We had a little hassle with the SF Bay Bridge recently, closing it down. You may have heard about it.

It negated one of my routes to work (the casual carpool) and turned the other two (ferry and Bay Area Rapid Transit: BART) into sardine experiences. It wasn’t too inconvenient on the ferry for us regulars. And at SF’s ferry building they even set up cordon “chutes” to direct confused newbies onto the right boats to cross the bay. While boarding in the morning, the line to buy tickets for the new conscripts got incredibly long. (Regular commuters buy books of tickets, but these folks were buying a day’s round trip, hoping the bridge would get fixed.) The line formed down an aisle, wrapping around the cabin of the boat and, one morning, out the door and down the ramp to board, before they shooed everyone in so they could pull the ramp down and chug off toward the city.

With the added demand, they ran more trips including some new crew—one of the crew on the afternoon boats was a gregarious, chatty fellow.  On Monday afternoon the news came that they had finally re-opened the bridge. As we boarded, he exhorted us all to continue to take the ferry, that the boats would be there when the cars and bridge failed us. Worth a smile.

As we arrived in Alameda he opened the doors to let us off the boat, and as we began shuffling down to hand off our tickets and head home, he hollered, “and don’t you all get back in your cars tomorrow!”

A number of us broke up laughing. But we’ll see. I bet ridership soon goes back to what it was.

Our BART train stalled in the Tube down on the floor of San Francisco Bay today. It seemed to run into some trouble as we left Oakland and entered the Transbay Tube, stopping and starting a couple times. During a stall the driver came on and said they were having technical difficulties and we would be delayed. The next time he came on he said they had to turn off the power for 90 seconds to get the train running again. There would be no lights.  So there we were, down on the floor of San Francisco Bay, in complete darkness.

It felt  like being on a submarine.

As I’ve mentioned before, I really, really, really don’t want to be in the Tube for the next major earthquake.

 It was standing room only when I got on, with all the seats full and a few people already clustered by the doors. I always move to the middle of the compartment—it bugs me when people block the doors. The train pulls into the Oakland station, and these idiots stand on either side of the doorway so everyone has to exit single file. There’s plenty of room in the middle of the railcar, but they won’t clear the doorway. After everyone leaving has gotten off, they look around, see that seats are open, so then they move out of the doorway to go take the seats.

 So it was an SRO crowd, the Monday morning drowze, people sleeping and reading their papers, and  then we stopped. While I tried not to think of all that water over my head.

And then he warned us, and it went dark, very, very dark–just a crowd of complete strangers beginning their work week stranded down at the bottom of the bay in utter darkness. (Yoo hoo, I’ve changed my mind–could we go back so I can take the bus instead?)

I resisted the urge to make that submarine emergency sound: Aooooouuuwga!  Aooooouuuwga! Dive, dive!

People quickly got out their cell phones and PDAs, so we had a few splashes of that eerie blue-white light.  I counted off the seconds. It started to get warm. I got up over 100 (maybe I was fast) when some lights came back on, and then more, and then the fans started again, bringing cool air. After a few lurches, we got going.

 I bet that delayed a lot of schedules, as trains stacked up behind us. Nothing like beginning the day with a little commute stress.  Okay, a weekend’s worth of relaxation has already worn off and we haven’t even stepped in the office door yet …

I did the casual carpool this morning. For those outside the SF Bay Area, the casual carpool is a way to reduce congestion during rush hour. I think it’s primarily in the East Bay (across San Francisco Bay from the City), rather than down the peninsula or in Marin county, but they may have it elsewhere, too.

 At certain randomly designated (even spontaneously discovered) corners, often near a bus stop, commuters or cars can wait for each other to share the ride across the Bay Bridge, taking advantage of carpool lanes so that they don’t have to queue and pay the toll. You pass the long queues in the toll lanes and zip right on through to the bridge.

 This means that perfect strangers can walk up to a waiting car, nod hello and get in, then the passengers read or listen to their own music, while the driver (hopefully) minds the road. Oftentimes no one says another word until we arrive at Fremont and Howard streets (a hodge podge of vehicles disgorging riders) and say our thanks and good byes.

 Other times are not so quiet. 

This morning two women sat in front, while a quiet fellow and I got in the back. The women worked together and were laughing and telling stories the whole way in, and some of it was fairly amusing. They were completely dishing their coworkers, including who should be fired and who is clueless and how to handle various people, even sharing technology solutions they had discovered for recurring problems. It sounded like a madhouse, including people throwing things and pushing each other, particularly a guy who had been there for over 20 years, whom numerous people had tried to get fired for his inability to get anything done. At one point the passenger exclaimed, through her laughter, “Everyone in our group should go to anger management!”

 “Yes,” the driver replied, “only not together.”

 And then they were really laughing. “Everyone has to go separately!”

 They also talked about their car accidents (this concerned me somewhat, and I began paying some attention to the traffic) and how much more dangerous it is in the Bay Area, compared to Los Angeles, where the driver grew up. The passenger (a younger woman) said she had begun casually surveying all of her women friends, asking who had taught them to drive. “It’s bad to say I know, but I think women don’t really learn how to drive unless they are taught by a man. I hate to be sexist, but the women I know who are good drivers were taught by men, and the women I know who aren’t were taught by women.” And they laughed some more, perhaps at the scandalousness of this.

 As we got to the City and dropped off the other guy, I spoke up and mentioned where I work—occasionally it happens the driver is going the same way, and that happened this morning, so I continued riding with them. “Just don’t ask who we work for!” they exclaimed.

 The driver said she had never been in an accident while growing up and driving in LA, and the first day she drove in the Bay Area she was in an accident, and ever since every car she had owned had been in at least a fender-bender. Explaining the first few, she complained in mildly outraged amusement about the Bay Area drivers who had caused them, but admitted the last one was her own fault. “And you know what I hit?” she asked me, chuckling. “A parked car. It was at the casual carpool pickup spot!  The car in front of me was full and I thought it was going to pull out, as I got my passengers, and I tried to pull into traffic and I hit its bumper!”

 “You see!?” The other one admonished. “The first thing my Dad would have asked is, ‘do you know the width of your own car?’”

 She felt that male teachers reinforce constant vigilance and awareness of the surroundings, knowing the dimensions of the car and what it could handle.  Personally, I’m certain women can be perfectly good driving instructors.  But I am curious about generalized distinctions, while realizing each individual brings unique talents to bear.

 Perhaps the passenger’s point was that the lesson can become focused on operating the vehicle rather than emphasizing the calculus of one’s own size and velocity in relation to the flying metal all around you. But the passenger, through her laughter, felt women get distracted by conversation, and connecting.

 Relevant to the driver’s story of being in an accident her first day of work in the Bay Area, I mentioned once moving to a new neighborhood, and the first time I got on the trolley car there the driver proceeded to drive the trolley car right out from under its trolley lines. (It never happened again, over eight years.) Instead of turning she went straight, and the trolley car was totally stranded–that really cracked them up.

“We both work for [a transit agency]!” they exclaimed.

 “We weren’t going to tell!” They were both laughing and hollering.

 “But we won’t ride it!” 

 As I got out I laughed, too, saying, “I had no idea how much I was taking my life in your own hands, here.”

After all that, the office seemed very tame.

So, I’m sitting at a new desk at work. I don’t know how long I’ll be there, although the powers that be have moved my computer down to the new office, which is on the opposite corner of our block from where I used to work. It might be a matter of weeks, or months or even years. I might find out sometime before I retire.

Or I might not. Some things, in my mandarin work world, are determined not even in San Francisco, but in Sacramento. Let’s just say that there is a prominent politician who has appeared in Hollywood action movies who has a say in it, and leave it there.

In the meantime, I can show you a bit of my new view. I used to work in a new building on this block, but now I work in a much older building; neoclassical, I think. So my new office is actually an old office. If I lean over to one side of my desk and look out the window I can see SF’s City Hall.

But generally, the view from my desk looks more like this.

Still, it has a window I can actually open, and how rare is that in the modern steel and glass Bauhaus office world, any more?

There’s a lot of construction going on around here, so even with the window closed I hear the staccato of jackhammers and the frequent thumping, crashing, and pounding of construction equipment.

But it’s okay. I’m happy with the new work, and the new locale; and if the bureaucrats in Sacramento could resolve some issues, a lot of us will be given a new start.

 I’m re-locating at work next week. Rather, I’m sort of straddling two desks.

At 5 p.m. today my office computer will be moved to the new location; down two floors and kitty-corner across the block, to the older building. I’ll still have a lot of stuff (especially paper) at my old desk, but will spend most of my time at the new. Depending on how some high end bureaucratic appointments go down, it might become a permanent assignment, which might even entail a modest raise.

But that’s way ahead of the game.

In the meantime, I haven’t been visiting any of my online friends recently. Work, the new baseball season, spring gardening tasks, etc., have all conspired to keep me away from the screen at home, my portal and digital transponder. I even cropped a bunch of the travel photos from our recent trip, but just haven’t made time to import them and write captions for a post – hopefully, this weekend.

And I look forward to visiting most of you, too. I hope you have many pleasant surprises to report. *smile.*

Earlier this week I passed by three small, slender trees struggling to survive on Golden Gate avenue and, with the oncoming summer dry season in mind, I thought, maybe a few times this summer I’ll put a water jug in my pack and come out here to try and keep these poor guys going.

It’s not easy being a small tree in the Civic Center area. During the workday it’s not too bad, as the neighborhood’s full of office workers, street people, and those who have business in the area, mostly with government offices.

But at night the wackadoos rule. Drugs and their toll are always evident here, with varying degrees of madness and desperation, amid the lashings out of those with nothing left to lose, and it’s not uncommon for the mess next dawn to include small branches torn from trees, their still-green leaves beginning to curl and die.

Yet these three had survived. They were seven or eight feet tall now, with evidence of lost limbs and damage, but there was plenty of new greenery at the tops of two of them and the other, saddest of all, had hopeful green sprouts pushing out its trunk.

I think that was the one that kind of got me. I wanted to give it a drink of water, to slip out once every couple weeks or so and give it a chance to heal, survive and grow. It had enough roots, it had a trunk and a limb left, all it needed was a little help.

And now they’re gone. A massive building project up the block, putting in a new parking ramp, has spilled over and now the entire block is all torn up. The parking lane and even the sidewalk is removed, all evidence of the trees is gone. Well, the end presumably came fast.

Yet it’s odd to me that I can feel compassion for the trees but have become so inured to the human madness, to the angry, unwashed, and unhinged, that I pass them by, simply shaking my head at their requests as I’m unwilling to finance their next heroin or crack cocaine purchase.

We do give to charities. I guess the only explanation that comes to mind is that the trees had no choice – but I’m not sure that’s adequate.

Maybe it’s simply that, when I offer a little sustenance to a tree, a cool drink on a hot, dry day in the concrete amidst the heat and the car exhaust, that short silent communion is enough of a respite, a balm inside a busy day, all by itself.

 Amidst the national election, the mortgage crisis, the banking bail-out, and everything else going on from endangered polar bears to Somali pirates, I’ve been listening to the pundits talk about throwing a $25 billion bone to the automakers. At first, I accepted the notion that cars are different from airlines. An airline can reorganize under bankruptcy without scaring off customers – buying a plane ticket isn’t the same commitment as purchasing a car.

So bankruptcy for “The Big Three” would be much more catastrophic. But lately I’m changing my mind.

If they do give Detroit a mere twenty-five billion dollars, I’m glad they’re talking about  tying it to producing economical cars for the future.

It’s beyond exasperating that we have to bail-out businesses that made stupid choices. And I’m not buying the argument that they were just making the cars people wanted. Lots of us looked at SUVs and shook our heads.  The oil crisis began 35 years ago, in 1973, and much of the world has been both preaching and practicing fuel economy for years.  The Japanese automakers have done a fine job of making economical cars that people wanted just fine, and the Europeans, too.

I get the concept that carbuyers want to be sure they can get replacement parts for their vehicles before they commit. So their decision is driven by the long-term viability of a company.

But I don’t think that will be too difficult to implement in the Detroit automotive solution, for the carmakers are right – this isn’t just three carmakers, it is thousands of businesses who are very reliant on the big three. Whatever answer is achieved, all of these companies need to be part of the re-tooling necessary from the Big Three on down. Better to make that change now rather than string things along, right?

Here in the Bay Area, we had a city go into bankruptcy in recent years. The city of Vallejo, northeast across the bay from San Francisco, ran into trouble when lucrative contracts for the firefighters and police, especially pension plans, outstripped the city’s income. Oh, the news coverage was quickly full of dire forecasts. Bankruptcy! The sky was falling!

A lawyer explained to me that the legal counsel for cities such as Vallejo were often easily outmaneuvered by the high-powered lawyers retained by the pension funds, and that the pension fund lawyers were highly motivated, for good reason. If a city declares bankruptcy, all the debtors have to line up and renegotiate their contracts. So long as the city struggles to stay above water, the retirees keep collecting on lucrative contracts. The unfortunate side effect of this is that an inadvertent class separation is created.

I’m all for pensioners enjoying the just rewards of their working careers and living long and well in retirement. Really – I’m pretty liberal, and I like unions.

What I have a hard time with is businesses going under, unemployment rising, the nation sinking into recession, and a separate class of older citizens living better than everyone else, as the younger generations are shouldered with the burdens (and frankly, the failures) of the older generation.

Bankruptcy reorganization is picking up the pieces and re-structuring the industry so that it can move forward – if the carmakers are indeed really faced with chapter 11 reorganization. On NPR this Saturday morning I heard a bankruptcy lawyer speak on how he thinks the carmakers do have assets they can leverage to re-structure on their own, and that we taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their mistakes in building the wrong vehicles for the future.

Because they did. And frankly, some of the SUV owners I knew jeered about liberals and global warming. Sure, they loved the rolling luxury of the vehicles, but their pleasure was also occasionally tinged by figuratively thumbing their noses at leftists preaching responsibility.  Owning a couple tons or more of rapidly depreciating  rolling metal is already a burden for enough of them now; they’re getting their own comeuppance without anyone needing to rub it in. But do we taxpayers need to pay more for their and Detroit’s prior mistakes? 

(As a side note, did you know that many SUVs are banned from driving on residential streets? For being too heavy? If only the laws were enforced … )

I’m sure it would be the least painful path for the auto industry to be bailed out when the lean times start to pinch. We all prefer the path with the least discomfort, making it easy — which is what the bailout would be, for them.

I’m not against federal involvement in the solution either – so long as any financial bailout is strongly tied to making the cars we’ll be driving in the future. Obviously, one of the first and most important points is that it absolutely shouldn’t used for executive bonuses.

And don’t even get me started about CEOs begging Congress for money, arriving with tin cups in hand – on their corporate jets.

So maybe bankruptcy isn’t the worst thing that could happen to the Detroit automakers. And maybe the threat of it might push them a bit harder to solve their own problems. And if we need Federal involvement then, we can pick up the pieces and move forward, hopefully with fewer Stupid Uneconomical Vulga-hicles.

Yesterday, I described how I decided to take a day off from work to brew a second batch of Belgian wit ale this autumn. 

As substituting hops may have been part of the problem (the worldwide hops shortage meant a supply store in Berkeley hadn’t had the hops I needed, so I’d used their comparable alternatives),  I checked to see what hops were in the garage fridge, and called around to see if I could procure the Perle and Fuggles hops the recipe calls for. The fridge had a little of the Styrian Goldings hops I needed, some Kent Goldings hops, plus the packages of citric acid and corn sugar, so I set them out and began trucking all the equipment out to the backyard concrete brewing pad, getting it ready so I could come home from the store and fire up the brew kettle right away.

Excited to hit the road with me, the dogs dashed out the door, and we cruised off to the store. I got the Perle and Fuggles, but they were out of Styrians Goldings. (Eye roll and hands toss.) I spoke to the clerk about it, and decided to supplement the last little Styrians I had at home with the Kent Goldings I already had, drove home (dog noses out the back windows as we cruised by San Leandro Bay), and got the brew kettle fired up. 

*   *   *   *   *   *

Here is where things began to go awry, and I think it was Dave who distracted me. You see my assistant brewer, Dave, is a freelancer. He enjoys the freelance commute from bedroom to home office. I used to enjoy that commute when I lived in a long narrow flat in San Francisco, from my bedroom in the back to the converted dining room toward the front. Unlike my commute now, the only intersection where I might stop was the kitchen, if I wanted a cup of coffee.

It beats the hell out of my commute now, especially as there is no single conveyance that gets me from here to there. All three of my commute options involve some combination of footwork, infernal combustion engine, BART train, diesel bus, or the ferry. I miss the freelance commute.

So we have this joke between us about the advantages of an office job or freelance work, and I’m not above calling Dave on my days off and pointing out I’m drawing my salary while enjoying the day at home, too. As I set up to brew, I began planning my leisurely wicked call to him—“aah, a day off at home, the brew kettle going, it’s a sunny day outside, the dogs are out on the back deck, lolling about and panting in the sunshine …”

Dave plays his end to the hilt. “You’re home? And getting vacation pay? I can’t believe it!” As if there is no justice left in life.

Mindful of prior misadventures, I put the filters in the bottom of the mashtun and filled it with the milled grains, got everything set up outside with the powerful propane burner blasting away like a jet engine, and was all set to call Dave and savor his envy.

The only thing I still needed was the Styrian Golding hops, the citric acid, and the corn sugar from the downstairs fridge. Hmm, they weren’t in the garage, where I’d set them aside. Didn’t find them outside with the other supplies. I went upstairs to the kitchen where I’d left some stuff. Not there. Sometimes I set stuff on the dining room table so it’s ready to go out the back door. Not there.

Do you ever get caught in a loop? Where you don’t find something in the room where you’re looking, so it seems like it must be in one of the rooms you aren’t in, and you go to that one and don’t find it so you go to the next, and then the next? Around and around?

I looked under tables and behind stuff and thought, ‘Well, I have that acid blend stuff I could use instead of the citric acid, and there’s an unopened package of corn sugar in the fridge—but those damn hops, no, I have to have those hops.’

I went up the stairs from the garage to the kitchen to check again and through the dining room again and down the back deck steps ruefully thinking, ‘is this what I get for planning to call Dave and kid him? Is this my just deserts?’

Meanwhile the brewkettle is heating up to the temperature I need for soaking the grain in the mashtun.

Damn! Where are they?? These freaking hops are killing me …

I can’t believe it! I am not driving back to the store.

I think I made three complete loops, up stairs and down, plus numerous side trips on hunches. Finally, out on the back deck I looked in one of the sacks of equipment, full of bottle brushes, long-handled spoons, and the iodophor bottle, and there was the citric acid packet. I dug deeper and found the corn sugar and hops.

While pulling stuff out to heft it out to the back deck, I must have popped them in the bag (consolidating the load) without thinking twice about it. They had slithered down to the bottom; I had to poke around to find them.

Now the kettle was up to the 170 degree temperature I needed, ready for the mashtun, and I needed to get going. I no longer had time to call Dave.

That’ll teach me, huh?

So far, the Belgian wit ale is fermenting just fine. A couple airlocks have gotten clogged, but none have blown off.

But I’m not bragging about it, and I’m not gloating. Believe me you, I am not.

On my way back to the house the other morning I realized where my wife’s keys were (also where she wouldn’t know they were) and that there was no way she’d have gotten out the door in time. I didn’t know it yet, but it was only one link in the mayhem.

Mrs. Ombud’s Mom has a sewing school, teaching kids to sew, and last weekend MOM had a fashion show in a nearby park for her kids. It was pretty cute. The parents came and she had music and a microphone to introduce each kid and they all modeled what they had made. MOM tells me some of the parents work at Pixar studios – one parent was happy with how much her kid learned and began telling others. (It’s cool to see how the kids’ confidence is built by their accomplishments. As an adult it’s easy to take that stuff for granted.)

Anyway, it was a lot of work getting it all set up and then put away, and the upshot was that MOM lost her keys. And so we looked everywhere and then looked everywhere again, and the next day, as we went back to our jobs, MOM went back and looked through the trash bins in the park. No luck, no keys. We keep a spare set of keys for her so we retrieved those for her, and made plans to have spares made – her car key, with the microchip, is not cheap.

Then, in the course of the week’s travels, Mrs. Ombud met me at a BART station and I drove home – with her keys still in the ignition. So that, when I went out to grab dinner somewhere I put her keys in my pack (for safekeeping) and promptly forgot them.

You see where this is going.

I didn’t realize until I finished walking the dogs the next morning that, of course, Mrs. Ombud couldn’t leave without her keys, so I hustled home and found her on the front steps, waiting for us.

The good news was that, in looking for her own keys, she found her mother’s keys, tucked in a pocket of her pack. For safekeeping.

All these efforts at organization and safety and the results were:  MOM was using Mrs. Ombud’s set of her own spare keys. Mrs. Ombud had her mother’s keys. And I had Mrs. Ombud’s keys.

The only keys actually with the person for whom they are intended were my own set.

 I’m somewhat grateful for that. Even as I despair of our efforts at organization, at times.

Sometime shortly after 7 last night, we had finished dinner and were transitioning toward evening activities when we heard a loud “Ka-WHUMP!” from the street. We felt it, too, especially the dogs, who immediately adrenalized into watchdog action: “bark-bark-bark-bark!” and the alarm was sounded. Almost simultaneously, the sirens began.

“It’s all right,” I told the pups, to calm them down. “It’s okay,” I looked out the window and saw the neighbor’s silver van up on the sidewalk — and then decided to go down and investigate myself.

The viny groundcover along the curb was ripped and strewn in a dirty trail crossing the sidewalk into the bushes between our house and the neighbor’s who live on the corner. A Chevy Neon was planted in the shrubs at the base of the towering incense cedar between our homes, its left side doors flung open; behind it, a police van had followed its path and now blocked it in, driver’s door also open. Sirens sounded all around us now, and Alameda’s Finest showed up in force — at least four and soon perhaps a half dozen police cars arrived, parked at varying angles because, well, they can. (Who’s going to ticket them?) Around the corner on the side street a police dog in the backseat of a double-parked cop car barked ferociously at someone. Following its eyes I stepped so I could see around the bushes at that end of their yard and saw an officer bent over and holding down a large man at the curb.

I looked back at the van and then saw the front of our truck, dented and bashed in.

Assimilating what had happened, I noticed how loud it was — several sirens. Looking up at our neighbor’s picture window, the kids were lined up kneeling against the couch back, watching wide-eyed. Cops everywhere, of course, and then neighbors out on lawns, some with cameras. One by one, the police returned to their vehicles and turned the sirens off.

One persistent fellow walked all around the vehicles shooting pictures like strobe lights — I asked who he was, thinking he might be with the police and just dressed down to muted blues and grays, but he was a neighbor, wannabe paparazzi, perhaps hopeful of getting his work in the local fish wrap.

At first the police wouldn’t tell me what the pursuit was about, but clearly they had followed the Neon up over the curb and into the bushes. The Neon had struck the van, driving it backward into our truck; the van then bounced forward and up onto the sidewalk.

I spoke with our neighbors, an extended family. The van was the father-in-law’s, and he was called and told to come home, so they could get in and get the vehicle registration and insurance information. We could then get a police report number for our insurance companies.

Our neighbor had been watching TV with his kids, heard the collision, and turned to look out his picture window and see the three people flee the Neon. One of them was caught, the other two got away. For now.

My wife was pretty upset about our Toyota T-100. She likes it for her handicrafts, and even though we haven’t driven it as much lately, she of course had intended to use it for work the next morning. Her office has moved and she was going to drive it to the storage site to meet the movers and perhaps take some things to the office. Not too likely now. Isn’t that how these things usually go?

After that, it was a lot of standing around and watching police work. I could hear our dogs whining up in our house, and at one point I went up, leashed them, and brought them down to our sedan in our driveway, put them in and rolled the windows down part way, enough for heads to hang out.

They calmed down and watched intently — once again I’m struck by how vital it is for them that the pack be kept together. They have their priorities straight.

After all, one of the idiots was in custody. The other two soon to follow, I’ll bet. Only vehicles were damaged, and some landscaping ripped up. But we were all okay — and that’s what matters most, right?