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shannon_aSo our big goal in April was to get started on packing, and I suppose we succeeded on that. I've now got boxes in small, medium, and large sizes, which was step #1.
For step #2, we decided to start packing books, because we're likely to move more of those than anything else. It's obviously not cost-effective to move them across the sea, especially in large quantities, but they're really a core of our household.
We started with the lit and for each shelf, we culled first and then packed. For culling we've really tried to follow the two criteria of (1) are we likely to ever read that again, or (2) does that have emotional value. It's allowed us to cull about half the books from each shelf. Overall in April we culled two of our three lit shelves and packed one of them. (I'd hoped to get all three packed, but then we went to Hawaii, and then I was sick for weeks after our return.)
I initially packed a medium box full of books, and it was about 35 pounds, which is within the capacities of the boxes (and within the amounts suggested for moving), but I really didn't want to unload dozens of 35# boxes from a container when it got dumped on our metaphoric Hawaiian lawn. Packing in the small boxes was a lot less efficient: those medium boxes were just perfect for two rows of TPB, two levels deep, while the small boxes only have room for one row of TPBs, and everything else needs to be stacked like puzzle pieces. But, so it goes.
Anyhow, so we've got a small start on the boxes: that one shelf, half culled, then filled three small boxes. But that's three boxes we don't have to do as the year goes on.
Here's another reason I'm sick of Berkeley: I feel like we're now fighting a constant battle against encroaching homeless encampments on all sides. While we were in Hawaii in April, one set up about 100 yards from our house, literally in the street. Shortly after we got back, it began growing at a frightening rate. When someone threatened me as I walked by on the way to downtown (because I stopped too long to assess what I was going on), I'd had enough.
The police rather shockingly told me that camping on public areas was now legal, which is a really grotesque misreading of the appellate decision from Washington last year. (Basically it says you can't *criminalize* sleeping on public land, which isn't the same as protecting those commons from misuse, and it only talked about sleeping, not camping, and it also said that was only the case if you didn't give another option for the homeless, and one of the very serious problems that we have is the chronic homeless who refuse services.) Anywho, it means that the police have gotten really, really bad about doing anything about these illegal encampments. They'll force them to move along only in specific cases, and not even in the case of my being threatened, because it was *implicit* (my being told to move along when I was on a public street, with the tone and posture offering the clear implication that the homeless asshole was going to try to beat the shit out of me), rather than explicit. But it turns out that the one thing the homeless can't do is camp on the actual street, so it took several more days, but they were moved.
But it's almost pointless, because a new encampment has appeared on our main street (but at least that's a few blocks away), and there's another one a block down from that, that's been there for more than a year now, where the residents constantly sit at the bus stop bench there, blocking it from use for people like (for example) my wife, who can't stand on one foot. Only one person has died in the encampment to date, so it's not problematic enough for the police to do much about.
I have every desire to help the homeless in a societal way. We should as a country house and shelter them and help them get off drugs and get them into some psychiatric care if they need that help. Homelessness is *not* a moral failing, and it's *not* an acceptable state for our citizens. If we want to work with all the cities of the Bay Area, to work on this problem at a level where we can actually resolve it, that's great. If Gavin Newsom wants to work at it on the state level, that's even greater. Rows and rows and rows of tiny homes somewhere other than a tightly packed city (where everyone is living on top of each other), with full physical and mental health care is the least we should do.
But the "caring" people of Berkeley are making it worse, because they're attracting huge numbers of homeless people to the city with their refusal to police these violations of our community standards, and they're forcing them to live in filth because they've attracted more people than they can house, and meanwhile they're making the city more dangerous and less pleasant for the rest of us. It's a trainwreck. It's unsustainable. And Berkeley is so quickly descending into squalor that's it's shocking, especially given how bad the problems seemed *before* this, when we just had street kids threatening tourists.
Now, we've got potentially dangerous people *everywhere*, and I say that not because people who are unlucky enough to be homeless are innately dangerous, but because a lot of them are homeless because they have mental health problems, and they're not getting treated for them. And that *is* dangerous. We've had murder, arson, and any number of assaults that originated with the homeless population of Berkeley, and our fine city council, with their refusal to protect our civic commons, is putting us all right in front of that bullet.
I remember when Jesse Arreguin got elected mayor of Berkeley, the same day as Donald Trump, I said, "He's going to do some really bad things for the city." Because he's one of these liberal "purists" who doesn't let reality get in the way of his policies, and who refuses anything other than the most extreme progressive solution he can find, meaning that he's actually willing to vote down liberal proposals that aren't progressive enough. We don't have a rapid-transit bus system because of him and his co-conspirator, our former council representative. But I figured that Kimberly and I would be gone before we saw the worst of that. I had no idea that we'd be watching him destroy the civic fabric of this city in our last three years here.
On another note, here's a mild and silly nuisance as I work on my last year here: I've long had a long list of books that I wanted to read from the library. In the last year or so, I've really been working through it, because I know that libraries won't be nearly as good on Kauai. It's not just that Kauai is smaller than Berkeley, populationwise, but also because I'm used to drawing from the LINK+ system, which allows me to borrow from about 100 library systems, mostly in California (but also a few in Nevada).
So we got a notice toward the start of May that the Berkeley libraries wouldn't have access to LINK+ starting on June 1. This is supposedly part of a system upgrade that should be done by July 3 or so, but I'll believe that when I see that. (I'm not going to be shocked if we lose access to LINK+ for three months or so.)
And a lot of the books I was planning to read were ones that were only available on LINK+.
So, I've been gorging on LINK+ books this month, to try and meet my goal of finishing most of my library to-read list. I picked up five final ones today, which all need to be back to the library by May 31. I'll switch over to Hoopla digital books and the books that actually are at the local library when Berkeley's LINK+ goes down. And if they're not back in a month, I can actually get LINK+ books from Oakland instead ... it's just not nearly as convenient.
Here's the moving plan for May: get the cats fully ready to go to Hawaii (or at least have the paperwork in process) and continue packing. And, yeah, call that *(()#@ handyman. And probably find a new one. And maybe get the huge trove of books-to-go out of our foyer.
April had our last big disruption for our while, with our last vacation to Kauai, which turned out to be even more disruptive than expected because of my extended illness. May, June, July, and August should all be pretty clear, which hopefully means we can get lots and lots done. By the time we hit fall, I hope it'll look like we're in large part ready to go.
For step #2, we decided to start packing books, because we're likely to move more of those than anything else. It's obviously not cost-effective to move them across the sea, especially in large quantities, but they're really a core of our household.
We started with the lit and for each shelf, we culled first and then packed. For culling we've really tried to follow the two criteria of (1) are we likely to ever read that again, or (2) does that have emotional value. It's allowed us to cull about half the books from each shelf. Overall in April we culled two of our three lit shelves and packed one of them. (I'd hoped to get all three packed, but then we went to Hawaii, and then I was sick for weeks after our return.)
I initially packed a medium box full of books, and it was about 35 pounds, which is within the capacities of the boxes (and within the amounts suggested for moving), but I really didn't want to unload dozens of 35# boxes from a container when it got dumped on our metaphoric Hawaiian lawn. Packing in the small boxes was a lot less efficient: those medium boxes were just perfect for two rows of TPB, two levels deep, while the small boxes only have room for one row of TPBs, and everything else needs to be stacked like puzzle pieces. But, so it goes.
Anyhow, so we've got a small start on the boxes: that one shelf, half culled, then filled three small boxes. But that's three boxes we don't have to do as the year goes on.
Here's another reason I'm sick of Berkeley: I feel like we're now fighting a constant battle against encroaching homeless encampments on all sides. While we were in Hawaii in April, one set up about 100 yards from our house, literally in the street. Shortly after we got back, it began growing at a frightening rate. When someone threatened me as I walked by on the way to downtown (because I stopped too long to assess what I was going on), I'd had enough.
The police rather shockingly told me that camping on public areas was now legal, which is a really grotesque misreading of the appellate decision from Washington last year. (Basically it says you can't *criminalize* sleeping on public land, which isn't the same as protecting those commons from misuse, and it only talked about sleeping, not camping, and it also said that was only the case if you didn't give another option for the homeless, and one of the very serious problems that we have is the chronic homeless who refuse services.) Anywho, it means that the police have gotten really, really bad about doing anything about these illegal encampments. They'll force them to move along only in specific cases, and not even in the case of my being threatened, because it was *implicit* (my being told to move along when I was on a public street, with the tone and posture offering the clear implication that the homeless asshole was going to try to beat the shit out of me), rather than explicit. But it turns out that the one thing the homeless can't do is camp on the actual street, so it took several more days, but they were moved.
But it's almost pointless, because a new encampment has appeared on our main street (but at least that's a few blocks away), and there's another one a block down from that, that's been there for more than a year now, where the residents constantly sit at the bus stop bench there, blocking it from use for people like (for example) my wife, who can't stand on one foot. Only one person has died in the encampment to date, so it's not problematic enough for the police to do much about.
I have every desire to help the homeless in a societal way. We should as a country house and shelter them and help them get off drugs and get them into some psychiatric care if they need that help. Homelessness is *not* a moral failing, and it's *not* an acceptable state for our citizens. If we want to work with all the cities of the Bay Area, to work on this problem at a level where we can actually resolve it, that's great. If Gavin Newsom wants to work at it on the state level, that's even greater. Rows and rows and rows of tiny homes somewhere other than a tightly packed city (where everyone is living on top of each other), with full physical and mental health care is the least we should do.
But the "caring" people of Berkeley are making it worse, because they're attracting huge numbers of homeless people to the city with their refusal to police these violations of our community standards, and they're forcing them to live in filth because they've attracted more people than they can house, and meanwhile they're making the city more dangerous and less pleasant for the rest of us. It's a trainwreck. It's unsustainable. And Berkeley is so quickly descending into squalor that's it's shocking, especially given how bad the problems seemed *before* this, when we just had street kids threatening tourists.
Now, we've got potentially dangerous people *everywhere*, and I say that not because people who are unlucky enough to be homeless are innately dangerous, but because a lot of them are homeless because they have mental health problems, and they're not getting treated for them. And that *is* dangerous. We've had murder, arson, and any number of assaults that originated with the homeless population of Berkeley, and our fine city council, with their refusal to protect our civic commons, is putting us all right in front of that bullet.
I remember when Jesse Arreguin got elected mayor of Berkeley, the same day as Donald Trump, I said, "He's going to do some really bad things for the city." Because he's one of these liberal "purists" who doesn't let reality get in the way of his policies, and who refuses anything other than the most extreme progressive solution he can find, meaning that he's actually willing to vote down liberal proposals that aren't progressive enough. We don't have a rapid-transit bus system because of him and his co-conspirator, our former council representative. But I figured that Kimberly and I would be gone before we saw the worst of that. I had no idea that we'd be watching him destroy the civic fabric of this city in our last three years here.
On another note, here's a mild and silly nuisance as I work on my last year here: I've long had a long list of books that I wanted to read from the library. In the last year or so, I've really been working through it, because I know that libraries won't be nearly as good on Kauai. It's not just that Kauai is smaller than Berkeley, populationwise, but also because I'm used to drawing from the LINK+ system, which allows me to borrow from about 100 library systems, mostly in California (but also a few in Nevada).
So we got a notice toward the start of May that the Berkeley libraries wouldn't have access to LINK+ starting on June 1. This is supposedly part of a system upgrade that should be done by July 3 or so, but I'll believe that when I see that. (I'm not going to be shocked if we lose access to LINK+ for three months or so.)
And a lot of the books I was planning to read were ones that were only available on LINK+.
So, I've been gorging on LINK+ books this month, to try and meet my goal of finishing most of my library to-read list. I picked up five final ones today, which all need to be back to the library by May 31. I'll switch over to Hoopla digital books and the books that actually are at the local library when Berkeley's LINK+ goes down. And if they're not back in a month, I can actually get LINK+ books from Oakland instead ... it's just not nearly as convenient.
Here's the moving plan for May: get the cats fully ready to go to Hawaii (or at least have the paperwork in process) and continue packing. And, yeah, call that *(()#@ handyman. And probably find a new one. And maybe get the huge trove of books-to-go out of our foyer.
April had our last big disruption for our while, with our last vacation to Kauai, which turned out to be even more disruptive than expected because of my extended illness. May, June, July, and August should all be pretty clear, which hopefully means we can get lots and lots done. By the time we hit fall, I hope it'll look like we're in large part ready to go.