a bear escape

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes a black bear falling off a highway bridge and hanging on for dear ursine life to a concrete overpass arch near Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada range.

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No more excuses

I have no excuse.

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Bomb Scare

Do you know how stories can buzz around inside your head for a while after you read them? That’s how the bomb scare in Paris story affected me. I guess because I’m still sorting out how the fear of terrorism has shaped us.

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“And I Couldn’t Believe My Luck”

A few months back I wrote about the good life. No, more than the good life, the fantastic life, top of the world, and how it might be enjoyed in Manhattan mid 20th century, by a star having life by the tail, living in tall cotton or deep clover.

That was a joie de vivre forged in talent and brawn, but there’s another so fleeting it barely happened and, as wonderful as life became, the crucial bond wasn’t forged on the musical genius that sustained it but on the most tenuous of connections: a shared sense of humor, and of charm.

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Come and get me, copper!

Local newspapers have run several stories lately about thieves breaking into buildings on the old Alameda naval air station so they can strip out the copper, which they sell to unscrupulous scrap metal dealers. Which is what made this Bay Area story all the better.

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New Slippers and Old Hats

Sometimes our possessions become so familiar and old hat that we almost stop seeing them any more; the furniture and books and appliances are so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we take them for granted. If this ever happens for you and you want to see things anew again, just get a puppy. Fifty to sixty pounds of five-month-old black labrador mix, like our Edie, will do just fine.

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A New Deal

It’s so easy to take it all for granted, until you realize the debt that’s due, and how, if the heroes of a prior era hadn’t worked so hard, all too often for so little pay, the very building you stand in or the bridge you traverse would be gone.

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Hitting the long and winded road

A busy day coming here in the Ombudshold Saturday morning; we’ve got a beach cleanup going on Saturday morning (including cleaning up the beach by our morning boatramp-to-Hornet-museum dogwalk). Then we’re getting out of town, which means we’ll probably miss the Peanut Butter Jam Festival this weekend (yes, Skippy concocted their first batch of the lip-smackin’ stuff here on our end of the island).

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A comfortable living

A couple decades ago my friend Rich said to me, “Most jobs suck. That’s why the people who own your company are paying you to do your job. If your job was fun to do, they’d do it themselves.”

It’s odd that I find this somehow comforting.

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Finding some peace amid the collapse

The I35W bridge collapsed just over 40 days ago, and today is the 9/11 anniversary. In making the blogging rounds today I found this lovely description of the scene of the bridge collapse, and the people who come to the steep bluffs of the Mississipi and walk out along the close, paralleling 10th avenue bridge, overlooking the river and the site:

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