Until today I had never seen these pictures of Bonnie a volunteer took before I met, fostered, and adopted Bonnie. That person added me on Instagram. I noticed the HSNB logo and started to peruse the animals on the feed. Bonnie was among the dogs that were featured.
It still amazes me that she had been in the shelter for a year, but to most people adopting a blind dog is daunting, not to mention the medical expenses that she came with even before her eyes were removed. These pictures were taken long before her bilateral enucleation, of course. I am grateful every day that she’s my little girl now, even though she can sound like a tremendous dragon when she growls, usually to protect me when I don’t want her to. After getting professional dog training, Shea and I are much more adept at calming her down and acknowledging her real and understandable fear.
We are emergency fostering these two brothers who were tied up and abandoned at the fence of the Humane Society of the North Bay yesterday. Calvin and Hobbes are lovely even though on the drive to the house with us they were extremely nervous. These poor pups had quite a dramatic day yesterday. I’m so glad they had the loving touch of the great staff and volunteers at HSNB. Shea is very patient with them while we keep them safe and warm until they can eventually find a forever home, but they are on a mandatory three-day hold. They are about a year old and very healthy from what we can tell. Look at their amazing eyes.
Here are all four of them on the couch with me. You can barely see Snoopy who is the only one with his eyes open.
You’ll hear me refer to them as Ernie and Bert, but we had to change their names since those were used so often recently at the shelter.
In a dramatic roller-coaster of a night, what should have been quite routine, a second reading of the ordinance, became chaos, when a last-minute vote struck it down due to some requests for what amount to minor changes on the part of the tobacco retailers. Fortunately, the lawyers on the council were able to save the day and a motion was made to bring back the item for a vote that same night and it passed. There are crumbling about some amendments that might be made, but the two years of work were not for naught. This was as good a xmas gift as I could hope for due to the sweat equity so many of us on our coalition put into this ordinance. I did not speak because it was unclear that I needed to, and by the time I left, I was miffed that it did not pass.
A fury of communications ensued after my colleagues and I departed from City Hall. To my glee, I got the good news that Vallejo youth will now be protected as the second jurisdiction in Solano County, the largest city jurisdiction in Solano County, and one of the recorded worst jurisdictions in the Bay Area in some years for youth tobacco sales. Here are the relevant parts of the TRL drama from this evening, on what was otherwise a very long night:
Teena Miller’s amazing fundraising birthday party was for the charity Food is Free Bay Area. What a nice way to raise money to benefit the community, as Teena and JD always do! It was nice to be among many friendly faces here in Vallejo while we celebrated at the Solano County Fairground’s McCormack Hall.
Here are other pictures posted from the event. For this group photo, I had to think fast. I found some reels of packing tape, put them together, and stood on them so that I could almost be seen in the back row.
Here’s a video of my last attempt to remotely convince the Oakland City Council that their Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing ordinance was pathetic. I’m so glad Vallejo at least did it right, without a smoking of cannabis exemption. It’s so short-sighted not to protect all residents of multi-unit housing from second-hand smoke. At least the ordinance improved the lives of bar employees and bar patrons who wish to enjoy fresh air on bar patios.
Here’s the text of what I said (including what got cut off):
“I’m here as a volunteer member of the Alameda County Tobacco Control Coalition speaking on item 5.5. It’s really disappointing that an exception was made for cannabis SMOKING in the attempt to pass a smokefree multi unit housing ordinance. How many times did the doctors and experts without a cannabis lobby agenda have to testify in front of the Oakland City Council that there are a plethora of ways to ingest cannabis that does NOT affect the immune-compromised and otherwise vulnerable neighbors who don’t want smoke wafting into their windows, electric plugs and residential patios? Whose interest is being protected when the Oakland city council only concentrates on the cannabis lobby talking points and not the health of citizens who almost never have the means to pick up and move because they are tormented by the lack of fresh air in their own homes? Medicinal or not, there is no MANDATE that cannabis be smoked even though that has been normalized, and this aspect of the smoke-free policy for Oakland is now just another unenforceable piece of paper posing as an ordinance. I encourage you to revisit this flawed logic. There is no doctor who can honestly say that the healthiest way to ingest cannabis is through particulates entering the lungs. At the same time, at least you got the smoke-free bar patios portion of the ordinance right. For that, I thank the council on behalf of Oakland bar employees and patrons that want fresh air while working or outside consuming drinks. Thank you.”
Here is the entire video of the Consent Item’s public comments. In Oakland they combine all consent item comments at the same time, so some of them are not germane to the 5.5 ordinance on Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing and Bar Patios:
This was very much worth flying back from Hawaii a little earlier! Shea and I took the redeye on Friday night and after a very brief rest I headed over. Shea joined me later. I wasn’t about to do something without my dogs, so I had them the entire time, even though Bonnie was her cranky self and startled a few folks. Fortunately, she’s harmless (but loud). Snoopy, on the other hand, was such a good ambassador, that he even was held by a stranger for her photos since she missed her late dog.
As you can see, once again we had families with kids, dogs, and without sitting with Santa and Mrs. Claus (Tom and Julie).
Thank you to Bill, America, Ted, Shea, and Sara for your contributions to these photos!
Thanks to Big Tobacco, today marks THIRTY-FOUR years since my dad has been gone because of his smoking. He was only 50 years old when he died (the same age as his mom from her smoking), so he could very reasonably be alive today at 84.
This is one of my favorite pictures of him with me. He knew how much I hated his smoking and he thought it was funny when I would draw “Cancer Cures Smoking” signs and tape them to his nightstand. One year for MY birthday, he bought a smoking cessation kit for himself, because he knew how much I wanted him to stop, and this was all before his quintuple bypass at age 48.
Even that didn’t stop him from resuming smoking a month later and within two years an aortic aneurysm caused him to hemorrhage to death in rush-hour traffic on Highway 92 here in the Bay Area. He never regained consciousness and it turned my entire family’s lives upside down, including my immigrant mother who was somewhat lost without him. I had no choice but to step up and protect her and her household with my two younger siblings, so I grew up very fast knowing at that moment what I wanted to concentrate on with my activism when I went to law school (I was still in college on the other side of the country).
I spoke on the consent item with Vallejo receiving about $930,000 in California Department of Justice funds to facilitate the forthcoming Tobacco Retail License.
I also spoke on the action item regarding the first reading of the TRL.
While it isn’t the most robust TRL I had hoped for, finally MY CITY and a second jurisdiction in Solano County (the largest city by far) has now started the process of addressing the historically high commercial tobacco youth sales rates that had no enforcement. This TRL will reduce blights and food deserts, and facilitate far fewer youth from becoming addicts who will die miserably after suffering from tobacco-related illness.
I spoke on the consent calendar and the specific action calendar item with many colleagues and amazing Vallejo youth (some as young as 13). The hashing out of some of the details by the council was frustrating, but at least it’s a pretty strong TRL. The one-time seven-year grace period with which to sell the businesses with the tobacco license exemption to strangers is at least a date certain (January 1, 2032). Still, the licenses to sell to close family members are in perpetuity, unfortunately. Still, we should be able to chip away at the 100 retailers and get it down to the goal of under 50, depending on the population of Vallejo at that time.
I’m very disappointed at the lack of understanding of the penalty structure by most city council members. More years during which time to accumulate the penalties is actually better for enforcement. Still, the council decided only to make the retailers forego the privilege of transferring the license if they are caught three times in one year. Without even ONE mandated check on businesses per year, and all the whining about the lack of resources and the challenges of hiring a coalition partner like Bay Area Community Resources, the odds of any of these bad actor retailers getting caught three times in a year before the tabulation resets is extremely unlikely. We’d have to have the efficiency of the best surgeon to accomplish that kind of monitoring of a single retailer.
