honk if you....

...oppose the war. honk if you.....want peace. well, if you live in oakland and spend any time near the lake, you will know that every sunday there is a small, dedicated cadre of folk that circle the lake with protest signs overhead urging one to honk if one opposes the war, or wants peace, or something of the sort that always make me honk when i cross their path.
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there are maybe a dozen of them. by now they seem timeless but as the years pass and our country strays ever farther away from values that i understand, i always feel that i honk alone. but today i realized that i was driving past them, not standing with them, and that i could not hear the honks that lay in front or behind me.
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today, after a day of avoiding the sunday talk shows that depress me and doing typical sunday things, i reclined on my couch to watch mindless tv. my new place is so peaceful, with it's lovely view and, unlike my last apartment, no major interstate out the window................
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..........and then there came the honking. i was reclining, right? so i thought it was an impatient bumhole waiting for someone to cross lakeshore ave (or one of the many events that cause honking) so why should i bother looking? but here came more honks. different honk tones. more and more. what the hell was going on?
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my bum is dragged off the couch......... and there they were! surrounded by glorious honking!! everyone, it seemed, honked! honestly, as i saw this ragtag band of brothers and sisters, the ones that before now made me wonder how they could go on week after week in the face of an increasingly incompetent US foreign policy, it all made sense. it made me tear up. one thought made it all make sense: i am not alone. nor are they.
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now lets get off our bums off the couch, get our acts together and change this mess. VOTE!!!

piggy tails in sea breeze

a new view for me and for you

out my window - lake merritt, oakland, CA

i've been a bad, bad blogger :)

is the summer over? amazing! has it been a busy summer? it must have been. was it a good summer? well, if the adage "time flies when you are having fun" is true, it was.
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i had a lovely family trip to the TX coast (port A dude) but the pics are so similar to last year's, that they are hardly worth posting. i moved to a new apartment. to anyone who knows me, that will not come as a surprise :). it's not that i enjoy moving (i'm no psycho masochist) but i do keep thinking the next place will be better (paging dr freud! ok - i'm not sure that was his specialty :)). but i do have a STUNNING view of lake merritt now. pics will be posted above.
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i have a trip planned to india; that makes me happy. i bought a new camera; that makes me happy. my company is RIFing the hell out of my division; that doesn't make me happy. my nephew is healthy post-bonemarrow transplant; that makes me happy.
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but i knew something would get me blogging again. you know how some friendship-indescretion (a forgotten party, birthday, etc) calls for an apology that you don't follow thru on promptly? and every day that passes magnifies your culpability exponentially? but finally something happens (if you are lucky and the person is a valued friend) to break the logjam? well, that didn't happen but blogging is kinda like that. something happened today to make me want to write.
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that being said (unnecessarily - but isn't that what this is all about?) i will post the experience that moved me to write after a post a pic or 2. CHEERS!