, I really hope Jo___ just tossed them in the landfill. 

And that’s all you were eagerly waiting to learn about this year’s dragon boat races... except to report that once again this year, there was a winner in every race. 

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

I like to think my campaign to promote HSB machochism in our little greening community is having some success. Jo___ seems to be looking forward to the upcoming work-fest as much as I am. Though it’s worth recalling that this could in part be because two years ago he was in a drug induced coma in the local burn unit at this time, so working really hard in Golden Gate Park is something of a lark in comparison.

Mary is desperate for more bodies this year as HSB and Fleet Week are overlapping -- I will be sorry to miss my usual greening of Marina Green with the airshow roaring above, but that doesn’t compare with HSB. Several of Ja___’s crew are signing on, and Jo___ was trying to tempt Ja___, which would be great, but he wasn’t buying it. 

The Class of '70

Your high school graduating class is one of those things that is only important (if it's important at all) while you are still in high school. As we were closing down our base by the dumpsters last night, and talking about greening related things, it came up that our third crew member (the one who blindsided me) and I are both class of '70. It came up because 1970 was also the year of the first Earth Day, and the year I sold my car (stopped consuming gasoline) and became a vegetarian (stopped consuming meat). 

I had deflated a rant against the environment destroying ways of capitalism by pointing out that capitalism didn't force people (me) to do the things that are harming the environment. It's a little like the elderly woman in Mesa who would complain about my working on the Sabbath while I drove her to church in my taxi. 

Let's blame capitalism for giving us the things we choose to buy. The world is full of failed capitalists (or at least failed entrepreneurs, their fellow travelers, I suppose) whose dreams were dashed when people refused to buy what they wanted to sell.

At any rate, I now know the two of us are the same age. I'm as bad guessing ages as I am remembering names, so I had never wondered how old he was, so I can't say I'm surprised that we are both class of '70. (And why does it seem like that should appear on a banner whenever you say it, even to yourself?) It does make me wish we were better friends -- he lives way north of SF so mostly works up there, where I never venture. If we were better friends I could now make senior citizen jokes at his expense.

109. Oakland

Previous - 108. Creating fiction

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Absalom

p317 ...who could know what times he [Bon] looked at Henry's face and thought, not there but for the intervening leaven of that blood which we do not have in common is my skull, my brow, sockets, shape and angle of jaw and chin and some of my thinking behind it, and which he could see in my face in his turn if he but knew to look as I know but there, just behind a little, obscured a little by that alien blood whose admixing was necessary in order that he exist is the face of the man who shaped us both out of that blind chancy darkness which we call the future; there -- there -- at any moment, second, I shall penetrate by something of will and intensity and dreadful need, and strip that alien leavening from it and look not on my brother's face whom I did not know I possessed and hence never missed, but my father's, out of the shadow of whose absence my spirit's posthumeity has never escaped... 

How does Bon know to recognize this similarity? And do half brothers really look so much alike? 

...this flesh and bone and spirit [Henry] which stemmed from the same source that mine did, but which sprang in quiet peace and contentment and ran in steady even though monotonous sunlight, where that which he bequeathed me sprang in hatred and outrage and unforgiving and ran in darkness... 

Through most of this, Shreve could just as easily be talking about God (the Father) rather than Supten. And Henry could be shorthand for the White race and Bon for the Black race. This even sounds biblical.

Women's March

After 40 years I don't even think about riding through a metal tube under the bay every time I take BART between SF and Oakland, except when the train stops in the middle and just sits there. Today I volunteered to sort and collect the trash at the City Hall end of the anti-Trump march. I may not be able to do anything about the political situation, but I can handle the trash like a rock star.

I left Oakland after 4pm (I'm always happy to let the younger people put everything away at the end), and found a crowd of people at the 12th Street BART station either leaving our event or headed for the much bigger SF march. Maybe some were doing both. The crowds were so big at the SF Civic Center BART Station that the trains were backed up far into the tube. It took us quite a while to make it to the first SF station, where I bailed since I figured walking was more predictable than being stuck in the train. 

You would think that exiting two stops early would mean more walking, but really it only amounts to a block or two. It's that darned Market Street diagonal again. As the bird flies, it's about the same distance to my house from all three stations. I chose a walking route that is two blocks longer because it avoids the steepest block. If it had been raining harder (and I had thought of it) I could have grabbed a cable car and been dropped a block above my apartment. My plan is to take advantage of that option once I'm eligible for the Senior discount -- making the most of my Golden Years.

Checking in on Facebook this evening, I knew people who had attended marches in SF, DC, St Paul, Mexico City, and even Flagstaff. Everyone seemed to feel better because of the marches. In Oakland I felt a little ashamed of myself for hating David Ricardo more than I hated Donald Trump.

And I missed that Kumbaya feeling other people had because the recycling scavengers were stealing not only the cans and bottles (which we didn't care about) but, in at least two instances, they took the entire bag leaving no place for people to recycle. So this is now the first event of 2017 and I'm ready to kill them. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Postscript

Thanks to the Golden Cheeto I'm thinking about greening two months early, damn him. One of the things I'm best at in my greening career, is adjusting to unexpected circumstances at events. Yesterday I had no idea I was going to be the virtual crew chief at Oakland City Center and also virtually the only experienced staff. After we got set up, the woman who suckered me into this gig took off to join the march so, it was just me and three untrained volunteers until almost the very end. But I really prefer to plan and to be prepared.

If I had anticipated having to coordinate volunteers I would have come up with a plan, but, taken by surprise, I just explained the basic of Oakland trash sorting -- which you could almost see passing through their heads the way gold passes through the GI tract, not being affected and not having any effect -- and then turned them loose with pickers and bags. In fact this worked out fine. They came with a notion of walking around with pickers and keeping the grounds fairly clean, which they managed quite well. Again, had I been anticipating my role here I would have made a mental note to encourage them about all this, but instead I just focused on my task of keeping all the three-stream stations sorted and accessible (not over-filled). 

My volunteers (including the barefoot one and the one who had deep thoughts about the environment that took a surprising amount of time for him to express) brought their unsorted bags to our gathering point -- much like a cat coming home with a dead bird or mouse -- so when I made it back there after hitting all our stations, I then took their bags to a busy nearby station where I sorted it into those bags until I had full compost and landfill bags to label and drag back to our headquarters. If it was a Green Mary event the collectors would probably have been able to do their own sorting, but maybe not as well or as quickly as I can, so, again, it worked fine.

In the end, they kept the grounds reasonably clean while I kept the stations reasonably sorted, and at the end of the day I was even able to sort-down and shut down most of our stations so that when Liza returned all she had to do was load already sorted and marked bags into a pickup truck and then return all the gear to the garage where we collected it in the morning. I would give everyone passing marks, except for me as volunteer coordinator. But then again I didn't kill any of the recycling scavengers, so I should get some bonus points for that.

According to the morning news, both Oakland and San Francisco drew crowds of 100,000 -- which I have a hard time believing. I would have thought Oakland was less and SF more, but then the plaza at the end of the march wasn't big enough to hold all the marchers so I never saw all of them at the same time (thank god.) Santa Cruz, where one of my Buffy friends was marching claimed 10,000 and Flagstaff, where a friend from college was marching managed 1,200 in a snow storm. Didn't look up St Paul or DC.  

Oakland

This was the same setting as the Art and Soul Street Festival we work every summer -- only less of it. I spent much of the day looking around Frank Ogawa Plaza and, as usual, thinking about how far Oakland falls short of its potential. (Wiki seems to have gone to some trouble to not show any decent photos of the place so I'll include two below, the first shows my main view on Saturday -- though I was at ground level -- and the other shows the visual focus of the plaza, the handsome Oakland City Hall, during Art and Soul.) 

Sadly, many of the retail spaces in the area are vacant. Partly this is because few people live in the area and the people who work near here are only here for work. Another reason, and a reason I wouldn't have a business here, is that since at least the Occupy days this area has gotten vandalized and or looted any time people have gotten upset about anything. 

One relatively nondescript building on the plaza I had never really noticed before is the Rotunda. I just looked it up and it's gorgeous inside, and apparently primarily a wedding venue.

If Jerry Brown, during his years as mayor of Oakland, had just allowed unlimited residential zoning within a two block walk to a BART station, downtown Oakland could be as vibrant as SF by now. Actually I doubt that -- Oakland can always find a way to screw itself.

Next - 110. Tainted blood and sticky buds

43. 94 F

Previous - 42. Apocalyse

Saturday

The first day of the Dragon Boat Races went pretty well. I was foolish to think it would be dramatically easier than in past years. Instead of the crews being in one paved area they were in two separate grassy areas divided by a road. One of the grassy areas had more trees than the other -- which would turn out to be important for the shade. But I'll get more into that when I talk about Sunday. Lake Merritt is a lovely place for boat races and this park is much nicer (and bigger) than I knew. Something else I've learned thanks to my Greening work. 

Cities and Burke & Jacobs

I was standing on the sidewalk in downtown Oakland -- in front of the new offices of the Oakland Tribune --- waiting for the shuttle to take me to the Dragon Boat Races, when I make a connection I don't recall ever making before. 

This is the old Oakland Tribune building.

Some of Oakland's finest surviving buildings were across the nearly dead street from me. Downtown Oakland, like many other traditional American downtowns, has never recovered from the economic devastation caused by the auto-age. These cities are like the failed states produced by the "Arab Spring" in that the consequences of making changes had dramatic unintended consequences. People, like Robert Moses or Le Corbusier or Mary Shelley's parents, think you can make extensive changes to complex systems -- even start over from scratch -- without considering Edmund Burke's conservatism and the need to make small changes while keeping an eye out for signs of system failure. 

Jane Jacobs was arguing for the same kind of conservatism for cities that Burke was for political states. Cities are actually trickier than states in that they are inherently dynamic and strict conservation -- preventing any change -- would be as bad as too much change. The same is true of nations of course, but cities need to change even faster if they are to thrive. 

Sunday

Day two of the Dragon Boat Races was an entirely different experience. For one thing, my sock/shoe insert strategy for working multiple days in a row failed miserably: It felt like I was getting a blister on the bottom of my left heel at the start of the day. (I have two weeks to work this out before the three days of HSB.) And then it was hotter than it had been on Saturday.

As I think I've said, San Francisco has not had a summer this year. We've had one day when it hit 80 F and for virtually all August it was below 70. On Saturday in Oakland -- always warmer than SF -- it was in the low 80s. When it felt hotter on Sunday I wrote it up to my working harder and the natural tendencies of San Franciscans to whine when it's over 80 or under 40. I worked to stay hydrated because I sweat profusely, but I didn't really think much about it aside from pausing, during a mid-afternoon hydration break, to realize I was really beat and still had four more hours (the hardest four hours) to go. Something about all this -- the heat and the park setting -- was reminding me of something but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

My crew chief suggested I get a cold beverage at the volunteer food area and I enthusiastically took her up on this brilliant idea. (On Treasure Island the volunteer food/break area had been in a hot tent with views of nothing. Here it was on the second floor of the boat house with the best views of the event. There was even an outdoor, but under shade, terrace. It was really nice.) I grabbed my ice cold water and went to sit outside in the shade. 

This is a dragon boat on Lake Merritt but not from the festival. That is the boathouse in the background with the outdoor deck on the left. I was working in the trees to the left of what is shown here. Our dumpsters were awkwardly located near the building on the far right, which is much better than what was shown on the map we were given. Either my Chicken Little impression of the consequences of having the dumpsters so far away made them rethink their plans or the map was created by people not good with maps. I would lean toward the not-good-with-maps option.

As I said, I was working two crew areas (with bus traffic in between) and James had one of his people assigned to each area to keep things clean and to haul my sorted bags out to the road where they could be picked up (by James, usually). I had been wondering what had happened to the guy in one of these areas as my bags had started to pile up noticeably.  I found him listening to the Oakland Raiders football game up there in the shade. Smart... though not helpful. 

As a response to some boneheaded play by a Raider, he said something like, "That's the kind of thing you learn not to do in Pop Warner." And that's when the penny dropped and I realized what this day had been reminding me of. 

"Pop Warner" football is a program for pre-high school age kids. I played three years of Pop Warner football while living in the San Fernando Valley in the mid-1960s. The worst... worst part of the season was our training camp in mid-summer before the season really started. It was the equivalent of boot-camp but held in a lovely park in Encino. (This was the only occasion I had any reason to be in Encino, which was on the other end of the Valley. Why we trained there rather than at our usual facility in White Oak I don't know, but speculate it was so we didn't come to hate our regular practice field.) This was always at the hottest part of the summer with vile, mid-60's air quality. All I remember are hellish episodes of exercise and endless running with maybe a few blissful minutes collapsed in the shade under the trees.

Both Saturday and Sunday were "Spare the Air" days, and perhaps the program works because I didn't notice the smell of ozone, something I'm finely attuned to thanks to those years in the Valley. But the heat and lack of wind and the constant work (and sweating) were certainly reminiscent of those days almost 50 years ago. And then, when I got home, while drinking close to a liter of electrolyte water to keep the foot and leg cramps at bay, I learn that I hadn't been working in 80 degree heat but in an Oakland record (for the day) 94 F. That explains so much.

Our crew was one person short of what it should have been, and, because the worst trash doesn't come in until the vendors (and in this case the crew teams) breakdown at the end of the day (and the crews tend to party which delays things even more), I would have needed another half hour to get my sections shut down to my satisfaction. Some bags went directly into the landfill that I "could" have diverted. But for the most case, if I do say so myself, I totally rocked it, while also training one of James's people who sometimes also works for us. In part this went well because the crews didn't leave behind some of the most difficult trash I recall from previous DBRs, and in part because I was grabbing stuff from them throughout the day -- my plan for the year. 

In any event, when my shift was over I walked away (limped away, and I still had to walk quite a few blocks to catch a train home) not really caring about those final bags. I was at the open end of the landfill dumpster and was, I admit, tempted to look at the most recent bags to see if they were ones I had marked as sorted, but it was getting dark and I just wanted to go home, take a shower, and dig into that bottle of electrolyte water.

I almost forgot the highlight of the day. Cans and bottles of some beverages come in cardboard containers wrapped in plastic,

 The problem with this packaging for us is that the plastic goes in the landfill stream while the cardboard goes in either the recycling or compost. I've joked in the past that we should teach seminars in the occult science of removing the cardboard from the plastic (flattening cardboard boxes is the other skill vendors seem unaware of). Yesterday a high school aged rowing crew member came up to a station where I was working with one of these empty boxes and asked if it went in the recycling. I said yes, once you remove the plastic, which, and I give him credit here, he preceded to do. Only it was so pathetic. At one point I thought he was going to start crying. I even offered to finish it for him but he was determined. Though I did still have to flatten the cardboard.

I say it was the highlight of my day, because it made me laugh, but really it was sad. We are never going to win this battle to get people to properly sort their own trash.

And there was something else that made me laugh. The PA directed all the teams to their marshaling points by name. One crew was going by the team name "Boaty McBoatface."

Caption.

It's no secret I have an interest in military history and weapon systems. This leads to my viewing any number of YouTube videos and even commenting on them. Which then means I get a long stream of notifications of responses or other comments. Currently, we are more than a few days into a debate about the relative value of Sherman and Panther tanks during WW2. I'm using the popular names though most of the weirdos in these debates use the official designations -- though they may disagree even on that, and they aren't even as specific as I would like. It quickly gets very complicated. 

And the reason I'm bringing this up is because of an image I just saw of a B-24 bomber from the same period. You could argue (well, I could argue) that the B-24 and the M4, excuse me, Sherman tank have something in common. While no one would ever say they were the best bomber or tank of the period, they each played an essential role in wining the war. 

The B-24 is the ugly stablemate of the more beloved B-17. Most crews come to praise their aircraft, even if it wasn't what they would have chosen (I'm thinking of the P-47 here), but I don't recall hearing anyone say they loved the B-24. And yet it was, arguably, more important to winning the war than the B-17. It carried a heavier bomb load, but that isn't what made it so valuable in all theaters of the war. It was it's longer range that made it possible for the US and the UK to close the gap in the mid-Atlantic where German U-boats had previously been safe. And in the Pacific it could hit remote targets like Truk. 

It wasn't until almost the end of the war in Europe that the U.S. Army fielded a tank that was the equivalent (face to face) of the best German and Soviet Tanks, but the Sherman was operationally superior to everything else in almost every situation. You don't need to defeat Panthers and Tigers one-on-one to win a war. 

Just as the Japanese wasted precious resources on building super battleships they didn't really need, the Germans wasted their resources on building tanks that were a poor value for their army. I've heard that there is a Russian proverb, "Better is the enemy of good enough." The Sherman and the B-24 are perfect examples of "good enough." 

And, since we've come this far, it's worth noting that by the end of the war, the Sherman had been improved to M4A3 status which included a version with what was essentially a 105mm assault gun (in a regular turret) and the M4A3e8 (Easy Eight) version that mounted a decent anti-tank gun. The M4A3 family of vehicles may not have looked as cool as their German or Soviet equivalents, but they got the job done. 

Next - 44. Jacobs & George

6. The East Bay

Previous - Transbay Transit Center

But first...

Back in 1992 I had an idea for a movie. Over the years I've had lots of "ideas" for movies but this one was different, for one thing I plotted it out scene by scene and even wrote it all down -- someplace. But just now the idea came back to me and, 24 years later, I still have the whole thing in my head. All the connections and character overlaps... the whole thing.

I'm no more likely to do something with it now than I was then, (for one thing the idea built on two movies that had recently come out and the context was important to the surprising place the story was to go), but that something as ephemeral as an imagined movie can hang around in your head for so long really surprises me. 

Oakland 

Oakland, not San Francisco, really should be the first city of Northern California. The transportation connections are much better. The weather is better. There's more room to expand. True, it is sitting on a fault that is due to cut loose at any moment, but that's not the kind of thing we hold against a city here in California.

On Friday I took the train to Oakland and then transferred to a bus to go up in the hills to the surprising location of a lawyer's office. I'm in Oakland so infrequently that when I do pass through I really see it. The area between Broadway (downtown) and Lake Merritt seems to have been redeveloped during those ghastly (for redevelopment) decades after the war. The scale is wrong for cities but right for "California." The message the built environment is sending is "we all have cars now so let's spread out."

I rode the bus about half way to Piedmont (an enclave of wealth in the Oakland hills) and walked a convenient block to the lawyer's office in a great old house. The house across the street was a grand old Victorian stripped down, but not as brutally as you sometimes see. You really had to look before you notice there must once have been much more decorative trim. The vent duct sticking out the second floor turret wall facing the street is an unfortunate addition, but I bet the wall heater or, better, stove in that bedroom is a wonderful addition on rainy winter nights. It would have made much more sense to have set the TV show Charmed here rather than in SF. Here houses really do have front, back and side yards.

The lawyers house is a completely different California look: Stucco walls and arched windows. More rambling and not as tall. There's even a citrus tree just outside the conference room window. These streets are closer to Pasadena than SF.

The only time I worked in Oakland (in my coding days, I mean) we were located in an even grander house than this right on Lake Merritt. It was wonderful, though a long walk from the train, until it caught fire and we had to move to a more conventional office in another neighborhood. 

Berkeley 

This weekend I worked both days of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The setting is wonderful. Caesar Chavez Park sits atop an old landfill in San Francisco Bay. It's connected to Berkeley by a causeway. You might be thinking this is a flat park, but it is anything but. There are hills. It has had many years to become "natural." So natural, in fact, that they've had to start a program to exterminate the burrowing animals that were disturbing the seal that separates the bay from all the tons of waste under the park.

The festival itself is quite spectacular with huge kites and experts flying kites in formation and kite fights. (Do a Google Image search.) But on the hills overlooking the main venue and to the north, just behind the row of food vendors, there are hundreds of people putting on their own show with their own kites. Many are as spectacular as the ones featured in the event.

Normally our home base is wherever they leave the giant debris boxes (dumpsters), but the City of Berkeley pays their (union rate) sanitation people to man a couple conventional garbage trucks and haul the bags of waste we sort to the trucks. (Until the end when they drive the trucks through the event and pick up anything that remains.) 

The trucks -- and therefore our home base -- are located in a saddle between two areas of hills. Looking west from that vantage point you see across the bay past Alcatraz to the Golden Gate and its bridge. I stress the Gate and not the bridge because the weather here (the micro climate) is determined by the wind and fog blowing directly through the Gate. North and south it might be sunny and warm but here it is often foggy, cold, and very windy. Hence a great location for a kite festival. 

I tend to get really wrapped up in my work so I can be oblivious to my surroundings, but I really do try to pay attention -- especially in Golden Gate Park and here on the Bay (Treasure Island is even better). Every time I would climb the slope up to our home base I would see the stunning vista of the Bay with SF's skyline to the south and the hills of Angel Island and Marin to the north. And then I would turn around (looking down wind) and see the sky (often blue on Sunday) full of colorful kites.

And then I would go back into the crowd to sort down a badly contaminated three container (compost, recycling, landfill) trash station only to have someone toss their plate full of food into the landfill container I had just cleaned out, and I would want to drag that person to the bay (by the hair or the junk) and drown them... slowly.

Next - 7. Socks & concrete