shannon_a

We've been in Berkeley for two days now. Two out of four. I'm ready to head back to my island paradise, but we still have a few things to do and a few people to see.

And of course we've had stuff to do every day.

EXPLORING THE GREENWAY. There's a little Greenway right behind our AirB&B. Just a few blocks long. It runs between the very important landmarks of a kid's playground (on our side) and the DMV (two blocks down). I biked it here and there when I lived in Berkeley (it seemed longer then!), but it was nice to get to walk it for once, which I did on Monday morning. Just a few short blocks of pleasantly Californian trail (meaning that it had plenty of leaves that were autumning). There used to be a homeless encampment at the far side of it, which was there every time I biked through, and that seems to be gone now. I'd heard Mayor Arreguin had dropped homlessness by 45% in Berkeley these last few years, which is a Christmas Miracle after he spent the first six years or whatever screwing up the city with purist progressive beliefs, which meant that great projects got sidelined because they weren't good enough. Anyway, I wonder if the same is going on in Oakland and so it's a general trend and not Arreguin actually doing anything.

LAPPING THE LAKE. Later in the day on Monday I headed out to Lafayette to visit with C&M. It's become an annual tradition: we walk the Lafayette Reservoir, which is a pleasant little ~3 mile walk that reveals some more open (less treed) California landscapes, then we go have lunch somewhere. C & I inevitably talk just a little bit of business, but not much, so as not to leave out M. So we did that and we also talked some TV shows and some politics along the way. A pleasant little excursion! Though I talk with C. every week for Blockchain Commons, it's always good to get some face time.

GLORIOUS GAMING. And the same was true for my Monday evening. One of the joys of being in an Air B&B is theoretically having room to invite friends over. And sure enough this Air B&B has a very little table (which I knew), but it even has a leaf to extend it (which I did not know). So that was sufficient to have just a couple of people over to game. So we had an in-person Wednesday night reunion: just myself, S. and EL. We'd have loved to see EV, but he's up in Sacramento at the moment, and there was no way he was coming down here on a week night. (Aligning a Thanksgiving trip to get time with friends not during the week is challenging, and something I'll have to work on when we do it again presumably in two years). We ended up playing two games, _Calico_ and _Rise of Augustus_. Ironically, _Calico_ just appeared on BoardGameArena, so it was a game we didn't need to be in person to play, but EL appreciated the in-person teach (and I think I've gotten better at teaching it, after figuring out what the tension points in the game's teach are, when I was down in San Martin). _Rise of Augustus_ also exists on BGA, but only in a different form called _Via Magica_, and _Rise of Augustus_ is better in just about every way (better theming, more opportunities to increase your number of meeples and so play a less random game, better balance on super powers). So, that was nice to play.

THE B&B. Two days in, the air B&B has held up to our original expectations, which is to say it's the nicest and perhaps also most comfortable Air B&B I've been in. Could the higher-priced ones (at least at their regular price; this one was discounted when I rented) actually be better and not just bigger? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. In any case, everything is very modern, but that also has its drawbacks. For example, it took us a full day to get the heating system something like what we wanted, by adjusting both temperature and fan settings, and even now it's just slightly on the chill side ... except when it gets too hot at night. And the bathrooms have super fancy lights that go on whenever you enter. Which was great until the night before last when Kimberly got up in the night, walked _by_ the door to our master bathroom, and the light came on, waking & blinding me. Then I of course had the flipside while showering today: I was apparently too still, and the lights when off while I was in the shower. Anyway, very nice B&B. We're lounging around today because it's a pretty quiet day for both Kimberly & me, and it's totally comfortable. (But if I had to list a top win it might be the great overhead lighting in every room. Too many Air B&Bs I've been in have just been a dull twilight at night as a single table lamp fails to light a room.)

HAWAIIAN HOURS. I've been keeping Hawaiian hours since we got here, which is to say I've been waking up between 6.30-7.30 and going to bed before 11. Yesterday, I discovered that doesn't sync well with Berkeley hours. I was up, showered, and ready to go not long after 8, but I wanted to grab a sandwich for a hike up into the hills. I didn't want another Safeway sandwich, since I had one for dinner on Monday, and anyway I knew from past experience that it's a major fight to get someone to serve you at the sandwich counter at the Safeway if it's earlier than 11 or so. But Ike's Overpriced Sandwiches next door didn't open until 10.30. So I hung out at the Air B&B and did some reading and writing and then headed out to get to Ike's a few minutes after it opened. I was their first customer. Still overpriced. Still tasty. (I had a sandwich with delicious halal chicken and a few other goodies.)

THE HIKE. Big, big hike yesterday. I'm fairly certain it's the biggest hike I've done since November 2, 2019, a few months before we left. Since we're in Rockridge, I knew we were right under Lake Temescal, one of my favorite destinations when we lived here. I used to bike up there in the evening with a book or my computer. I did a lot of work on _Designers & Dragons_ and the DnDClassics histories up there. I remember finishing reading _A Dance with Dragons_ up there too, primarily because I realized I couldn't throw it across the room afterward because I was outside (and it was a library book beside).

Anyway, I decided to walk up there, with my theory being I could then walk into the North Oakland Regional Sports Center that's above it and use that to get up into Sibley, which is a ridgeline park, and then walk the ridgeline until I hit Berkeley, when I'd come down the fire trails in Strawberry Canyon to the campus. I've done all those individual bits before, but not necessarily in that order (as I was starting a few miles south of where our house in Berkeley was).

And so it went. I had lunch in Temescal, and moved on pretty quickly afterward because it was *cold* sitting out at the park. The paths up through the Sports Center took the most effort, and it took me two tries to find the correct path up to Sibley. Oh, and I got attacked by a coyote! Well, almost. He was hiding in the underbrush and burst out at me as I went by. But he obvious saw I was much larger than the prey he was expecting, so he nope-noped back into the brush when he was only halfway out. Then just half-a-mile on from that I ran into something even more dangerous: an overprivileged hill dweller with almost a dozen wild dogs, all off-leash. Several of them started aggressively barking at me and one kept aggressively advancing on me as the owner (walker probably) tried to bribe them back to her side with treats. After a very wary minute or two trying to get past them and not get assaulted I realized I really should warn her about the coyote but couldn't because she wouldn't have been able to hear me over the thunderous barking and there was no way I was getting closer to her again. Hopefully the super aggressive dog kept the smaller ones safe.

As soon as I went over the ridge, just before Sibley, the temperature felt like it dropped by 10 degrees, and so my overshirt went on again. Sibley was great, but then I faced a major challenge when I hit the connector trail between Sibley and Tilden: the trail was marked closed! This was my only way to get where I was going (well, except _maybe_ a road that went almost all the way down to Orinda and back). So I decided I had to chance it. Worst case, I backtracked and asked an unhappy Uber driver to pick me up in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that part of the trail had collapsed, I suspect during the torrential rains that the Bay Area got just before we came out. Fortunately, the collapse was just four or six feet across and there was still maybe three-foot width of trail and it looked like it was on solid stone. If I were living here, I'd avoid that trail until it was fixed, but it was OK going over it once when i really needed to get from point a to point b. When I got to the far side of that connector trail, there was another closed sign, but this one had been moved to the side of the trail so as not to impede traffic on it.

One of the neat things about the hike was that it was through a lot of places, such as Sibley and the North Oakland Regional Sports Center and even the closed connector trail, that I hadn't expected to ever see again. But when i had a full day free, the sky(line) was the limit. The fire trails that I took down to Berkeley were more familiar, and I've even been on them a few times since we left.

It turned out to be a LONG hike, longer than I expected, but I didn't usually go both up and down like that when I planned a hiking day when I lived here. If I was going up into the hills for that long of a hike I usually planned to take a bus back down: there were two bus lines I walked to up there: one in Tilden (which was pretty close) and one at the Chabot Observatory (which was pretty far). But this time my plan was basically to use the hill trails to transit from Oakland to Berkeley, the _long_ way. I did about 1200 feet of rise from our Air B&B to Sibley. There was more up and down later, but that was most of it. I hit almost 17 miles for the day, the vast majority of which was on that hike. I was *exhausted*. As I said, it was the longest I've walked since we moved, but even back in the day, 17 miles would have been a major outing. (The badges system on FitBit says I've hit 35,000 steps 14 times in the 10 years or I've had a FitBit, which was what I did yesterday, but I was close to 40,000 steps, which I've only hit 5 times.)

MATCHBOX MAGIC FLUTE. The reason I was transiting to Berkeley was that Kimberly and I had tickets for a play that evening: Mary Zimmerman's Matchbox Magic Flute at the Berkeley Rep. We'd seen two of Zimmerman's plays many years previous, her Metamorphoses and her Arabian Nights, and they were both terrific. This was more of the same.

I actually hadn't known what to expect, and thus was somewhat surprised that it was fully operatic (or opera-lite as Berkeleyside described it). And in some ways that made it marvelous. Oh, I could have done without 80% of the lines being sung in operatic tones, as that made it hard to understand at times. But getting this viewport into another word of storytelling was amazing. It was a Hero's journeys amidst fantasy realms, sure, but additions like the fool (papageno) and a storyline that totally undercut traditional views of who might be good and evil were terrific. And the constant Mozart concert and all the singing were fun, even if the latter obscured the words at times.

Zimmerman also did a marvelous job as writer and director, upping the humor and even modernizing it (there was even one non-overt Trump dig, about "storming the capital ... I mean castle" and how that character might become attorney general as a result). And the staging, oh my gosh, it was beautiful. Over the top colors, iconic outfits, even a red-lit airvent that poofed up the Queen of Night's skirts and gave them a red hue.

Overall, a terrific experience. Papageno's bird calls were still running through my head when I was getting ready for bed last night.

(And today, I rest! Total plans = Wendy's for lunch, Wicked for desert, then Millennium for dinner.)

A BETTER DAY FOR ELMER. My dad visited Elmer today, and he was still skittish but by the end of the visit he seemed to be hunting a lizard with his brother and had his tail in the air. Then our catsitter came over shortly afterward and she also reported Elmer hiding but in better spirits. So, hopefully our kiddo will be OK until we return home.

OUR REFRIGERATOR IS HAUNTED. Here in the suite. It frequently makes weird burbling and whining noises.

UP PANORAMIC HILL. This morning, the sky was overcast, but the rain held off, so I decided to take a walk up Panoramic Hill. This was one of my favorite little hikes when I lived in Berkeley. I could walk up from our house to the Clark Kerr campus, hike up into the fire trails, loop over to Panoramic Hill, and come back down. About 600 feet of ascent from our old house, some nice scenic views, and maybe an hour's time or so.

So today I did the reverse: up Panoramic Hill and then down above Clark Kerr before I headed over to Rockridge. And it was *HARD* work. Primarily the flights and flights and flights of steps up Panoramic Hill were hard work. I think that's partly that going up those steps is harder than the slopes (and steps) above Clark Kerr, but I've also definitely loss some of my climbing fitness from four years in Hawaii. Definitely time to get back into shape next year.

But it was a lovely hike today even if there were several rests along the way up.

OUT TO THE CITY. I walk through much of South Berkeley to get to Rockridge BART, and then took the train into and out of the city. Were things running on better schedule today? I dunno, because I never looked at a schedule. But I got a direct train into the city 4 minutes after my arrival at Rockridge and a direct train home from SF as soon as I stepped down onto the platform. So I was definitely luckier if nothing else.

ASIAN ART. My destination in the city was the Asian Art museum. I've never actually been there, though I'm sure I saw some of its exhibits when they were back in the de Young 20+ years ago.

The highlight of the trip was the Takashi Murakami special exhibit. A lot of his work is anime and kaiju influenced, and so it's a lot of fun. There was also some even _more_ pop art stuff, including happy flowers and even NFTs. But he also did some really thoughtful stuff, like producing two-D paintings of ceramics that REALLY looked like the ceramic.

The rest of the museum was terrific too. It was divided by culture, running from India through Malaysia into China, Korea, and Japan. So, so many buddhas (and really interesting didactics on the spread of Buddhism with trade in Asia, one of which said something like "and Buddhism was brought into this region as trade increased, and it was embraced by the population, we don't know why"). Also kukris and Samurai armor and swords and vases and jade carvings (jade can't really be carved by metal implements, it has to be abraded! I had no idea!).

I was bone tired by the time I'd been there a few hours, after 4+ miles of walking in Berkeley, 650 or so feet of ascent, and then circling and circling in the museum. There were a few smaller special exhibits I could have visited, but I couldn't figure out where they were, and I was tired, so I decided to call it a day.

A+++ MUSEUM. WOULD RETURN.

REST & DINNER. When I came home, Kimberly was chatting with K., who she'd spent some time with during the day. After K. left we both napped. (Tired!) Then we had dinner out with N., one of Kimberly's old co-workers, and someone we'd both taken a writing class with. Oh, she also married us. That is, she conducted the ceremony.

Good to see her, good dinner, and now it's another relaxing evening in the suite.

One day left. Gaming for me. Then we go home.

_Three more days at the Wiedlin house (Christmas Eve through Boxing Day), celebrating the holidays._

THE FITBIT CONUNDRUM. While we were packing I told K. not to pack her Fitbit charger. We both have Charge 6s now and I'd already packed the USB cord that recharges mine, so no problem. And then on our first day in San Martin I tried to charge my Charge 6 and I flipped it over and over in the little clip that's supposed to attach it to its charging connectors. No dice. No charge. At which point I realized I'd brought my old charger for my (likely) dead Versa 2. Whoops.

Fortunately, the local Best Buy in Gilroy claimed they had one Charge 6 charger. I never trust the old "we have one" claim, as that's usually an inventory/lossage error. But I ordered one online for Curbside pickup and voila, on Christmas Eve morning they told me it was ready. So down to Gilroy we went. I'd never used curbside pickup before, but there was no way I was walking into a Best Buy on Christmas Eve. It was delivered right to our car window, quickly and efficiently. So now we're not going "waste" steps on this trip.

SOUTH TO NORTH. Later on Christmas Eve my mom and I biked up to Morgan Hill, which is the opposite direction from Gilroy. On the ebikes, of course. Fun ride. We did about 16 miles. (I used pedal assist level 1 most of the trip, and pulled it up to level 2 for the final bit back home.) My mom showed my around Morgan Hill a little, then we rode a trail I didn't know existed along Llagas Creek, and even explored a new spur that went in this year and my mom had never ridden before. Fun to see my mom loves exploring new bike trails, just like I did in my 20 years of active biking in the Bay Area, and also fun to see there's at least one more trail down there than the Coyote Creek Trail I already knew about. (This one is south of the Coyote Creek Trail and a pretty small thing, relatively.)

THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR. Yesterday was Christmas. My brother R. had joined us for Christmas Eve, and we all had Christmas morning together, then we went over to my brother J. & s-i-l L.'s house for Christmas afternoon. We had more Christmas there. My niece & nephew got TONS of presents (including from us, of course). I also got to spend some time with them, and they were quite sweet (and less wild than last year). My niece L. kept bringing me presents to read the tags of, and whenever I told her one was hers, she'd ask, "Can I open it? Can I open it?" My nephew J. asked me to play Lego with him and later play in the backyard with him.

I'd known that modern Lego sets had instructions for how to put them together and special pieces to make that possible, but I hadn't realized that they were all these teeny extremely thin pieces that you built up millimeter by millimeter. Wow. So J. had a Donkey Kong set and we got most of Donkey Kong's legs and body together over the course of something less than an hour. J. was pretty good with it, but I'd sometimes correct him, and when we'd look more carefully I'd be right about 50% of the time and he'd be right about 50% of the time. Heh. It really looks like these Lego sets are training kids for a future of Ikea furniture building.

Anyway, a nice Christmas day all around.

HIKING. We missed any notable exercise on Christmas Day, but the day after (today), my mom and I hiked a bit in the hills right behind their house. We just did a mile up into the hills and a mile back, but we got some good ascent and got high enough to look over the valley. We also dodged quite a few cows, and poor Zeke puppy, who was of course hiking with us, was terrified of them. When one of them was positioned in the middle of the trail, lowing away, Zeke practically climbed the hillside to get around it.

GAMES, GAMES, GAMES. We played lots of Games while at Casa Wiedlin. I'm think we played Cascadia three times. I remember K. won our first game, R. kicked butt at a game on Christmas Eve even though it was his first game, and I finally racked up a win today after that game on Christmas Eve where I'd thought I was a winner before I saw R's score. We always played a game of Nidavellir, which I've wanted a copy of since I played it online early in the pandemic, and finally got one for Christmas. I think my mom won that one.

TO BERKELEY. Today was the great transition from San Martin to Berkeley, marking the mid point of our holiday. We are staying at suite in a hotel in Berkeley. Our first reaction when we got into our room was that it was COLD. But the heater was off. We turned it on, and four hours later the room has never really gotten better than slightly chilly. Part of the problem seems to be that the second heater in the bedroom generates no heat. So we've cranked the living room heater up and up over the course of the evening, and pulled shut all the drapes, and hope that eventually the whole suite warms up, because that was one of our goals in staying in a hotel, as in some recent years we've had AirBnBs in Berkeley and Oakland that had rooms that were ice cold (mostly the bathrooms!). Of course, the other reason for the hotel stay was accessibility for K. because of her messed up knee.

K. has already started seeing folks here in Berkeley, as she went out to dinner with a few tonight (while I just picked up a chicken cheese steak, something not available on island as far as I know). But I'll start seeing people tomorrow. Walking and chatting tomorrow; gaming on Thursday, more gaming on Saturday, and a blesséd free day on Friday. Before we go home on New Year's Eve.

Our Air B&B is a classic little apartment that reminds me of our Berkeley house. Radiant heater. A strange misshapen hallway. Weird nooks. Weird crannies. Light switches that appear to do nothing. Plugs that don't work. Don't get me wrong: I like it. Great windows, set back from the street, but nicely central to Rockridge. Well upkept.

Well, the physical building is well upkept. There's all kinds of weird stuff that I don't know why the host leaves in a rental. Like 12 bottles of booze, including a nice, big bottle of rum out. Intended as a visitor gift? Hard to say, since there's so much more.

And I didn't sleep that well because the bed wildly rocketed around whenever someone turned over. Kimberly didn't seem to notice. But I similarly had some of my best sleep of the year at my mom's house, while Kimberly found the (new) mattress too hard. So it goes.

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Last night Kimberly was planning to get together with a friend (ultimately cancelled), so I scheduled with the current Thursday night group: MA, MB, E., and S. They were all fortunately able to get together. We grabbed dinner at the refurbished Smoke House (which was closed my last year in Berkeley due to a fire), and the chicken sandwich was superb and the fries were NO LONGER GREASY. Yowsa. So even better than before the fire.

We ate that dinner over at MB's place, and he said it was the first time he'd had anyone inside since the start of the pandemic. (They'd apparently planned to start playing there again at some point, and then yet another variant hit.) Wow, still a pandemic. Things have loosened up a lot more than that in Hawaii.

Here, people have also constantly been talking about testing negative recently, often right before a get-together. Should I be getting tested amidst all these get togethers, I wondered.

We played Bohnanza and Boomerang: Australia, the latter of which I brought from Hawaii (and will be returning BA-DUM-DUM). E. headed out after the first game, because it was as much seeing people in person as he could take amidst a pandemic.

It was great seeing everyone in person, but sad to see how much COVID is still affecting everything out here.

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I had the early part of today free, so I took an Uber with Kimberly to near the Claremont (where she was going to Rick & Ann's to meet people for brunch) and hiked up on the fire trails over Clark Kerr.

Yay! One of my favorite hikes that I probably did 100s of times while living here. Today I went up Stonewall, across behind Rattlesnake Canyon, up the hill to Panoramic Hill, across it, and then down the steps. Lots of beautiful views of the Bay. Some mud, but not too bad. I ate half my lunch at the bench at Stonewall, started getting rained on, and then finished off on the other side of Rattlesnake Canyon.

It was great and nostalgic, and I was excited to see there were two new benches and a few new steps built since last I was there.

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Afterward I toured Berkeley and after hearing it was so different in the last year, found it largely the same. Very few businesses had closed. But there was a surprising amount of new construction that got done. The hideous Moorish-Tudor building on Telegraph (see https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/02/24/a-moorish-tudor-fever-dream-is-unveiled-on-telegraph-avenue). The building that replaced The Village. A new skyscraper in Downtown Berkeley. I was shocked to see it all done after two years of Pandemic.

There was also some nice renovation to the Downtown Berkeley library. A great looking new Teen Room (that is Teen-only 2-6) and a really neat looking Mystery Room, neat mainly because it was full of comfy chairs.

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I also checked out the house. I was pleased to see the landscaping that we got done to improve the sale price of the house has survived. I was pleased to see the two trees out front that I lavished care on for their first year also are going strong. There was a huge (fake) spiderweb in a front window, presumably left over from Halloween. And there was a carton from beer thrown next to the trash can. Bud Lite.

So the house endures. Even if it's now home to Bud Light drinkers.

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I eventually made my way to Downtown Berkeley BART, so I could get to today's gaming at EV's house, which we'd scheduled again because Kimberly had plans.

The ride was mostly better than yesterday, which I expected given the stations I was traversing (Downtown Berkeley to MacArthur to Pleasant Hill).

But the scheduling was even more messed up than when I was last in the Bay Area (when the BART schedules, which were reliable for decades, were increasingly faltering).

Today, they had so many trains out of service that they were cancelling every fourth train or so. I have never seen BART officially cancel trains before, in 30 years of using the service. And this is after they've been buying huge numbers of new trains.

I got to MacArthur fine, and met up with S., who was also joining us for gaming. And then we found our transfer train to Pleasant Hill was cancelled.

And then the next train got delayed by 10 minutes due to "police action at Embarcadero" (increasing numbers of police actions were one of the things that were messing with BART schedules before I left; the other was mechanical failures).

We eventually made it out to Pleasant Hill, with just a few nose-mask scofflaws spotted and not all of the other problems I saw last time, when we went through the rest of Oakland.

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Gaming was great today. EV was very kind to set things up on a weekday and it was great to see S. and C. also there, who I frequently game with on Wednesdays.

We played an old favorite, Jump Drive.

We played Eric's next release, First Empires, which I'd enjoyed through what Eric says was 8 years of playtesting in different forms (since 2012) and so I'm thrilled to see coming out. (Even better, it allows me to write a review; I've had another of his games waiting a review for a year, but it's been difficult to get a group together for a final review play).

We also played two fun new games, Fantastic Factories and Wild Space, both of which I enjoyed enough to want to get my own copies of (especially the first), in the dream that I'll be able to play eurogames in person in Hawaii someday.

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So that was two days of gaming in COVID, my only in-person gaming since COVID started, other than familial games. Hopefully we're all safe enough with full vaccination and (mostly) boosters.

It was great seeing everyone in person. It was great engaging in our old pasttime. It was great playing games not available online.

A week ago Wednesday was a golden day for getting things done, but as always there's some steps backward too.

Return of the Office. I am back in my office! My dad helped me cut up and place trim a few weeks ago, I painted it, he helped me move the heavier furniture back in a week ago Tuesday, and then that Tuesday night I got much of my current references (and my computer and stuff) moved back in, in advance of the workday Wednesday.

I am surprised how happy I am to be back in my office. I mean, the back corner of our family room, where I was setup, is actually quite large. (Something we really need to account for when we get shelving, so we don't waste all the open space.) I had my full desk/shelf/filing-cabinet/printer-stand setup out there. But it's one of the darker corners of the house (because it's on the front wall of our house, where the first story is mostly under ground), and there's just a different feeling being in borrowed space.

So, thrilled to be back in my office, though I did learn I'd been wrong about one thing: my office is actually hotter than my borrowed space was, especially in the morning, because it has a huge south-facing window (which is why I needed to get the window tinted, just to make the room usable as an office, without having the drapes shut 100% of the time). It just feels cooler because there's an overhead fan, and the back corner of the family room is one of the very few nooks in the office that doesn't have a fan of its own.

My office isn't done. I need to floor my closet, work with my dad on transitions for the family room and the closet, and then put a last bit of trim down around the door (which we couldn't do until the transition was done) and in the closet. We've got a full iteration of the family-room transition out to the hallway done ... but it was too tall for Hal so we need to rout it down. But after that the rest will probably wait until next year, because my goal was to get enough of the office refloored that we could put shelving down, even if some of the shelving comes down to the floor, which may or may not be the case.

After my dad and I finish that transition, the next major task will be to fix the tiling in the family room. Renters did a lot of flooring in the house on their own over the years: some nice tiling in the family room and wood laminate throughout the upstairs. Unfortunately, they did an awful job. (To be fair, I suspect it was all harder work than the lego-like planking I've been working with.) In the family room, the problem is that some of the tiling has popped up. So we need to clean those off, reseat them, and hope that solves the problem, again before the shelves go in.

But given my dad is going to be away for the next few weeks (more on that momentarily) I have other tasks planned: rescreening some windows, hanging some curtains, and using tubs to sort out and clean some of our boxes in the family room (for stuff meant to go on shelves). (I haven't gotten any of it done yet, but hope springs eternal!)

Kimberly's Office. I should note that Kimberly's office is totally done at this point, after I finally decided I was done with the spray painting of her final closet doors (the second set of which never ended up as good as I would have liked, but good enough). That's going to allow her to get that office into final shape (minus any shelving she wants), and will also helpfully drain more material out of the family room.

Here Comes the Sun. A week ago Wednesday we also got our solar power fixed with the installation of a new inverter. It took a few hours, and then a few days before the battery was topping out at 100% again.

Hawaii Taxes. But the most pleasant surprise that Wednesday was when our tax guys let us know that Hawaii has FINALLY accepted our tax return, after half-a-year of illegally trying to force us to pay taxes that we'd already paid to California for the sale of our house. Our tax guy also had to kick them to get our refund started, and a week and a half later it's still not here, but progress. (And that all means that I can hopefully get started on paying the excise tax that I owe THEM for the privilege of doing contract work in Hawaii. To date the state has been totally non-helpful in getting me a TAX ID number for that, but now that our return has finally settled, I'm hoping I can get that through an automated process.)

The Many Trips to the Airport. Last week was a busy week, because after all of that good progress on Wednesday, I then spent Thursday and Friday going back and forth to the airport. On Thursday, I took Kimberly to the airport for her second post-surgery followup on her foot ... and then picked her up several hours later. Instead of going home in between, as I did last time, this time I went up to the bike path on Kapaa and had my usual day out, with a Safeway sandwich for lunch and some writing at a pavilion before I walked about five miles up and down the path. (Hawaii sun was hot! I was exhausted! But I enjoyed seeing stuff by foot, including some walking on one of the beaches.) Overall, I'm pretty sure I got more work done than last time I drove Kimberly to and fro the airport (not a high bar), and had a nice day out too.

The trip on Friday was to take my Dad and Mary to the airport, to go to San Jose. Obviously, I did not pick them up the same day. They're gone for three weeks again, to see their new granddaughter and tour California and Oregon. So we're alone again (naturally) on the island. Which mainly means our time is less structured because there's no Sunday gettogether, no early evening walks, and no joint work on projects.

I am Kimberly's Foot. Well I'm not. And I'm not even Joe's. But anyway. Kimberly's second followup appointment told her foot was healing fine. And she got the referral for physical therapy that she'd been waiting for, and so we're now struggling to fit twice a week physical therapy into our schedule, plus the request for her to get out to a swimming pool. Fortunately, the physical therapy is just down the hill a few blocks. Of course the concern here is that Kimberly has to be really careful to not hurt her foot after years of not using it (much) ... and she says it's been hurting since her last physical therapy ... like it did when she broke it, setting off this whole string of problems. Hopefully not what's going on.

Two Steps Back. Of course, it's three steps forward, two back. Kimberly broke a tooth last weekend. It's these silver fillings that they used in the '80s. They expand and crack teeth over time, and Kimberly and I both had them. When my dentist learned I was moving, she said she wanted to replace my last ones (I think my last ones! Definitely the last ones she had flagged as problems) before I moved. So she did, and two years later, I'm all good. But Kimberly still had one they were keeping an eye on, and one of those silver-filled teeth was what broke. So she got an emergency temporary crown on Monday, and a permanent crown is being made on the mainland.

Meanwhile, I got another annoying notice regarding my health coverage. A few weeks ago, it was my doctor jumping ship. This time, it's my insurance plan doing the same. To be precise, my HMO is being replaced with a PPO. They're happily telling me that I get to choose my own specialists without a referral now. Yay. Which is pretty grossly dishonest, because if I fail to pick the doctors in network, I pay out the nose, and that now falls on me. Boo. I've been fighting to keep an HMO for 20 years now, which resulted into higher fees for a while, but now PPOs are right up there and not as good. (There will probably be higher copays too.) So, boo. I'll see if I have any options, but I actually have very few options on-island, so I'll probably just go over to a sucky PPO at the same cost as my better HMO.

American healthcare sucks the big one.

Life is continuing on. Every day our Hawaii house is just a teeny bit more of a home. It's going to take time, lots of time, well past the next months when I'm finishing up my full-time work for Skotos, well past when I'm going out to Buenos Aires for RWOT10, and well past when we're returning to the Bay Area for an early 2020 visit, but it'll happen.

And it's a lot less stressful than the deadlined work of 2019 to move out here.

Today has been shockingly windy. Doors keep slamming. An entire roll of toilet paper got unrolled in our front bathroom. We actually closed up all the windows in the house. Well, except a couple of turncrank windows in the front of the house that can't be closed because renters let the plants grow under them.

Speaking of plants:

This weekend I bought a new weed-wacker at Home Depot, which I've now been to about half-a-dozen times. I loved my old battery-powered wacker that Bob got me several years ago, but it just wasn't sufficient to cut our steep hillside in back, which is big and too steep for a lawnmower. So I got the best battery-powered Ryobi model. At 40V, that's the same power I have for my lawnmower (and in fact the same battery, which is a plus), and I also got a wacker with a 15" cutting swath and with dual-feed lines. It did the job MUCH better. Previously, I'd been unable to do more than 20% of the back hill before I had run both of my old batteries out and utterly exhausted myself. I exhausted myself again on Saturday, truth to tell, but I finished the whole hill, and all on one battery. So, yay, that's been a problem and it's now resolved (but I need to build some upper body strength).

And speaking of plants in another state:

We had a very disturbing report from our realtor that one of our neighbors told her that a crew of people including a pregnant 30-year-old woman had been out in front of our house recently, trying to stuff our recently laid pebbles and our recently planted landscaping plants into bags!!?? She says she yelled at them to get out of there and that she was calling the police. This is honestly the most bizarre thing I've ever heard of, even in Berkeley (where our realtor said that someone also dumped a bunch of trash in front of our house, which is much more typical of the self-centered, civic-free attitude of a lot of people in the town), but a gang trying to steal our new landscaping??? WTF!!

I do wonder if the story isn't a fabrication, as I think the neighbor is the same middle-aged woman from the apartments across the street who greeted me real friendly a week or two before I left and after we talked for a bit said she was really sorry when she heard I was leaving because she liked us living there. And this was a woman that I'd swear I never talked to before. But she seemed otherwise entirely normal when we talked, and that's also balanced with concern that someone knows the house is empty and thus vulnerable ... apparently to plant theft.

But I alerted our other very nice neighbor, who I know is watching over the house, and hopefully if something is actually going on one neighbor or the other will make sure the police are alerted.

But again i say, WTF. (And did it really happen?)

(We've generally been hearing about minor nuisances at the house, such as a smoke alarm that's started chirping and a few sockets that aren't working right, and I've just been giving our realtor the OK to deal with them and/or spend money to do so. I'm thrilled she's doing so and I don't have to, especially now that we're a thousand miles away.)

And I think when I started writing tonight, my subconscious intent was to write about the insane possibly true attempt at plant theft. So I'll call it quits now.

So Kimberly's been having "episodes". We don't properly know what to call them. She starts having significant cognitive impairment, she has problems with balance and manual dexterity, she can't remember things or figure out things, she slurs her words. More recently, she's had weird sensory inputs. This goes on for 2-6 hours, and then she's back to normal. It's been going on since July 4th.

We've had rafts of tests done, with rafts more to go. There's no consensus as to the cause, but her neurologist is currently exploring the possibility of seizures. So, she's got an MRI and an EEG scheduled, but the problem with an EEG is that it will only show anything interesting if Kimberly is actually have a seizure at the time of the test.

So after Kimberly's most recent episode, where she was smelling smoke, which is new, one of her doctors said we really need to go into the ER for a situation like that, where there's weird sensory input, and we need to press them to do an EEG while she's symptomatic.

Which is our prelude to yesterday's useless, annoying, and upsetting episode.

---

Kimberly gets home at about 4.30 yesterday and when I got to see her at 4.45 she tells me that she's basically lost the previous 15 minute and that she's having weird sensations in her toes, like fish are biting them. (It later spreads to weird sensations in her legs, hands, and tongue.) So, I decide we're off the ER, because this is the exact sort of sensory weirdness that her doctor was worried about the night before.

We go through the metal-detector rigamarole at the ER, because this area sucks. And pretty soon we're talking to the intake nurse. I heavily press upon him that we're trying to rule out a seizure (or rule one in, I guess), and so we need to get Kimberly into an EEG while she's symptomatic, and that means soon, because these episodes have a limited shelf life. Kimberly is by this point having increased problems with confusion and is slow responding to questions, and somewhere in all of that, we get the point across. He gets Kimberly into a wheelchair and pushes us over to wait for the triage doctor, who will see us next.

Which is the last time things will happen quickly all night, and generally when things go to shit.

---

We get called into the triage doctor a few minutes later. She opens the door, glances at Kimberly in the wheelchair, and then turns around, offering no help. So, Kimberly starts to get out of the chair and I quickly get in there to help her if needed.

And one of the other patients starts screaming, "Why is she going in when we was here first!?" After the third or fourth scream of this, with the staff not doing a damned thing, I turn around and say, "My wife is having a seizure." Which may or may not be true, but it's my best brief explanation of the situation.

And so as we're going into the triage room, the triage doctor attacks us for the first time, saying "How could she be having a seizure when she's walking!?" Because apparently surly doctors confined to the ER at Alta Bates didn't study hard enough to know that there are other types of seizures than motor seizures: non-motor seizures to be precise. I say, "We think it might be non-motor seizures" which is the sort of medical information that a patient should never have to explain to a doctor.

And then when the door closes, she rips into me again, saying, "You can NOT respond to another patient like that", referring to my answering the screaming person that they failed to control in the waiting room. And, I admit, at this point I lose my cool. I shouldn't have, but at least I direct it toward the person outside the door, rather than the asshole of a doctor that we're now saddled with. But I give my colorful description of what I think of a person who kept yelling at us because we were deemed a more time-important case. And the doctor tells me to leave the triage room.

And look, I understand where she's coming from. As I said, they've got a metal detector out front because they get gang members and people from the street with mental health problems and tweakers into that ER. She's certainly regularly dealing with drunk college students (who clog up the ER every Friday and Saturday) and about every time I'm at the ER, there's some out-of-his-mind homeless guy stomping around and ranting. But, as Kimberly points out, she escalated straight to "get out of the room" with no warning in between. And my outburst was the result of being verbally attacked twice, first by the person in the waiting room who the staff ignored and then by the doctor herself. And, it's also pretty obvious to me that she's got a power trip thing going on, like it's the only thing she gets for herself in a job that she pretty obviously both hates and is bad at.

I calm down damned fast and put myself in an entirely supplicant position to her power mongering. I flat out apologize and tell her that wife is very vulnerable and needs me there. After telling me three or so times to leave, asshole-doctor has apparently received enough groveling because she just acknowledges my presence and continues on.

---

Not that she's of any use.

For one, she attacks Kimberly one more time by denying the whole idea that she could be confused. She tries to get Kimberly to define confusion and tells her that doesn't sound like confusion when Kimberly explains her inability to focus her attention on what's important. (And I'm thinking, "Can you not hear the huge delays in her answering questions?" But I'm at this point letting Kimberly talk as much as she can and me as little as I can, because I've got my temper under control, but I'm not sure it's going to stay that way if someone goes at me directly, like the doctor is at Kimberly.)

The doctor also tells us that the ER doesn't have any access to an EEG. She says that if they decided to admit Kimberly, they could do an EEG in the morning. I tell her that's useless because in the morning Kimberly probably won't be symptomatic. She says several times that she just doesn't know what she can do.

That really should have been our cue to leave. I mean, there are some scary sensory symptoms that Kimberly is still having, so maybe it's good to literally be there at the hospital, but I'm not convinced otherwise. But then the doctor says there's something they can check for in blood. So we stay.

---

Kimberly gives some blood, and then they tell us there are no rooms, so they're going to stick us in the back waiting room.

("Away from the yeller in the front waiting room", I think. We thankfully never see her again.)

There are about half-a-dozen people there, and we soon realize how bad conditions are when a young Russian man sticks his head outside the waiting room to ask if the staff still knows he's there.

He gets shouted down from outside the room by a female sufficiently nasty that Kimberly and I sort of assume it's the asshole triage doctor. But I don't know why she'd be way over here, so maybe they just had multiple bad people on staff last night. In any case, the nasty care provider objects to the Russian's claim that he's been there for five and a half hours, and makes him recant and admit it's only been four and a half hours. They then offer a long diatribe about how they know exactly where every patient is.

The young Russian man tries to explain to Kimberly and me how very long he's been there, and we nod and smile politely. He sits back down.

---

Over the next few hours, patients come and go. We see the people ahead of us slowly decrease.

Meanwhile, care providers come into the room any number of times asking for someone not there. It becomes quickly obvious that they have no fucking idea where their patients actually are.

(We suspect this may be in part because some people are leaving. At least three people just get up on their own and never come back, including young Russian man. But they've lost far more than three people.)

---

We soon see people who came in after us getting into rooms.

No, we don't throw fits over this.

But it's pretty obvious that asshole doctor has triaged us quite low.

---

Kimberly's symptoms fade about 2-2.5 hours after they started, between 7 and 7.30, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that we're sitting here for absolutely no reason at this point.

I still don't trust myself to go deal with people who will argue with me, so I let Kimberly go out to try and get released. We can't just walk out because they've got an IV-thingy stuck in her arm. She comes back five or so minutes later and lets me know that not only did the staff refuse, but they talked down to her while doing so, like she was a six-year-old.

It's good I wasn't the one out there.

---

At some point we hear on the intercom that the triage doctor has gotten a call back from the doctor who is on-call for Kimberly's neurologist. No one ever bothers to tell us anything about this.

---

Meanwhile, a tweaker gets brought in and left on a gurney out in the hall. He keeps telling staff that he's hallucinating and says all he needs is some Ativan and he'll be fine. The staff test him by demanding he describe his hallucinations. He doesn't offer anything very descriptive. They refuse to give him Ativan because they say he'll stop breathing.

The tweaker going through withdrawal is left directly outside our room, largely unsupervised.

---

At some point we strike up a conversation with a couple of the other patients, all overcoming our reluctance to talk to strangers in a hospital setting because we've suddenly got this shared adversity of sitting in this damned back waiting room for hours while the staff can't even be bothered to check in on us.

I'm pretty happy to talk to a young mother across from us, because she'd been really visibly agitated a lot of the time we were there, and she obviously calms down when talking to us about just random things. She's apparently sitting there because there's some concern that she might have appendicitis. Yeah, a back waiting room with no one checking on us seems like a great place for someone who could have an appendix burst at any time.

I'm less happy to talk with the Florida man who ruined his feet by overdrinking during winter stints in Miami and who fixed up a hotel really nice, but no one wanted to come. I mean, he's nice enough but he talks and talks and talks.

And we don't talk much with the young man who's been there since 4.30 waiting blood test results. At one time he flags down a nurse and is simply told, "If there was something bad, they would have told us by now." Which apparently means: otherwise, you can sit down, shut up, and wait.

---

A nurse comes by at some point to talk about the wait. It's the first human interaction we've gotten since entering the hellish back waiting room, other than nurses shouting down people seeking information and other staff looking for patients that they can't locate. The nurse mentions the idea that people might want to leave, but blows it off. Except Kimberly doesn't let him. After he goes straight through, "If anyone wants to leave ..." and then moves on as if no one would, Kimberly says, "I want to leave!"

Because she's now thoroughly past the episode. And we now know there's no chance of an EEG, not that it would matter at this point. So we're just burning our evening in a place with sick people all around.

The nurse gets us out of there some time later ... and brings us to waiting room #3, in the way back of the ER. He seems generally helpful, the second such person at the hospital after the intake nurse, who's now something like 3.5 hours in the rear view mirror.

And we wait more and more and more. Our helpful nurse goes on break. But by this point it's obvious that we're out of the pre-ER-room purgatory, into a place where things are actually getting down, albeit at a slow rate. And where they're actually treating us like human beings rather than spending all their time ignoring or attacking us.

And eventually a doctor comes by, lets them know they didn't see anything in the blood test, but can't rule anything out, and discharges Kimberly, "against doctor's orders". Which hopefully doesn't cause problems with the insurance payment in this f***ed up things we call a healthcare system in the US. But that's entirely a problem for another day (and hopefully not a problem at all).

The helpful nurse comes back from break as we're checking out and thanks us for being patient, and I should have thanked him for his help because I always do my best to recognize that good service providers aren't responsible for shitty systems, but I'm too annoyed by the whole situation to do more than nod.

---

On our way out we wave to the young man who got his blood tested at about 4.30. He's still in the secondary waiting room. It's now 9.30.

---

We've unfortunately been to Alta Bates ER a number of times in our twenty years in south Berkeley. And, it always sucks. If you go in for a physical health problems, you're not out in less than 4-5 hours, and most of that time is spent sitting around while no one talks to you.

But yesterday was a real highlight. Because we were there for almost 4.5 hours, from about 5pm to 9.30 or so. And we never even got a room. And we saw the worst doctor that I've ever had the misfortune to interact with (though Kimberly has dealt with worse, IMO). And we learned that they couldn't even do an EEG if they wanted to despite machines being within a few hundred yards, not that they particularly cared about Kimberly's symptoms once we got back to a doctor; they seemed more intent on deriding and doubting them.

And as I've said, yes that hospital has to deal with a lot of people who are deranged or drugged or drunk or lying to them, or all three.

But it's no excuse.

---

Alta Bates ER at Ashby & Telegraph gets 1 star.

So 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.

Last night, a bit before midnight, I start hearing strange sounds outside. Hooting and huffing, like an owl and a wolf, maybe some moaning. Then the first outright yell cuts loose. That one catches Kimberly's attention; she never likes intrusive sounds, but particularly not a crazed shriek in the night. Amidst this I also hear banging about of trash cans, quite possibly the ones right next to our door.

Twice, I go to upstair windows to try and spot who it is making these sounds. I look out toward the ever-under-construction apartments next door and out across our swath of sidewalk, and can't spot anyone.

Callisto is disturbed by the sounds too, moreso the hooting and huffing than the yelling as far as I can tell. She's running all about the house, also trying to figure out where it is.

I should note, though these types of sounds haven't intruded on house before to this extent, they aren't unknown in Berkeley. Through its policy of permissiveness and refusal to stop homeless vagrants from illegally camping on our streets, illegally taking over our parks, and illegally shooting up drugs in all of these places, the Berkeley City Council has made our city a "Holy Land" for the homeless. No, that's not hyperbole. There's been at least one newspaper article that puts it in those terms, quoting homeless who travel from all over to get to Berkeley and partake of the city council's laissez faire attitude. And, one city obviously can't resolve all the homeless problems of the entire Bay Area, so we have a constantly overflowing petri dish of people with severe mental health problems and severe drug use problems, and that often leads to people nonsensically (and threateningly) shouting, screaming, huffing, howling, and hooting in the street while stumbling around smashing trash cans and whatever else is nearby.

And, I've been threatened both in the street and in restaurants by some of the same, but as I said, it hadn't intruded upon our supposedly safe domicile before.

Going downstairs after my second fruitless window search last night, I see that this time it has. A disheveled gray-haired man in a ripped jacket begins sporadically banging on the glass panes of our front door, huffing and hooting as he does.

That is the point at which I call the police. Non-emergency line, but I let them know he's right at our front door and that I feel threatened. No, he doesn't have a weapon that I can see, but at that point he's sat down on our front steps, so I can only see his back.

They say they'll send someone out.

A minute later the vagrant starts banging really hard on our glass panes, and I'm afraid he's going to smash them. I pick up the landline in my hand, ready to dial 9-1-1 and get an immediate response. I also quickly consider where the best weapons are in the house. The thick, wooden closet rod in the art-room closet can be popped out of its sockets. That's probably the best choice. The banging stops. A minute later the police show up. It's a long wait.

I hear bits and pieces of the conversation. He says, "I'm very cold", the first articulate words that he's said since beginning to haunt our house. They also get a name out of him, though it takes a few minutes. They get the first name first, then the last name a minute or two later.

With the police having successfully cleared the area, they bring in an ambulance a few minutes later, then they're all off.

I open up the door several minutes later to survey the damage, and I see two drops of blood on our bottom two steps. So, apparently he was both physically and mentally wounded, and that's probably why he was banging on the door. This freaks me out even more. I fill a pitcher with water and pour it out over the bottom steps, standing as far away as I can. Then I do it a second time.
 

---

I feel bad for not letting in someone who was hurt and seeking help. I mean, I feel like that goes against the basic morals of the human species. But everyone who has lived in Berkeley for more than a few years is haunted by the murder of Peter Cukor. Basically: paranoid schizophrenic vagrant shows up at Cukor's house and starts messing around in his yard, exactly as happened to us last night; Cukor goes out to confront him, and is bludgeoned to death. And that's not even to speak of the regular knifings that occur at the various homeless encampments, the continuous arson, the sexual assaults, the 1500 police calls that occur just at People's Park every year.

Some wag came up with the phrase "the homeless aren't harmless" and that's unfortunately true.

I don't want to ignore the very real challenges that the homeless face. I do want to get them help and support, but we can't do that at a city level; all we do is endanger the other 99% of our residents in exchange for trying to help the 1%.

Seriously, fuck Berkeley for creating not a Mecca for the Homeless, but a Black Hole of Homelessness.

Seriously, fuck Berkeley for making me constantly choose between compassion and my personal safety.

I feel like their permissiveness, their horribly misguided and doomed-to-fail attempt to be good, is contributing to making me a worse person.

---

And that's the second time that I had a very uncomfortable vagrant encounter in the last week. On Tuesday, I went to have lunch at McDonalds. They always have a problem there with not policing their lobby, and it filling up with vagrants. So I sat down next to a table where there were two. Whatever. 

And as I'm eating a third vagrant sits down in the chair across from me so he can talk to them. He ignores me, so again, whatever. 

And then he starts asking what stuff they got and how much it is, and it's obvious that there's a drug deal going down, literally at my table at McDonalds.

The price is more than he's got, so he stomps off. And he comes back a few minutes later, thankfully looming over their table instead of sitting at mine, and he's somewhat angrily trying to negotiate down their price. And I'm starting to be worried there's violence going to erupt. But, the two drug-selling vagrants are cool as cucumbers. They finally give him his drugs for what he can afford.

And I don't see a reason to go back to that McDonalds unless I'm getting something to go.

And seriously, fuck Berkeley for allowing a homeless encampment to exist at Shattuck & University for months and months, in the literal middle of our downtown, and thus forcing this business to decide whether it's going to put someone in danger trying to police the vagrancy or whether it's going to allow drug deals go on in its premises, the ultimate result of the city's permisiveness.

---

Last night, Kimberly said she felt we did the right thing. We got our hooting intruder help quickly, through the police. And we did it without endangering ourselves.

She's right. I'm sure she's right.

But, I worry, I catastrophize. Is he going to show up at our house again, banging on our door? Is someone going to come after us for not providing aid and support quickly enough? Is he going to claim he hurt himself banging around our property in the night and that's it our fault? is there more blood out there that might be a literal biohazard?

Most likely we'll never hear of it all again.

Most likely I'm just fretting because I'm feeling vulnerable because my personal sanctuary was assailed last night.

---

This morning I could see the outside better, and I noticed that our nighttime visitor had thrown our trash can a full ten feet.

On Saturday I returned to Joaquin Miller Park near Montclair, which I visited for the first time earlier this year.

I was astounded to find it much smaller than I thought. Last time I was there it felt like it took the whole day to get from the base of the park in Montclair up to its top and then back. Admittedly, I did some writing while up there that day, per usual, but I can't imagine it was too much. This time I discovered I could make it from the base to the picnic tables up near the top in 45 minutes, and about the same time back down. Weird!

It continues to be a beautiful park. I love all the watercourses and I love the heavy forestation. I did continue to see signs of the City of Oakland's neglect though — not just in the bathrooms (closed up, with portapotties nearby) and not just in the slowly dying picnic tables, but also in the fact that they have some extremely narrow trails open to bikes. If anyone was paying attention, they'd forbid it like they do on a few other trails, because it was crazy. There was one where I had to literally dodge off the trail several times as bike raced down it, despite it being just a few feet wide.

I was really pleased that it was still so early when I got to the top of the park, so I continued onward to the parks even further up in the hills. I walked the length of Roberts Park and then walked back along the west ridge of Redwood Regional Park. They're beautiful too, and Redwood Regional has some vistas of the sort you don't see in the lower parks.

(I had lunch at Lake Temescal on my way up to Montclair, so it was a day of four parks.)

---

On Sunday, Kimberly and I went out to the holiday Telegraph Street Fair. I walked, she scooted. It was terrific to get out and do something, as she's been mostly housebound in her free time since she discovered that she'd broken her foot. However, the Street Fair shopping was mainly for her.

And, she discovered quite a few necklaces and earrings that she liked. She got a few of them as early Christmas presents.

The only downside of the day happened at our last booth, which had a lot of Navajo-made jewelry from their lands in the southwest. As Kimberly is looking over their pieces, an older guy walks by me and say something like, "Don't buy from them, they're n****rs."

I have a temper. Or maybe I used to have a temper. I rarely lose it any more. But I blew sky-high immediately. He just keeps walking on likes it's the most natural thing in the world, and I scream after him something like, "We don't want your racism here in Berkeley." He looks back at me, confused, and I say something like, "Yeah. You. We don't like your racism." (Maybe there was some profanity too; I don't really remember.)

And then I calm down and I have to explain to everyone what he said. The Navajo woman thanks me for "protecting" her, and I don't really like that white knight label. I try to explain that it's more a societal issue, that I think someone like that racist needs to know his views aren't acceptable. That he'll get called out in public for them.

Kimberly bought a piece of jewelry. I later asked if that all made her more likely to buy, and she said, "Yes." So, screw you, old racist.