Douglas E. Berry

As I said in an earlier post, today is the first day of Santa Clara's annual city-wide clean-up campaign. This is the weekend where people in Zone 1 (which includes us) can haul all sorts of crap to the curb and it will be gobbled up, no questions asked.

As always, this event brings in hoards of scavengers looking for examples of the "one man's junk. . ." axiom. One of the things we hauled out was the bag holding the old cover for our trailer. This cover failed so fucking hard. It shredded in what was a mild California winter. We actually got called by the storage lot owners to come and take care of it.

We were still cleaning out the carport when scavengers grabbed the bag. Congratulations, assholes, enjoy your bag of fabric confetti! If only we had thought to add glitter to the bag. . .

Accomplished today:

Recycling taken to Danny's Recycling, we got nearly $50.

A BIG bag of old clothing was dropped off at Goodwill.

Picked up a prescription at Rite Aid.

We did a small weekly shopping that turned into a big weekly shopping.

I'm in the process of doing two loads of laundry.

. . . I think I've earned a beer.

We also saw flowers being offloaded at St. Justins and slowed to a crawl in Safeway's parking lot to determine what kind of flowers. Bouquet sighting confirmed, happy floral arraignments in process.

We are so easily amused.

As the recycling money is generally considered to be my fun money, I'm going to deposit it in the credit union and use it to order a POD Runequest book.

For some time now Kirsten and I have been discussing getting a new mattress for our bed. The old one had been around for a long time, and let's face it, supporting a woman of Kirsten's size meant it was never going to be back in good condition again.

The problem is the cost. We live on the ragged edge of the lower middle class. A new mattress would cost the equivalent of one month's rent on Offhand Manor (which is a one-bedroom apartment about 500 feet from heavily used railroad tracks.) This would be a major outlay, and the old mattress still did its job.

At this point, I must mention Buy Nothing, a group Kirsten has come to swear by. It is what it says on the tin, a place where you can offer up anything for free, and usually get a taker very quickly. As a fan of decluttering, I'm both overjoyed at how it gets stuff out of the place and appalled and how quickly it brings stuff in.

Saturday evening Kiri spotted a post on the site. someone very close to us was offering a nearly-new queen-sized mattress with a memory foam topper. She leaped on it. And we waited. Which became an issue. As This Saturday marked the beginning of Santa Clara's Annual Cleanup Campaign, also known as make your street look like Berlin 1945 week. We had a solid deadline of 0700 this morning, May 3rd, to get items to the curb. Late dumping can get you a hefty fine.

So we waited. Finally, last night at around 2000hrs, we finally heard back. We could pick up the new mattress in the morning. Which left us in a dilemma. We still had to sleep, and the futon is not good for the two of us to get a restful night's sleep. I set an alarm for 0600 (half an hour before my usual alarm) so we could wrestle the old mattress to the curb.

Kirsten took me to work for my first shift. As that ended, she picks me up and I covered up my police shirt (we're not supposed to run errands in uniform, people confuse us for sworn LEOs all the time) and we rolled over to the pick up location. Where a second wrestling match results in the mattress lodged into Darby's bed, and bungee down best we could. Luckily, we were able to take low-traffic side streets almost all the way back.

One more episode of Man v. Mattress and the thing is on the bed. Victory! We even made the bed. Mostly.

Coming home from our weekly shopping, we encountered this van at the Corner of El Camino Real and Main St. I'm fascinated by this kind of car, and stopped to take a few pictures. The owner clearly needs some sort of mental health help.

Click the image for a few others.

I've been a customer of Bank of America since, Halford's knees, the mid-80s? It's the only bank Kirsten and I have used since we got together.

And I'm done.

I understand that SARS-CoV-19 is fucking everything up, but BofA has responded by closing every branch that I know of in Santa Clara.

The line stretch around the building. It's a sunny day here, and there were elderly people, disabled people, and plenty of others standing in an unmoving line. Because the branch they left open has three teller windows.

More people quit than toughed it out. Eventually, a manager came out to triage the line. Since I was trading two twenties for four rolls of quarters, I got jumped inside.

But this is terrible customer service. We're going to take a serious look at local credit unions.

On a normal morning, traffic on Scott Blvd northbound past my post is quite heavy. By 0815 traffic stopped at Monroe St. can back up all the way to my corner, about 500 feet away. Stop and go is the norm from about 0800 to when I leave ar around 0900.

Yesterday, the City of Santa Clara banned all public gatherings of more than 1000 people, and asked the big tech firms to allow as many people as possible to work from home.

Today, there was almost no traffic on Scott. It was eerie.

I need to get involved in my city government. Because I, a citizen, wish to petition for a redress of grievances.

In short, I need a crosswalk built. Take a look at this map.



I'm at the corner of Scott and Cabrillo. You can see I have a nice crosswalk on Cabrillo. I do pretty good business, during our annual census, I averaged 55-60 students a day, plus parents, younger kids along for the walk, etc.

But you will notice there is no crosswalk across Scott at my corner. This is a problem because the nearest legal crossings are at Monroe (top of the map) and Royal (at the bottom of the map.)

Add in that my school has a large number of immigrant parents, so I'm facing linguistic and cultural barriers. Which leads to the problem.

Epic jaywalking. Over a dozen that I see (I'm usually facing another direction to watch for pedestrians to cross) and Halford knows how many I miss.

Because it's simply ridiculous for a family coming up Cabrillo on the far side of Scott to have to walk that far out of the way to cross the street. So they risk it. I'm seeing mothers with four or five pre-school and school-aged children trying to get across Scott.

And Scott is dangerous. It's a major commuter route for some of the Valley's heavy hitters. Which means that one in three drivers is distracted. Trust me, I see it every single morning.

It's just a matter of time before some techie is reading a text and not watching the road.

I really don't want to have to call ion a vehicle-pedestrian incident.

So, what I'm going to pitch is an uncontrolled school crosswalk (the ones with the yellow bars, like I have) across Scott on the southside of Cabrillo. There's already a ramp cut on the far side, they'd just need to cut one on my side and repaint. This would cut about 8' off the left turn lane from NB Scott to WB Cabrillo.

Now I just need to figure out where to start? My council rep? The District?

The funny thing is I'd be making more work for myself, along with getting a partner to work the far side. But it'll be worth it. If anyone is curious as to why I'd need a partner, ask and I'll explain in the comments.

A really cool sight while on my way to my afternoon shift. As I was driving down Scott, I noticed a big bird over the roadway, really low. It's not uncommon to see hawks around here.

But then the bird banked and it was HUGE. The wingspan was enormous. The bird settled on the wall of an apartment complex across from where I work, and by the time I had parked, it was gone. I did get a good enough look to see this was, in fact, a vulture, one with a prominent red head and neck.

I just looked it up, and I was right. I saw a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura). While they aren't uncommon around here, I've seen one up close in flight like that.