Dr. Maurice R. Barusch, Uncle Maurie, completed his life Saturday evening at his home in Oakland. His sons, Larry and Ron, and wife Barbara were with him. He and Aunt Phyllis were life-long fighters for equality and improvement of their community.  Uncle Maurie was a charter member of the Richmond (now West Contra Costa County) Unified School District.  He was president of the board as it tried to integrate the schools, and for a while he had to have a police escort to their public meetings. Maurie was redozdachs's mother's brother.  I like to think that my addition to the family helped [...]

 Tagged by redsquaredInstructions: Each player starts with 7 random habits/facts about themselves. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose 7 people to get tagged & list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged. 1. My most exciting work moment was spent in a faux doorway while the windows were breaking out, light fixtures were dropping from the ceiling in the hallway, and the double-high, double-wide filing cabinet fell over [...]

Fighting with spam, battling telephone companies, and doing the routine daily maintenance easily becomes the focus of life and blog material. I forget how special our San Francisco community is.  It’s devilishly easy to turn maneuvering through a too crowded grocery store into an Issue that dominates the day.  Or, MUNI’s lack of service can seem most important. Fortunately, a woman I have met just once sent me a link to the YouTube trailer she’s posted about the documentary she’s making about two gay men adopting five children. Yeah, one of the men is the minister of my church who [...]

The story of the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times is famous, but how they got published as a book, with Mike Gravel's face on the jacket, reads like a John Grisham novel. I heard a radio report Monday that Gravel is the first major-party (but not "major" himself) Presidential candidate to be in the SF Pride Parade. I was one of the few people who recognized his name when he passed by, and I only remembered that I thought he was heroic but couldn't remember for what! Looking up stories on him this week I [...]

Hollis and Mary Pat's Moki is offering SNYP's (5-cents a snip) to his fertile feline friends in Jackson County.  It doesn't sound like something I want to be the poster boy for, but Moki doesn't have any issues with the program!

She charges that much, because she can. Details on this trivia

Yesterday's lunch honoring an 80-something-year-old friend from church was good small-town San Francisco, another reminder of why living here feels so right for us. Our friend Bernice received the annual Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the local Democratic Women's Forum, and the banquet room of Castagnola’s on Fisherman's Wharf was a perfect place for the homily flawed, home-town celebration. The class tourist views during yesterday's sun fest were straight from the Chamber of Commerce brochure.  The plate-glass windows gave each speaker a backdrop of Coit Tower or other spectacular landmark.  Among the 100 or so people who showed up were two [...]

A friend was killed while crossing the street in a crosswalk during daylight yesterday. She was older, and hadn't made it across wide 19th Avenue before the light turned. Someone — apparently a 47-year-old man without a license — zipped out of the line of backed-up traffic and sped into an open lane and into Alice. She died at the scene. (Examiner news story) (Chronicle news story) I've known Alice for over 20 years. Sweet, endlessly complimentary, and, oh yeah,... feisty. Someone to miss. I normally worry about the pedestrians on the cell phones who jaywalk out into traffic without [...]

apparentparadox’s post about his “Partly Cloudy” experience at the recent squaredancing convention rekindled my musings about the state of that “friendship set to music” hobby. I had a “mostly sunny” convention, but understand how Tim experienced the same event so differently. There is a fundamental dichotomy in the squaredancing community. For some (“Dancers”), the joy of getting through – or at least nearly through –  complicated sequences is paramount. For others (“Socializers”), playing with their fellow dancers while testing/straining their personal limits is more important. Very few people can both play with and in their squares while dancing extraordinarily well. [...]