Dogged Blog

Dear San Francisco, please kiss my ass.

Dear City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Works,

Are you out of your freaking mind? You send me a notice saying that if I don't move my garbage cans off my own property, next to my garage door behind my car at least 20 feet off the street, move them so that they are not even visible from the street, you're enforcing a brand new law that will allow you to fine me somewhere between $100 and $500?

I'm a fourth generation native San Franciscan and I care about my city, and I think people should keep our neighborhoods looking nice as much as the next person, but this is just insane. You can barely see the freaking cans from the street -- see photo.  And the whole reason they're out there is because we needed to move my mom's furniture out into the garage to make room for her hospital bed and other medical equipment, but please don't let that or any other tough reality of people's lives change your brilliant scheme to replace the city's revenue stream.

But do feel free to come over and check out the situation we're living with, and the brutal blow to our financial situation that's come with the same economic downturn that's messing with you, and advise us on what exactly you think we should do to make sure you get your citation revenue keep our city streets unsullied by trash receptacles.

No? Maybe you'd like to come build one of the pretty screens you sent us pictures of as "acceptable enclosures" for trash cans.

No to that too?

Then please see headline. Thanks.

All shook up...

Earthquake!  Centered in Alamo, east of here in Contra Costa County, estimated as a 4.2 magnitude, which isn't that big, but it gave me one good, hard jolt here in western San Francisco.

Climate change? Srsly?

It's hot here in San Francisco, yo.

I mean, very very way way hot, no doubt because yesterday's historic ruling that the configuration of our genitalia or our chromosome count cannot be used to deny Californians our civil rights when it comes to marriage laws has opened the gates of hell.

Or, you know, climate destabilization due to decades of pro-business, anti-environment policies on the part of legislators.

The exact "why" might vary with political affiliation, but historic temperature records are falling all over the Bay Area, and it was in the 80s when I walked my dogs at 7:30 this morning. This does not happen here. I know; I'm from here.

My mom, in a fit of prescience and generosity, bought a tiny window unit air conditioner (I mean, I have purses bigger than this thing) for my bedroom. She said it was so my dogs wouldn't be too hot. They did, indeed, spend all day yesterday in that one room, and graciously let me sleep in there with them last night. I feel very guilty at the environmental toll of running that damn little machine all night, but not enough to have turned it off and suffered.

It is possible I own the only window unit air conditioner in San Francisco. I'm not sure.

So not only can I get married, at least until November when we'll see if the out-of-state religious right hate groups succeed in getting our constitution amended to strip me of my rights again, I am also the only person in the City who is not going to sleep in an agony of hotness tonight.

Well, the only one other than my mom, because she, too, has an air conditioner.

A friend in Virginia laughed last night when I said no one in San Francisco has air conditioning. She thought I was joking, and it took me five minutes to get her to understand, no, really: No A/C in this city. Not in homes, not in apartment buildings, not in older office buildings, not in restaurants, not in stores. Only the really big, newer public buildings, malls, etc. have climate control. Some movie theaters don't even have it, although all the new ones do.

Anyway, yes, I feel really guilty, but the dogs are blissed out and napping in my bedroom, and it's 84 degrees in my living room right now -- at 10:30 in the morning. So I'm trying to live with it.

Rain much?

I'm glad to be in the City, I truly am. But as this hideous storm blows through California ... some of the worst weather in half a century, they're saying... I do miss my generator from my house in the country. I rode out storms and power outages as long as a week without being much more inconvenienced than not having cable.

So far my power has stayed on, though. My sister-in-law spent the afternoon here, piggybacking off my wireless connection so she could get some work done even though she has no power at her house just 11 blocks away. Gina, my friend and editor at Pet Connection, has been mostly powerless all day long.

The dogs hate it with a passion, and didn't even deign to potty until after 4 this afternoon, even though I took them out several times. They flatly refused to cross the street or go near the park, and every gust of wind made them even more certain that they were in mortal danger. Which, seriously? They were. Several huge branches crashed down in the park across the street. Scary.

Stay warm and dry!

Windy weekends in October

I spent the day yesterday at the Silken Windhound Western Regional Specialty, and had a wonderful time. I'm more impressed every day with the firm commitment in the Silken community to medical, genetic, and scientific research about their dogs and their breeding program.

I got into an interesting discussion with one of their guest speakers, a canine genetic researcher from UC Davis. In fact, we stood in the parking lot for a couple of hours after the show, talking. I'm hoping to sit down with him again for an interview and tour of his lab. He had some ideas that really changed the way I think about what breed clubs can do to support research into their areas of concern.

I was saddened, though, on getting home to hear of the terrible fires down in San Diego. I'll be blogging about that, with information about the animals involved, over on Pet Connection in a few minutes. It reminded me of another dog show weekend, in October of 1991 -- almost exactly two years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake -- when a terrible firestorm ravaged the East Bay Hills.

Both weekends, I was on my way home from a dog show when I heard news of the fire. It was eerie. And yesterday was incredibly windy, just like that long-ago weekend was.

My heart goes out to all my colleagues, friends, and everyone else evacuated or in danger in San Diego. 

And now for something completely political

Having gotten all the Lucy Lawless/George Takei fangirl media entertainment writer stuff that I'm actually paid to write about out of the way, time for a trip into the wonkish side of my world.

Those here only for the dogs and the shoes and the Xena may want to move along.

When I heard that George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek series and Lucy Lawless of Xena:Warrior Princess and Battlestar Galactica were going to be at the Human Rights Campaign's annual gala here in San Francisco, I was right there with my hand in the air to cover it for AfterElton.com/AfterEllen.com. But fangirl squeeage aside, I was equally excited to see Elizabeth Edwards (pictured, right, with HRC president Joe Solmonese) would be giving the keynote address. Political machinations aside, her statements in support of full marriage equality, as well as her forthrightness and courage regarding her political beliefs and fight against cancer, have made her one of my personal heroes.

Before the dinner started, there was a VIP reception where all the A-gays of the Bay Area -- and many straight LGBT rights supporters -- were mingling in tuxes and fancy dresses, sipping drinks from the open bar and greeting friends. Even though I'm a native San Franciscan, I only recognized a tiny number of them, including San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom -- who, like me, was born here.

I told him that I was a fourth generation native, and like all San Francisco politicians do when you tell them that, he gave me his full attention.  I thanked him for having the courage and vision and simple basic humanity to hand out same sex marriage licenses at San Francisco's City Hall, and said that I just wanted him to know that some "old time" San Franciscans are also queer San Franciscans.

We bonded for a while over our mutual San Franciscan-ness and growing up in the City and when I told him I'd gone to Mercy High, he said, "You're a Mercy girl? That's like a cult." So true. And how amusing to be called a "Mercy girl," possibly for the first time in almost 30 years.

I've already recounted just about every utterance of George Takei and Lucy Lawless, so I'll skip over that and go on to the speeches.

Given that I've practically made  a career of liveblogging in the last few months, I'd brought my laptop with me. But alas, no wi-fi was available in San Francisco's Civic Auditorium.

So I did it anyway, even if it's not exactly "live," but at least this time I've had the chance to clean up the typos and misspelled words in advance. Remember this is a report, not a transcript; only those things in quotation marks are direct quotes. Everything else is a paraphrase or summary.

HRC gala in San Francisco

So, last Saturday night I was chatting with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom... and thus starts my utterly name-dropping post about last night's annual awards gala for the Human Rights Campaign in San Francisco, where actor George Takei (Star Trek, Heroes) recieved HRC's Equality Award, Elizabeth Edwards delivered the keynote address, HRC's Joe Solmonese delivered a stirring defense of LGBT rights, and Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess, Battlestar Galactica) was the world's most glamorous charity auctioneer.

I was covering it for AfterEllen.com and AfterElton.com, so politics wasn't part of my assignment -- I was there to interview Lucy Lawless and George Takei. There was no wi-fi at the Civic Auditorium so I couldn't liveblog it, but I had my laptop and ummm, deadblogged? it, so I promise to do a political post here on Dogged about Edwards, Solmonese, Newsom, Mark Leno, and all the other hot political and social stuff.  [UPDATE: it's here.]

But in the meantime, back to the fluff. From AfterEllen.com:

I’m sure most of the reporters covering the Human Rights Campaign’s annual gala and awards dinner in San Francisco Saturday night were there for the politics, and honestly, I’m normally the very soul of queer political activism.

But that night? Let’s face it: I was there for Lucy Lawless.

Lucy was all glammed up in high heels, evening gown and tousled curls. She sailed into the pre-dinner VIP reception like an old-fashioned Hollywood star, and signed autographs and posed for pictures with adoring Xena fans both male and female.

Since she looks just as good in girly clothes as in jeans and a cowgirl hat — not to mention her Xena fighting leathers — it’s not hard to see why she made it onto the top 100 on the AfterEllen.com hot list. What did Lucy think about that? “Well that’s pretty great,” she beamed. “I love that. Thanks very much for the vote of confidence, girls, and just thanks so much for the support, and I want to be here to support you.”

Here's a photo KT took of Lucy gazing adoringly at me being interviewed by me:

From AfterElton.com:

At the reception before the awards dinner, I told Takei I’d been a huge fan of the original Star Trek series, but had always felt excluded from the show’s Utopian vision, where queers like me – and him – were invisible.

“Well, Star Trek had as its core value what we call IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” he said. “And (Trek producer and creator) Gene Roddenberry always told us the diversity of the Starship Enterprise was where its strength was. There’s a diversity that we can see: the color of one’s skin, or the shape of one’s eyes. There’s the accent of a person, diversity we can hear. But there’s another diversity that we can’t see oftentimes, but that too is a part of the strength of America.”

Here's me being quite a bit taller than George Takei, and also showing you my new haircut at last:

Be sure to click madly on the AfterEllen and AfterElton links so they'll continue to let me stalk interview all my heroes. Thanks.

And thanks to KT for the photos! You can see more of them at the above links, as well as here.

Breaking: lifestyle update

I have ordered from Waiters on Wheels three nights in a row now. I do love living in a big city where such services are available, but do you think it's possible, just REMOTELY POSSIBLE, that I might get enough of my life back any time soon so I could oh I don't know GO OUT TO A RESTAURANT instead of having someone bring me food from one?

That is all.

Yet another reason I love San Francisco

Yet another reason I love San Francisco: the weather.

I interviewed HGTV's David Bromstad Wednesday evening. (The article about that interview will be on AfterElton.com, and I'll link to it when it's published.) His show, Color Splash, is filmed here in the Bay Area, and he moved from Miami to San Francisco when he started doing the show. He loves San Francisco, but did indicate that he's kind of cold most of the time.

"I hate hot weather," I told him.

He paused. "Really?"

Really. I know most people like hot weather. They dream of vacations in Hawaii and tropical beaches and wearing shorts and sandals all year long. And that is so not me. I like the fog and the wind, and I'm in the mood for sunshine approximately as often as I am for snow, which is to say, about two weeks out of every year. A craving I would much rather fulfill by traveling to the place with snow or sun than living in it. Nothing makes me happier than getting up in the morning and having to put on a hooded sweatshirt and warm jacket to walk the dogs on mornings when, at my old home in Sonoma, my air conditioning would have already kicked on.

The western side of San Francisco, which is where I live and where I grew up, spends most of the summer tucked in a nice dripping fog bank, courtesy of the hot inland air meeting the cold, wet air blowing in off the Pacific Ocean.

When I was looking for a house when I moved back here after 16 years in the country, I restricted my search to the fog belt. Several friends said to me, while I was looking, "Well, just be sure not to get anything out there by the beach." They would shiver. "Too cold."

I'd just smile and think, all the more houses for me to look at. "No," I'd tell them, "I'm only looking in the fog belt. I hate the sun."

Real conversation

(Telephone rings while I'm working. I'm very crabby, but I look at the caller ID in case it's important. It's my mom. I grudgingly answer.)

Me:  Hi

Mom: You sound tired.

Me: I'm very tired.

Mom: Do you have anything for dinner?

Me (thinking maybe my mommy wanted to cook for me):  No.

Mom: You should call Waiters on Wheels.

Me: What huh?

Mom: They go to restaurants and get your order for you. You should call them.

Me: I'll look online. Thanks!

(End phone call.)

So I looked. It's real. Waiters on Wheels. They are bringing my dinner now.

GOD I LOVE SAN FRANCISCO.