Not My Best Week

 I feel a need to write all this down.  Slightly over a week ago, my husband announced that he planned to go hiking in the Marble Mountains (very northern California, look it up), and would be gone for 7 days.  He goes hiking regularly, not often for 7 days (although he went to Death Valley for 7 days in early March).  When he does, I'm alone in the house and have to cook for myself, as well as do any necessary shopping, so it takes me awhile to get used to the idea, although I always survive.

A few days later, Monday of this week, I drove down to the local Kaiser Permanente, trying to find some medical supplements I needed.  This means driving down Broadway in Oakland, not normally an issue.  I was in the left of 3 southbound lanes, passing the 38th street intersection, when a car came out of the gas station on the left side of the intersection, tried to turn southbound onto Broadway, and smacked into my left front fender with her right front fender.  Relax - nobody was hurt, and both cars can be driven, but - we had an accident.  I didn't even see her until she smacked my fender and we stopped.  I took the usual photographs and got her name and number, and continued with my errand.  (Oakland PD won't come to an accident with no injuries.)  But I was shaken.  I'm a careful driver; I haven't had an actual car-to-car accident in decades.

Later we emailed each other the insurance information, and I reported to our insurance company.  I spent too many of my lunch periods this week talking to insurance adjusters who all wanted to know "how it happened."  (And they all wanted to call at my lunch time.)  I talked to 3 insurance adjusters, because the other driver drives for Lyft, and Lyft's insurance company also wanted to know about it.  By the end of the week, we had a quote for repairs to my car from a well-known local body shop, we've scheduled repairs for my car for Monday morning, and I'll get a rental car (paid for by our insurance) for the few days it'll take to do the repairs.  All good.

Then this morning I went to my gym for my usual water aerobics class.  I was sitting on a bench in the women's locker room, taking my jewelry off (I don't wear it in the pool), when the young woman sitting on the other end of the bench folded quietly up and landed on her face on the floor.  Several women saw and gathered around, and I said out loud, "Get the front desk," which someone did.  I couldn't tell if she was breathing (she was), but in any case I don't know how to do that stuff.  The club called the EMTs, who were pretty prompt, and it seems she's OK - I heard something about a "blood pressure issue."  After the class, I wrote up the "incident report" they asked me for and headed home.

On top of the planned hiking trip (he leaves Wednesday, probably before I'll get my car back), and the car repairs and rental car, this was sort of more than I wanted to deal with.  But you don't always get your choice of what you're going to deal with.  At least the woman who fell is OK.  Thank you for listening to me rant.

Smog

 The Trump 2 administration has recently decided that it doesn't care what comes out of automobile tailpipes.  They want California to quit insisting on that "clean" fuel; they want us to use that gasoline that made all the smog we thought we'd gotten rid of.

It's been a long time, but my family made a trip to Los Angeles in the 1950s.  We were taking the kids to Disneyland.  I don't remember the exact year, but I'm going to say 1956, because I was 10 that year and my sister Sue was 8.  So Disneyland looked great to us.

We were a lower middle class family so we didn't do anything exotic to get there; we drove.  Since we started in Napa, we probably drove over to the central valley and took I-5 down, thus avoiding the traffic mess that was the Bay Area.  And that meant that we went into LA through the Grapevine, otherwise known as the Tejon Pass.  This pass is 4,144 feet high at the top.  

This much later I'm fuzzy on the details, but we stopped for some reason near the top - we may have stopped at Fort Tejon State Historic Park, or maybe just for gas.

Here's what I still remember, 70 years later or so:  We were over 4000 above the Los Angeles area, and still quite a number of miles away.  And when I got out of the car I could feel my eyes sting.  From the air.  From the smog.

We've largely gotten rid of that kind of smog, and Trump thinks we should have it back.  Consider that.

The Appliance Gods are After Us

 Actually, things look better than they did this morning, The irrigation installation in the back yard is no longer leaking.  The dishwasher still misbehaves now and then, but it's decided to do so only when there's nobody there who can fix it, so we just turn it off overnight and it recovers.  

Today we had a new problem pop up.  We have an agreement with a local firm to inspect our furnace once a year, and they came by today.  This should have been a glance and a wave, but - they said the furnace heat exchanger is cracked.  What?  We asked about repairs, and it turns out that repairing the heat exchanger is more intrusive and nasty than replacing the furnace, which is 18 years old.  Apparently a new furnace is just pop the old one out, and pop the new one in; while fixing the heat exchanger involves taking the whole thing apart and reassembling all the pieces.  The rep also said that 18 years is about a normal life for furnaces these days.  The bad news is that it'll cost low 5 figures; the good news is, they can do it next week.

One of the things this means is that the furnace is now dangerous - in fact, illegal - to run!  Some issue with carbon monoxide, which I didn't quite get.  But we have to turn the old furnace off until we get the new one!  It's a good thing it isn't January.  

The other thing they found when poking around the furnace in the basement is that we have a leaky hot water pipe down there!  This is not a difficult repair, but it'll mean turning all the water off, and I'm trying to do 5 loads of laundry!  The pipe repair guy says he'll have to get a new pipe and he can do the repair tomorrow, when the laundry will be done.  Phew!  There's a load in the washer now.

The pipe repair guy was totally blown away (he's youngish) to find that the leaky hot water pipe was BRASS!  In fact, the leak was at a connection between the brass pipe and a copper pipe.  The house is about 106 years old, and Jim remembers that they told us when we bought it not to drink from the hot water faucet, because brass pipes contain lead!  We'll replace the brass with a nice copper pipe, for much less than the new furnace will cost.

Birthright Citizenship - a Personal Story

We all know by now that our 47th president believes he can change anything in the Constitution with an executive order.  And one of the things he wants to change is birthright citizenship, which would require someone born in the U.S. to be the child of an American citizen.  The classes I took on the subject suggest strongly that he's wrong, but the issue got me thinking, since I personally am the daughter of a Canadian immigrant, who didn't become an American citizen until I was about 3 years old.  How did that happen?

What, you say?  Here's the story, based on my late mother's papers, which I inherited, and a lot of family memory.  On January 11, 1912 in Hamilton, Ontario, John Henderson and Maud O'Brien had a daughter, Mary Jane Henderson.  That was my mother, although I've never seen the name "Jane" anywhere but her birth certificate - in life she was "Mary Jean," and as an adult was often simply called "Jean."  (She died January 29, 2000.)

Her U.S. Certificate of Lawful Entry records that she entered the United States on September 27, 1920, in Detroit, Michigan, by ferry.  She was 8 years old, traveling with her family.  Her Certificate of Lawful Entry is dated January 19, 1943, she is now 31 years old.  (The Certificate, by the way, gives her name as "Mary Jean.")  

Why did the Henderson family come to the U.S. in 1920?  My grandfather, John Henderson, was a photographer, and he had made a living during World War I by photographing miners at the Big Nickel Mine, in Sudbury, Ontario.  They were producing metal for munitions in the war and wanted to send photos home to family.  That fell off badly after the war ended, and he had a cousin with a ranch in Campbell, CA, so he packed up the family and came to California.

Next, I have mother's Application for a Certificate of Arrival and Preliminary Form for Petition for Naturalization (I wonder if they still use that name?).  That form is dated July 1945, without stating a day.  That form spells out her life in the U.S. to date - her family stayed in Campbell, CA for a couple of months in 1920 but moved into San Jose in November 1920, where they lived until 1933.  She attended San Jose State but didn't graduate.  In 1933 she moved to Vallejo, CA with her family.  Her father's photography business wasn't going well in San Jose, and he thought he could do better business in Vallejo with the sailors at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

Among the places of employment she listed on the Application were the U.S.O. Club - from 1942 to 1944 she was the secretary and bookkeeper.  I'm now leaving the papers and going from memory.  A sailor at the U.S.O. Club introduced her to his buddy, Lestle Ivy (yes, that name is correct), who worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard as a laborer.  He had moved to California in 1940, looking for work.  And on August 16, 1944, in Reno, NV, he married Mary Jean Henderson.  She filled out the Application the month before she got married. 

[Correction:  mother filled out the Application about a year after she married.  She actually declared her intention to become a citizen in April 1943, the Application says so; it also lists my father as her husband, with the wedding date in 1944.  I think she filed the Application in July 1945 because she discovered she discovered she was pregnant - I was born on April 2, 1946.]

Mary and Lestle had 2 children, Karen Ellen (me, born April 2, 1946) and my sister Susan Carol (born May 19, 1948).  All that time, Mary Ivy was still a Canadian citizen.  I didn't know that until I started researching this.  Her Certificate of Naturalization says she became an American citizen on September 15, 1949.  So it took her 4 years from the initial Application to become a legal citizen.  (Well, there was a war going on for part of that.)  Which means I might not qualify for birthright citizenship under 47's "definition."  I'm not terribly worried, because my father was born in Missouri, and also because I don't think he can get that past the court.  If he does, I may start looking into the dual Canadian citizenship for which I believe I qualify.

Why Our Cars are Killing Us

 The Economist, to which I subscribe, recently (September 7) had a leader called America's killer cars.  (You may hit a paywall for that article).  I can't find it offhand, but within a week or so the San Francisco Chronicle also had an article, or possibly an editorial, on the same subject; I remember reading it.  And it's very unusual for the Chron and the Economist to cover the same subject.

Basically, those huge cars, and especially trucks, that you see your neighbors driving are much more likely to kill you in a collision than a smaller car.  And because of the weight of the lithium batteries, the new electric versions of big trucks are even worse (per the Economist, "The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs about 40% more than its petrol engine cousin...")  And you may have noticed that the old-fashioned sedan is really out of style these days.

It isn't just the size of the cars and trucks.  The design of our roads is lethal - Americans insist on 4 way intersections instead of roundabouts, especially in rural areas - bad for both drivers and pedestrians.  And the wide roads and lanes we like encourage us all to drive faster.

I've never been interested in huge cars.  In fact, my last car but one was a Mini Cooper, which I replaced in 2017, partly because I wanted to be able to give rides to my friends and the Cooper had only 2 doors.  But also, I wanted a hybrid.  I bought a Kia Niro, at least partly because I hate Priuses.  The Niro is a very nice car for the narrow streets in the Oakland hills - tight handling, good brakes, and the 4 doors I wanted.  But even the Niro has a square, high front grille that is hard to see over sometimes, especially when I've climbed a hill and am trying to pull into a flat intersection - I just pray that anyone in the crosswalk can see me, because I can't see them.  

The Niro is a "crossover" - a small SUV, often the smallest SUV in the parking lot.  It weighs a little over 3,000 lb.  But one in 3 new cars in America these days weighs over 5,000 lb., and if my little Kia collides with one of those, I know who will lose.  And I'm constantly amazed by the number of my urban neighbors who feel they're best served by a pickup truck, the bigger the better - I associate pickup trucks with farms and farmers, but I'm obviously out of step on that today.  And why do you need a vehicle so big you have to have a stepladder to climb into the seat?

I'm not suggesting any answers to this; I don't know what they might be.  Just - everyone drive carefully, and slow down!  The accident you avoid could save your life.

My, How Dorm Life Has Changed

 Everyone who lives in the Bay Area knows that U.C. Berkeley doesn't have enough dorm space for its enrolled students.  They especially know this in Berkeley, and parts of north Oakland, where all the students are looking for someplace to live.  

August 21, 2024 was move-in day at Helen Diller Anchor House, a new dorm for transfer students.  The S.F. Chronicle wrote up the event - on that date, but good luck finding the article, sadly, it's behind a paywall.  The dorm, which cost $300 million, is 14 stories, 3 blocks from BART, across the street from campus, and will house 772 students.  The "dorm rooms" have:  full kitchens, with dishwashers and stacked washer/dryers.  Of course, they cost $2,000 a month; but the building includes an indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio and a rooftop vegetable garden.  $2,000 is about what a small apartment costs today in Berkeley anyhow, and the fee includes an off-site meal plan if you'd rather not cook.

Now the voice from the past.  I attended Berkeley in the middle 60s ('63 to '68 including my master's degree) and I was a "dormie" for the first 3 years.  And boy, have dorms changed.

I lived in Peixotto Hall, which was part of the Smyth-Fernwald dorms.  These dorms were built for student housing immediately after World War II, and were recently demolished after some years as married student housing.  When I lived there, starting in fall 1963, it had 2 women's dorms (I can't recall the name of the other) and a larger men's dorm, which was either called "Smyth" or "Smyth-Fernwald."  I remember a single dorm as a long, one-story building with student rooms (2 students each) on either side of a central hallway.  The whole setup, including a central dining hall and kitchen (separate building), was about as far from campus as you could get - it was at the extreme top of Dwight Way!  I believe I recall bus service down to campus, but I also remember an awful lot of walking down hill, and then walking back up!  Google Maps says it was .9 miles one way to where Telegraph hits the campus.

What was my dorm room like?  Well, it didn't have a kitchen - in fact, it didn't have a bathroom.  It had 2 single beds, 2 student desks, and some closet space.  The bathroom, with showers, was down the hall.  This led to the occasional women's dorm call of "Man on the floor!" when a relative or a repairman had to come in for some reason.  And we ate in the central dining hall, unless we decided to go out and forage on our own.  But the dining hall was where the free food was, and we were a long way up the hill from anything resembling a restaurant, or even a fast food joint.

And nobody had a stacked washer/dryer!  If you wanted your laundry done, you either went and found a laundromat, or you took the laundry home to mama, if mama lived close enough.

It was a rather limited living arrangement.  On the other hand, it didn't cost $2,000 a month.  Frankly, I don't think I ever knew what it cost to live in the dorm; my folks paid it.  I didn't get into living costs until my senior year, when I moved into an apartment with 2 other women on North Side.  At which point I learned the joys of running into your roommate's boyfriend at 3 AM - but that's another post.

If you lived in the Smyth-Fernwald dorms in the '60s and remember stuff I've forgotten, I'm interested to hear it.

The Middle East is Not Listening to Us

 Once again, today, there's a news article about a street demonstration in San Francisco demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  Several Bay Area cities (including mine) have passed resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  I've been thinking, and I have to get this off my chest.

Folks, neither side is listening to us and our "ceasefire resolutions."  Certainly not to the cities of Oakland and Richmond, CA.  The Israelis aren't even listening to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said recently, 

"In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," Austin said, drawing on his experience as a four-star general overseeing the battle against Islamic State militants.

"So I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and strategic imperative."

The real problem in Gaza is that neither side wants to compromise.  Netanyahu has built an entire career on opposing a 2-state solution, which (in my humble opinion) is the only peaceful answer to this.  One of the reasons Hamas is in charge of Gaza is that Netanyahu supported them against the Palestinian Authority, because he knew they would never agree to a 2 state solution, and Mahmoud Abbas might have.  So when Hamas started this (and they did), they knew that Netanyahu would throw everything Israel had at Gaza.  Which is a lot.  I'm going to guess that Hamas also assumed what has happened would happen - millions of people around the world would see Israel bombing civilians in Gaza and killing many times the people the Oct. 7 invasion killed - and would immediately assume that Israel is to blame for the horror.

No, folks.  Hamas started this.  And Hamas' stated goal is to destroy Israel and take all of Palestine back, "from the river to the sea."  Which Netanyahu will do everything he can to prevent.  I don't know if Hamas didn't realize how much Israel would throw at them (I don't believe that), or if they simply didn't care how many Palestinian civilians got killed, because it would all make Israel look worse.  (I wouldn't be surprised.)

I'm in the camp that believes the only long-term solution for Israel and Palestine is a 2 state solution, preferably with Israel not run by Netanyahu and his right-wing gang, and with the Palestinian state not run by Hamas.  Israel has a good chance of getting Netanyahu out of office - he was on trial for corruption, and it just picked up again, after being paused for the war.  And before October 7, a lot of Israelis were demonstrating against him.  

I don't know what anyone could do about Hamas; but a non-Netanyahu Israeli government might be able to negotiate something with the Palestinian Authority.  Except that Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a 4-year term as PA President in 2005, and they haven't had an election since then (not to mention that Abbas is 88 - definitely older than Joe Biden whom many are complaining about!).

And the trouble with Israel "destroying Hamas" is that Hamas is not just an organization (one whose leaders, I might add, don't live in Gaza) but an ideology.  Go back and read Lloyd Austin's comment again, he understands.  Every Palestinian Israel kills have relatives who are potential recruits for Hamas.

I wish I had answers.  Should the U.S. quit giving Israel money?  Are we then saying they shouldn't defend themselves?  Is the only real solution the one that neither side will agree to?