Spending some extended time in the sun today was good to get my mind off the shit show in DC. I was able to use my day off to work on plants and outdoor decor. I know the dogs appreciated the sun and warm outdoor furniture with me.
There’s a lot going on in this video. I was in the garden with the dogs today as we had 65-degree (F) weather in January! I’m proud of this globe I painted, which is on a solar spinner. It survived the fire and was previously located at “ground zero” where the fire reportedly began. Still no explanation except “electrical anomaly.”
Front yard blossoms:
By the way, that is NOT poop that Hobbes is chewing on. It’s pineapple or bark.
I worked on my plants, thinking about what I’ll do with them and the outdoor decor from this rental when I move back home in a few months. I think about the move back all my waking hours at this juncture.
I put together a very utilitarian table out of repurposed, broken parts, which I’m very proud of. I love practical furniture.
The dogs bring me such joy, as does the sun.
Enjoying the warm weather with the dogs and Shea and appreciating what a great man this holiday is in honor of. I’m not watching the travesty in DC and do not want anything to do with people who are normalizing it. I pity this country and rejoice that I can pursue my EU citizenship, even though I’ll stay and still do what I can, more on the local level in the foreseeable future, to make life better even for those innumerable fools who vote against their best interests.
I will actively seek to disconnect from fascists and I will also make it quite clear that they are no longer in my life, especially the ones I’m not related to and have no reason to stay connected to. There are enough toxic people in the world already that I have to deal with, and the political ramifications of their existence and corruption.
Bonnie and Calvin evening wrestle. This is why most people can’t believe Bonnie is completely blind. For those who don’t know, her eyes were surgically removed to reduce pain after she went completely blind in August.
The adoptable Honey Bear had a kissing booth! This princess is going to make some household very happy. Thanks to foster mom and fellow board member Mei for bringing her!
Below are other pictures from a festive night at Vtown Provisions that hopefully raised a lot of money for our non-profit Humane Society of the North Bay!
Pictures taken by our official photographer, America!
Thank you to the Vallejo Waterfront Weekend (a yearly weekend event every October) for their big check to Humane Society of the North Bay. Some of us board members went there to receive it. It took place at Suite Treatments here in Vallejo.
Nelson, the Jack Russell, is Jackie’s dog. She runs the event and owns the venue we were in. Honey Bear, the brown dog, is available for adoption. He came with his foster mom Mei.
We attended my friend Andrea Sorce’s Victory & Swearing In Celebration at the Vallejo Museum with a great crowd looking forward to the many new leaders of this area, including a new county supervisor, new state senator, and several new city councilmembers.
As someone who was featured with my own story in Bay Woof last month, I’ve been very excited to find out more about it, particularly as a board member of several years of one of the Bay Area’s animal shelters. I reviewed January’s issue today only to discover that there is a section called “Mr. Smarty Pants Knows” on dog behavior.
Even if R.U. Steinberg (the author) is a genius, why the hell does there have to be a cartoon depiction of him smoking a PIPE as the logo? Cartoons generally attract youth. What message does that give to readers, and why is it ever appropriate to stick tobacco into the mouth of a “smart person,” especially in 2025? Is cancer smart? This is the kind of normalization and marketing Big Tobacco just LOVES getting for free.
Does Bay Woof not realize how harmful smoke is to our pets?
I urge Bay Woof to reconsider why you are perpetuating smoking tobacco as a positive and “smart” thing to do for someone adopting such a moniker, with an academic cap no less.
I spoke at Vallejo City Council twice last night. One of the times was on the tobacco retailer fee amounts for the recently adopted Tobacco Retail License that my coalition and I worked so hard to get adopted here with youth activists who have the most to lose if we do not do something about the rampant youth tobacco sales in Vallejo which heretofore had no enforcement mechanisms for laws that been on the books for decades to not sell tobacco to minors, for example.
As Councilmember Bregenzer said, it’s sad that we’re already watering down the ordinance. Youth advocates came to City Council begging for help in improving their lives, but instead, the concentration and the bulk of the time spent on this was to benefit tobacco retailers who keep pushing for unlimited restrictions on selling their businesses with the privilege of continuing to sell poison. No attention was paid that next door in Benicia, for example, no such right exists AT ALL, as is often the case with these tobacco retail licenses.
Here is the video with my first comment on tobacco retail license fees:
What I said (almost verbatim) was:
With all the hullabaloo about the number of years to give tobacco sellers transferability to maximize profit on resale, which appears to mean zero consideration in changing business models to sell healthy products that nourish our community rather than poisoning it, I want to point out that the state of California and other progressive jurisdictions are already working on different ways of reducing the suffering caused by tobacco addiction and curtailing the privilege of selling addictive products that kill when used as directed.
Pollution caused by disposable tobacco products, including cigarette filters and disposable vapes, is becoming intolerable to many cities and counties.
Santa Cruz just passed the First-in-the-World Cigarette Filter Ban to mitigate pollution.
Many cities in Massachusetts are forbidding anyone born after [I said probably “before” by mistake] 2004 to purchase tobacco products for their entire lives.
Some cities in California like Burlingame are already not issuing any more tobacco retail licenses PERIOD.
Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills in southern California completely disallow commercial tobacco sales within their city limits.
Accordingly, a lot of these transferability arguments are moot whether the transfer is in two years or twenty given current trends, despite Big Tobacco coming up with new poisonous products meant to skirt these laws as we enact them.
All the procrastination of reaching the reduced number of tobacco retailers in Vallejo may make a few people profiting off of the pain of our families feel somewhat vindicated, but I don’t know how it helps anyone sleep better at night.
What should always be paramount is the health of our population, especially our children. Every day Big Tobacco finds opportunities to normalize the media portrayal of ingesting carcinogens that have no medicinal or nutritional benefit. Anything they can get away with to prolong addiction and find new customers is delaying the inevitable if empirical evidence and science even matter anymore.
Here is the video with my second comment on tobacco license transferability:
What I said (almost verbatim) was:
While I’m very pleased Vallejo now has a Tobacco Retail License, making it the second city in Solano County to have one, I’m still disappointed that the mandate of at least one yearly check per retailer was not included as per the language of the Public Health Law Center model, particularly when almost all other elements of the model were wholly adopted in Vallejo.
Presuming the TRL will indeed be properly enforced, I once again ask that reporting to the city council be brought at regular intervals. Quarterly reports on how many retailers were checked and how many follow-ups were done on those retailers who did not comply should be an obvious goal here. I would think after all of the time and effort the city council put into the enactment of the ordinance, the progress should be presented for Vallejoans to see and appreciate. As a reminder, the intent of this was to always be revenue neutral, so not just the compliance checks, but the follow-ups should be budgeted when taking into account the fee for tobacco retailers.
If there is any concern as to why the fees are so high to begin with, one only needs to remember that Vallejo was proven to be the jurisdiction with the worst tobacco youth sale rates in the entire Bay Area. That’s literally why we came to the city council with this daunting problem. Even Benicia next door with the TRL they passed in 2019 had the reality of knowing that youth in their city and other nearby cities could easily just come to Vallejo to reliably get tobacco products. Vallejo needs to do everything it can to make sure that this is never the reality again, and like magic some of the blight will diminish. Thank you.
Here is a video of the entire drama on December 30th’s meeting:
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:
