I actually saw this happen, out of the corner of my eye: something dark flashed against the window facing the street, and I heard a thump. Damn kids throwing something, I thought, and then thought again: did we just have a bird fly into the window?
It's a big square window with no interior panes. It was possible. I went out and peered among the hellebores under the window. Yup, on the ground was a small brown bird - lying on its back, with its little feet sticking up in the air, panting rapidly. I wondered if I should try to rescue it, and then thought no, it's likely just stunned. I never saw a bird lie on its back before.
I hadn't, of course, brought my camera, since I wasn't sure what I'd find. I scrambled back in the house, changed to the long lens, and came back out. The bird was still there, now right side up, standing (actually sort of squatting) on the ground. I took a picture:
The bird ignored me. I watched it for a minute and then went back in the house. I went back out to check on the bird maybe 4 or 5 times over the next half hour, and every time it was sitting there staring blankly. Finally, I went out to check and it was looking around, then it turned, hopped a couple of times, and flew off. OK, recovered.
My husband says there's a reason for the term "bird brain."
I had a very close call last night. I walked to the mailbox to drop in some letters with checks, which means I have to cross 2 streets. And yes, before you ask, I was wearing a brown jacket and navy slacks. It was around 5 PM on a largely cloudless afternoon, and while it wasn't blazing sunny, it wasn't what I call dark, either. It was bright twilight.
The intersection I have to cross is a T, and I was crossing the base of the T when this happened. As I walked across the street, a car pulled up to the stop sign in front of me, on the arm of the T, and signaled a left turn. I had just about reached the center line, so I stepped out a little to allow the driver to turn behind me. The driver then pulled into the oncoming lane and came straight at me. I jumped backward to get out of the way, lost my balance, and fell in the crosswalk, rolling on my right side. If that judo class I attended briefly decades ago taught me nothing else, it taught me how to fall! The car missed me by maybe two handspans - a little over a foot.
I picked myself up off the pavement as the car pulled to a stop (still in the oncoming lane). The driver (a 60-ish white woman) got out with both hands to her cheeks and said, "My God, I didn't even see you - I was thinking about something else!" My personal take is that when you're driving a car you should be thinking about driving the car, but I realize that's hopeless. I pointed out to her that if she had turned into the correct lane we wouldn't have been having the conversation at all, and stomped off. Except for a sore hand and hip, both of which are largely gone now, I wasn't hurt; but oh brother, was I shaken!
The incredible thing about all this is that I never dropped the letters, which were in my left hand.
I went on to the mailbox, and a woman in a car that had come up (in the lane where the idiot stopped) called to me and asked if I wanted the license plate. On consideration, I decided I did. I tried to report this to the police and they wouldn't take a report since I wasn't injured, and no officer saw the illegal turn. I may yet file a citizen's report.
There's nothing startling here. It's been suggested that I should have been wearing lighter colored clothing, to which I respond that the driver should have been aware of her surroundings. But the most dangerous thing any of us does, ever, is have anything to do with an automobile - including walking across a street in a quiet residential neighborhood.
For the last month or so I've been obsessing over the election and the economy to the point that I got almost nothing else done. Today I got my chain yanked; I got a reminder of what's really important.
It started so normally - my husband picked me up from a dress rehearsal, and we drove home on the streets because the freeway alternative was a parking lot, for some invisible reason. To protect as much privacy as possible, I won't name the exact location, and I don't know the names of most of the people.
Anyway, as we drove up this main street, I saw a woman in an orange-brown jacket, crossing the street in a crosswalk. We were in the right lane and she was past us, so we didn't slow.
Then there was a thump, and the next thing I saw was the orange-brown jacket draped across the right front fender of a small station wagon. I can still see it. The woman fell off into the street, and didn't move.
The station wagon rolled a little farther and stopped, and the driver got out.
As my husband pulled our car over to the curb, I dived for my cell phone, entered the password, and speed-dialed the police department emergency number. Then I waited. (Our local dispatch center is notoriously understaffed.) After 1 minute 40 seconds (per the call duration meter), I climbed out of the car and looked around.
I have to give my fellow citizens credit. There were at least 7 or 8 people out there. Five or six were gathered around the woman in the street: reminding each other not to move her, covering her with a blanket, feeling her pulse. Protecting her. The rest had put out flares, parked cars sideways, and were very professionally directing traffic around the accident. One man had a cell phone to his ear, and I yelled, "I'm still trying to get through to 911!"
Eventually I got through (I estimate in about 2 minutes). Since she landed in the street, the woman in the orange-brown jacket hadn't moved. Dispatch asked if she was bleeding; I yelled, "Is she bleeding?" to the group in the street, and relayed the "yes" back to the operator.
After that, response was very quick: first the nearest patrol team, then the ladder truck from the fire station, finally a pair of ambulances. One of the policemen asked me for a statement, and we adjourned to the patrol car to get his paper report form out of the rain. The police, fire, and EMT personnel scurried professionally around, and in about 45 minutes the whole area was cleaned up.
One of the officers told me the injured woman was alive when they put her into the ambulance. I was glad.
But this is a reality check. We Americans, especially younger ones, have an unspoken assumption that we're invulnerable and immortal. If we're older, we know we are neither, but we sometimes think, nothing will happen to me, I don't have time for it. But sometimes it happens anyway. I hope very much that everyone will come out of this intact (or at least, not permanently damaged); but the victim put a hole the size of her head in the car's windshield. And the EMTs took the driver off in the second ambulance, just to make sure she wasn't hurt.
You hear a lot of rhetoric from the anti-abortion zealots about the sanctity of life, as if once those two cells merge, the resulting entity has some kind of right to a full life, the threescore-and-ten or whatever we live to these days. It's because of that "Right to Life" statement in the Declaration of Independence, and it's baloney. It's a nice sentiment, but people get killed all the time, by disease, accidents, and by other people. Life is very uncertain; modern drugs save lives that used to be lost to pneumonia and measles and tuberculosis, and they actually cure many cancer patients these days; but traffic accidents kill 40,000 - 45,000 people every year, or over 110 people a day, every day. And you get no warning, and no chance to clean up those things you were going to get to someday.
I'm not even sure what point I'm trying to make, except maybe: let's cut each other a little slack, and try to listen to each other, because we don't know how long any of us will be here. And maybe, there but for the grace of God go I.
Despite the subject line, this post isn't about the Bush administration or the financial bailout.
This is about skunks - the furry black-and-white critters with the unpleasant smell. We have a yard full of luxuriant bushes and plants, just the sort of place that a shy wild creature might like to move into, and I have a sinking feeling that a local skunk may have done just that.
As I look back at my Lunch in the Yard post, it was on August 28 that I complained about the lingering scent of skunk in the back yard. If only that had been the end of things - Friday of that week, we found a dead skunk in our back yard, right where the fence meets the corner of the garage. I took a picture of it, but I'll spare you. I looked up Oakland Animal Control on the Internet, and it basically said, we can't be bothered to send someone around - bury the carcass yourself. So we did.
We don't really know why the skunk died. If it was rabid, wouldn't they want to know? Evidently not. It didn't die in the garage, but according to my husband (who spends more time there than I do), it had been in the garage, and three weeks later he's still trying to air it out. Over the intervening several weeks, we've had skunk smells waft in, through the open upstairs windows, in the evening from time to time, which may be the remains of the last incident. Or maybe not.
Today, though, I came home from an errand, walked into the house, closed the door, and said to myself, "This place smells of skunk." Sniff again - yup, skunk. I turned on the house fan in hopes that the allergy filter on the furnace would help - several hours later I can't tell whether it has, or I've simply got used to the smell.
I began to worry when I went out to tour the foundation vents, and the access door to the crawl space, just outside the back door, was hanging from one rusted screw in one hinge (since fallen off). So anything smallish that wanted to nest under the back stairs could possibly have got in. The other vents were all solid, but it only takes one.
When my husband got home, he crawled part way under the house with a flashlight, and couldn't see or smell anything, except that we both smelled skunk strongly, right around the access door. Our current take is that a skunk sprayed the access door (which is right under an upstairs window we often open) but didn't get under the house. We left the door propped so something could get out but probably not back in, just in case.
I don't actually object to skunks; I wish them well; but I don't want them living under my house. I wish I didn't think that a local skunk had decided this is "his" yard. We already have a squirrel, a pair of towhees, and possibly a pair of Anna's hummingbirds living back there; surely that's enough wildlife support??
Driving home last night from a "summer sing-in" (I'll explain later), I saw a quarter moon in the sky, a waxing crescent. It was brown. The sky has been brown all week, too, because of all the fires in California; once or twice I've even smelled smoke, and I think the nearest fire is now around 100 miles away (the Basin Complex fire in Big Sur).
And it's only July. It's going to be a bad summer.
Oh, yes, "summer sing-in" - the Oakland Symphony Chorus, in which I sing second alto, does these for 6 weeks every summer. For a modest fee, you can show up at a local church on Tuesday night, borrow a score, and sing classical music, conducted by a professional conductor and accompanied by a pianist. Of course, if you own the score (some people do), you can bring your own copy. No auditions, and no requirement that you've ever sung the piece before; if you want to come and sight-read the Bach B Minor Mass (Tuesday August 5), go for it. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested, details are here. It's our 50th anniversary season and we'd love to have you.
Over the last several weeks, I've been doing something new: I've been getting to know the Oakland Police Department.
No, I haven't been arrested. Although I did spend the other afternoon riding around in a police cruiser. In East Oakland.
I subscribe to a local Yahoo! newsgroup on crime in the neighborhood. (After all, I live in the 4th most dangerous city in the United States.) Through the Yahoo! group, I learned that the OPD regularly offers a free "Citizens' Academy" - a 14 week program, available to any Oakland resident who's willing to show up every Saturday from 9 to noon. (They do run background checks. I doubt they'd let you attend if you had outstanding warrants.) You get presentations on every department (traffic, patrol, vice and narcotics, crime lab, K-9, etc.), given by people with experience in the department. I'm enjoying the class thoroughly; I've been reading detective stories for 50 years or so, and at last I'm finding out how a real police department functions, as opposed to the ones in the books.
So how did I end up riding around in a cruiser? Part of the Academy is a "ride-along" - each student picks a date and a shift, and you show up at the beginning of the shift and are assigned to an officer for the duration, usually 6 hours (although the officer's shifts are 12 hours). You ride around with him (I was assigned to a guy, although OPD has female officers) and see what he does. I went in with him on several low-risk interviews (a parked car bashed by a hit-and-run; a stolen vehicle; a school administrator trying to get a restraining order for a problem parent; a woman whose neighbor complained that her pets were waking him up). I sat in the car for some edgier stuff: a bunch of middle-school kids, fighting; a traffic stop of a rolling boom box. We answered a call for support on the school fight; the officer said that we "weren't going especially fast," and he didn't use the lights or siren, but we were going a whole lot faster than I'd ever drive through that kind of traffic!
I can't discuss one call very much, since I hope it goes to court, but there was an assault and robbery; the officer took the report, and realized that the suspects might still be in the area; he called for support, and with his colleagues' help, got them into the station in handcuffs, with solid evidence. (Well, it looked solid to me.) Let's just say they were very mean, but they weren't very bright.
So what does a police officer do all day? Think a minute and you'll realize: he does paperwork. He fills out endless reports. He listens to people and writes down what they tell him, by hand, then takes it back to the station and files it. The officer I accompanied was tirelessly patient and courteous, I never heard him raise his voice. I saw him put his hand on his gun once, but he never drew it. He was also very nice about explaining to me what he was doing and why.
The class isn't my only interaction with OPD. I'm also active in the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, which does liaison between police and the neighborhood; and I'm volunteering as a citizen interviewer on the oral review boards which are part of the OPD's hiring process. So one way and another, I'm meeting a lot of cops these days.
Frankly, my opinion of the OPD has changed because of this. (Not that I ever fully bought the '60's rants about "the pigs.") The officers I've met are sharp, dedicated professionals, and they love their jobs. Some of them even love (incredibly) being cops in Oakland. Some of them are Oakland natives, born and raised. Obviously there's some selection in the people who present to the class; still, the message is very consistent, and it doesn't correlate with unquestioning support of the OPD management. But the ordinary cops on the street? They're class acts. I just wish there were more of them; Oakland has half the national average of police officers for a city of 400,000; and more than twice the crime. This can't be a coincidence.
I don't usually expect philosophy from the San Francisco Chronicle, but on today's sfgate.com I saw a column with the arresting title: No Offense, but You Don't Deserve Your Salary.
Kind of catches your eye, doesn't it?
I strongly recommend the piece. I've actually considered writing something on this subject, spurred by disgust at the absurd salaries paid to CEOs and baseball players, but the columnist, Chris Colin, has really said it all much better than I could.
The reader comments are fairly interesting, too.
At least, I hope this is the biggest one; oops, the lights just flickered. Power's on now, but not for about 300,000 people elsewhere; and it was off when we got up. We're in the second of three storms, here, and the Bay Area is essentially closed due to weather. Some of it - the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, for instance - is actually closed. Also Golden Gate Transit bus and ferry service - you have to drive to get from Marin to S.F., and watch the roads for flooding. And don't even think of flying into or out of SFO today.
Winds over the bay are gusting to 70 MPH (80 MPH in Los Gatos); they closed the Richmond Bridge, if I heard the traffic report on KQED FM correctly, when a Safeway delivery truck blew over onto a fire truck. The SFGate.com article doesn't mention the fire truck. BART is mostly functional except in western S.F. where a tree blew down over the tracks and a train hit it. The National Weather Service has issued every weather advisory they have except tornado: small craft, high wind, high surf, flash flood watch, flood warning.
It isn't just the Bay Area either - the Sierras are expecting up to 10 feet of snow in one storm, and they've forecast 100 MPH winds. This would NOT be a good weekend to drive up to Tahoe for the skiing.
Honest, I've lived here all my life, and I've only seen maybe 5 storms of this magnitude; this is crazy stuff. I know we need the rain, but yikes!
Did you know you can see the smoke from the southern California wildfires on the 2KM and 4KM Pacific satellite photos? Check out the Satellite link on the National Weather Service web site (this link should display the forecast for Oakland, from which you can see the Pacific satellite shots).
In fact, SFGATE.com has a NASA satellite image in which you can see the flames. From orbit.
Sorry, folks, but this is the price we pay to live in a state where fire is a normal part of the ecosystem. It's also the price we pay for suppressing fire for a century - the fuel built up to the point that, once it starts, we can't stop it. The native Americans, I recall reading, used to schedule controlled burns on damp calm fall days; but they didn't build housing developments.
I don't see it online, but the article on the fires in today's paper Chronicle says that people in San Diego watched the flames hopscotch over I-15 - a 10 lane freeway. These fires are being driven by Santa Ana winds up to 100 mph - I don't see how they can stop them until the wind dies. I'm just grateful that Northern California is only getting mild winds and (at the moment) nothing serious is burning. The Oakland Hills Fire was 16 years ago, but I still get nervous on a hot windy fall day.
There's no moral to this post. I'm just scared. And the fires are 500 miles away.
I can't recall where I saw this first, but I recently noticed that there are web sites, and web rings, for women bloggers. I visited a couple of them; let's use as an example BlogHer, which exists in two forms, Blogher.com and www.blogher.org. If I'd spent more time on either of them I might have figured out what the difference is (maybe they're the same site with two URLs); they both had the same lead post, which, since it had to do with schools and school children, was of marginal interest to me. I was actually considering signing up for it, since I am a woman and a blogger; but the more I looked, the less I felt I fit in there.
First, there's this focus on "women's stuff." Some of their links are: Art and Design; Astrology and Horoscopes (of interest to me only for debunking purposes); Business, Career and Personal Finance (I'm retired); Feminism and Gender; Health and Wellness (that's what I have a doctor for); and so on. You can go read the list yourself; for that matter, you can read the posts yourself.
I'm just not very interested in "women's sites". I've tried it over the years; and they all get back to fashion (the way I'm built? surely you jest), and child care (no kids here), and weight control (yeah, I know I'm too fat; that's not a blog post, it's just a fact); and I never remember to go back. I don't understand why I should be treated differently from any other blogger, just because I'm a woman. Either I have something interesting to say or I don't. In honesty they do have some sections on Policy and News, Media and Journalism, Technology and Web, which I might actually like to read; but still.
It also bothers me that they have these Categories. My blog doesn't have a category; its purpose is to allow me to rant on whatever subject is currently exercising or interesting me. I have this feeling that if I signed up I'd end up classified as "Other", the organizational kiss of death. I've checked up on 3 or 4 other women bloggers that I've come across, and they also tend to rant on whatever's going on at the time, and not to focus on a Category.
I suppose their real point is that women bloggers are a small minority - which they are - and therefore need to be coddled and supported lest they vanish in the endless sea of male bloggers. I don't know - most of the women bloggers I've read sounded pretty confident and competent to me. Some of them astounded me. If you want to realize that all the annoying things in your life which are bothering you are really not that bad after all, go read the Babblings of Whimsicalbrainpan. Now, that woman is a survivor.
I guess I'm just not much of a joiner; I never seem to fit into formal groups. I have things I want to say in my blog, and I say them; and a few people listen, and sometimes they argue. God knows, this isn't the DailyKos! But a few people read and comment, and I enjoy the exchanges. Should I join a women's blogging group? I don't know. Maybe I'd get more readers; then again, maybe I'd end up classified as "Other" and never get a visitor from there at all. I'm still thinking about it. But as a good child of the Sixties, I've spent the last 40 years trying to persuade myself that people should be judged on their individual merits (intelligence, competence, honesty, kindness, etc.), and not by their race, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, or whatever; and that's why "women blogger" sites bother me.
Here we go again. Residents of South Lake Tahoe, the residents of the Oakland hills salute you. In 1991 we too watched helplessly as the wind lashed the flames toward our houses; some people died because they couldn't get out. At least no one has died at Lake Tahoe.
I live in the Oakland hills - in a normal urban neighborhood, not a forested glade. But every time something like this happens, I marvel again at humanity's desire to live in dangerous places, because they're pretty. Dry climate forests, where fire has been a part of the landscape for thousands of years, until we moved in and started suppressing it to protect our houses, because we like them to be nestled among the trees. Earthquake country. (Yeah, that's me - half a mile downhill from the Hayward Fault. But: our house is earthquake braced.) Flood plains. Hurricane tracks. Tornado Alley. We seem to think that because we live there it won't happen again; but it will. The only question is when.
And yet, think one more time: what constitutes a "safe" place to live?? For that matter, define "safe". We all have to live somewhere; offhand, everywhere I can think of in America has some disastrous phenom that happens at regular intervals (blizzards; droughts; heat waves). Maybe what we need is not to be safe, but to be aware that we aren't safe, and take the necessary precautions; and if the precautions aren't enough, maybe we should live somewhere else. Yes, I'm talking about you, the people who live in the Sacramento Valley subdivisions, below water level, behind 100 year old levees. What were you thinking of? The houses were affordable; but if those levees go, replacing everything you own won't be. The people who live around South Lake Tahoe are in the process of learning this right now.
I saw something very odd, leaving work the other day; odd to me at least. The data center where I work has broad expanses of lawn, punctuated with willow trees (which I always thought were an unreasonable choice for a water-challenged climate); it also has little decorative fountains with ponds. The willows are always full of birds, including crows, which have become more common in the last few years; and we've recently had a pair of mallard ducks enjoying the lawns.
I saw a crow attacking a smaller bird; and not very efficiently, either. I was maybe 40 feet from all this and couldn't see details clearly; but the smaller bird seemed to be all white (unusual in a wild bird); it looked like a parakeet. It was about that size and had sort of a rounded silhouette; it was walking along the lip of the fountain pool, peeping. The crow was standing on the lawn, several feet away, and as I watched, it flew over, pounced on the small bird, and picked it up in its beak. The crow carried the small bird, peeping wildly, to the lawn, and dropped it. The small bird seemed to be trying to defend itself (I'm anthropomorphizing wildly here) - it waved its wings at the crow, peeped wildly, and tried to scuttle away. The crow watched for a bit and then struck again. It looked like nothing so much as a cat toying with a mouse.
This sequence repeated itself three or four times while I watched. By then I had decided that I wasn't enjoying this very much, and in any case I had a train to catch and was already late. So I went on and didn't see the end.
I asked my husband about the incident later; he's not a birder as such, but he hikes and backpacks, and has seen a lot in the back country. He's the source of the phrase, "crummy raptors"; crows, he says, will try to be raptors but they aren't very good at it. They certainly aren't; an owl or a hawk would have killed that bird with one strike. I refuse to anthropomorphize to the point of thinking the crow was playing with the bird for fun; I assume it was trying to kill it with inadequate equipment.
The other thing that puzzles me is where the little white bird came from. I've never seen a bird like it anywhere near the data center. It almost looked like a released domestic bird. It met an unhappy end, wherever it came from.
There's an old story that I've read in more than one novel set in rural England before the 19th century:
A man comes home from a journey and asks his servant if anything happened while he was gone.
"The dog died, master."
"How did the dog die?"
"In the fire, master."
"What fire?"
"The barn burned down, master."
"How did the barn burn down?"
"The candles at your wife's funeral, master."
I've never seen it go farther than this; but as a slow revelation of disaster I've always thought it was blackly funny.
I had a "what happened while I wasn't looking" moment this morning on the Internet. We're having a cold snap here in California, the worst in 10 years - maybe the worst in 20. (All of you having ice storms in Texas and Missouri, just quit sniggling. 24 degrees Fahrenheit is cold for a seaside town, even if you're colder.) So the first thing I did when I brought my computer up was to check the National Weather Service site, to check last night's low. (It was 24 degrees.) And the first thing I saw when I checked the special weather statement was, "the tsunami watch for the central California coast has been removed."
Tsunami watch? Why are we having a tsunami watch? You already know, of course, about the 8.2 earthquake in the Kuril Islands at 20:24 PST on January 12 (that would be last night), but at 9 AM this morning, I didn't. Now, of course, the tsunami warning makes sense; and I'm just grateful that all we had was a tsunami watch, and not another disaster like last year's little Christmas present.
8.2 is a helluvan earthquake, folks; it's roughly the estimated magnitude of the 1906 San Francisco quake, and according to Wikipedia is the equivalent of a gigaton of TNT. Nobody seems to have died in this one, which means the human race dodged a biiiiig bullet. Happy New Year.