three pictures of Atlanta and three cards for friends

Apparently this is a dyke-owned cafe but there was a 45 minute wait so we went to Home Grown instead and got vegan peach sloppy joe's.

Beautiful porch woodwork, right around the corner from Ria's Bluebird.

Detail.

Birthday card for Glenn, front cover.

Birthday card for Glenn, inside.
We sometimes take walks together around Lake Merritt and look at the terrifying night herons. They stand still it seems for hours on end, waiting for their prey. They have funny things sticking up from their heads. They scare me and yet I stare at them, transfixed. Check them out some time.

Birthday card for my cousin Serene, who turned 50. Here's to another half a century of life!

Birthday card for Erock - Happy Birthday friend! Never forget you are amazing!

Birthday card for Rob, cover - fear not...

Birthday card for Rob, inside - ...you will always be (my) king

moms

Mother's day card for the mom, who just moved to California from Hawaii and who we finally, FINALLY, found a place to live...proving once again, that things will work out if we just let them.

Cover

Cover, II

Inside

Cards, cats, and curtains

Rain and winter: excellent cover for crafting.

More birthday cards for friends...

Lee

Deb

Curtains for my bedroom...

And for the kitchen...

Now I'll be able to see the palm trees outside our window when I do the dishes, and, I won't have to wonder how my hair looks as I feed the cats at 6:00 a.m. while my neighbor gets dressed.

November Highlights Part II: HRC Conference!

Austin, TX, 2010. Perfect convergence of harm reductionistas in a weird suburban mall!

Highlights:

1) Korean taco trucks: an oasis in a tourist trap hell-hole. Cheap. Delicious. Vegan. Yum.
2) Drive-thru ATMs that look like zombie brain juice filling stations?
3) Sonya Sohn (Kima from The Wire) is pretty amazing in person, too. She talked about having grown up in the projects and how she hated cops and how triggering it was to be in the neighborhoods of Baltimore, looking into the windows of houses just like her own, disassociating, and then running around a corner on queue to play a cop for the show. It was pretty intense but also really inspiring. After the show she got involved first in doing get-out-the-vote stuff in the projects for the Obama campaign, and then starting an organization, ReWired for Change, to use The Wire as a teaching tool to see if she can make a difference in East Baltimore. Pretty cool.

Sonya Sohn with Susan Sherman (my mentor and adviser at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), 8th National Harm Reduction Conference, Austin, TX, November 19, 2010

(And if you care to read my impressions of Baltimore --Hopkins, abandoned houses, the Baltimore City jail--feel free to read the article I wrote for the school zine, The Stew.)

November highlights, part I: Go Giants!

November 1, 2010: San Francisco Giants Win World Series for the first time in > 50 years!

The next day is Election Day and El Dia de Los Muertos. Hundreds of thousands of people rush to San Francisco to see the 11:00 a.m. parade. BART is crowded like a NY subway.

Traffic on the Hwy 101 is backed up all the way to Santa Rosa to North. Montgomery Station is so packed it's shut down. The remaining BART revelers ride on to Civic Center in style.

Little kids and old folks look fabulous in black and orange.

I think of Pete Morse (RIP), fan of all things orange, and how happy he would be to see Market St. awash in the hue of bright raver pants.

The crowd is so thick I can't see much of the parade, but I do see Giants player Audrey Huff waving his wife's red thong, which he wore for good luck during games.

And witness with awe a beautiful, shared moment in San Francisco history.


What a way to end 2010. (That's all for the sports enthusiasm, I swear!)

fall crafts for friends & family, tumbling through the cycle of life

Kristen finishes her Psych residency after what seems like 50 years...

Sarolta celebrates her birthday to mark the passing of 40 years

My dear friend Carrie loses her mama, Hana, painter of beautiful roosters, giver of green gecko beanie babies, beautiful, precious woman, not long enough on this earth.

My nephews turn 2 and 4, respectively, and though I had vowed never to buy them hipster kids' clothes from Brooklyn, the Oakland fever swept over me at the Lake Merritt farmer's market and I couldn't resist. Fairy Land is an actual and magical place, with a train and a pirate ship and a menu of only things that kids would like. Note to parents: let your kids take you there at once.

Up next for the winter?
Curtains!

pictures of oakland, my new home

Been preoccupied with looking for housing, moving moving moving, decorating and settling in. More craft projects to come once all this weirdly *pink* fabric I bought at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse becomes curtains. In the meantime, here are some observations of my new surroundings in these first few weeks...

One of the first things I noticed when we were looking for apartments around Lake Merritt was this huge building that looked like a vulva; turns out it's a church. I call it the Church of the Vagina.

One of the other remarkable things in Downtown Oakland is that Oscar Grant is everywhere, including in this incredible mural, which takes up a short block between Broadway & Telegraph on 17th St. It wraps around the corner of the building, and reads in full: Peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice."

Despite, or maybe because of everything that has happened here, people with a broad swath of races, genders, ages, and different body types walk around Lake Merritt at all hours of the early morning, evening, and night. It is great seeing people exercise and socialize in a public space that is free and doesn't require gym membership or a fancy yoga mat or bike. Here and below, strings of lights illuminate the lake at night.

An East Bay Express newsstand reclaimed on my corner. Nina Simone: "Handle it."

Yellow tiles in my new kitchen. They're half the reason we took the place.

Also on 17th St. It literally made me do a double-take.

And then wonder why I hadn't seen something like this, "and daughter," sooner.

There may be all sorts of craziness in the world -- homophobia, Islamophobia, etc., but there is also progress.