Boycott Chase Bank

I've never been harassed quite in this way by a bank before. My address changed six months ago and during those six months Chase has sent me 15 pieces of unsolicited mail--that is about one every other week. It is extremely annoying, and when I realized in September that they weren't just going to stop on their own, I called their privacy center at 888-868-8618. They told me I'd be removed from their list, but to allow 90 days for mailings already started to get through their system.

The unsolicited mail (two types of offers 7x each) from Chase Bank I've received during the last 6 months after I moved.

My Dentist's Advice: Eat Ice Cream and All the Halloween Candy You Can (and Exercise, Eating Right, and Brushing are Optional)

I went to my new dentist on Halloween. Yeah, I thought that was funny too. I bought and ate a doughnut afterwards but didn't eat any Halloween candy.

They make their new patients that drive take a test. If you park in the parking lot, you see a sign that has an arrow to the left that says "Back Entrance" for Dr. Herschleb. He isn't listed under "Front Entrance" with the right arrow. When you get to the back entrance, you see only a couple of doctors' names on a small door--with all those doctors listed on the left, there must be another entrance--so you keep walking around the building until you get to the front entrance, which lists all the doctors. It wasn't until I just wrote this a day later that I realized the "Front" and "Back" labels next to the arrows atop the two columns of doctor names on the sign on the parking lot side are not headings for the doctors listed beneath. My wife had the same trouble when she first went to this dentist a few months ago. Don't get me going on poorly-designed signs... I've got another whole blog post in my head about confusing signs at Samuel P. Taylor State Park. It is kind of like designing a Website--some people just shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of making and placing signs, and when they do the rest of us must suffer.

So after managing to figure out how to get into the building, and waiting for the mandatory waiting period for seeing a doctor, I really liked the guy.

Fixing Prop 13

I've always tried to think of ways to bring down housing costs. Houses should be places to live, not investments. Just like high gold prices right now are too expensive for people that actually use gold, if you took the speculation out of the housing market, housing prices might actually be affordable for people that need a house just for living in.

The economic downturn combined with my planned move to Marin County (and knowing that it would be difficult to afford to buy a house here) had me writing a letter to the Mono County Board of Supervisors last year. I proposed

Getting to Know the Local Environmentalists, Part 1: Under One Sky

Last week I attended "Under One Sky: Climate Change and Your Back Yard." It was a climate change discussion sponsored by the Environmental Forum of Marin and Transition Mill Valley at the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. As I walked in the door, I was handed a flyer for "Norman Solomon for congress" by a grizzle-bearded gentleman that told me the candidate isn't accepting any corporate campaign contributions. "Sounds good to me," I thought as I took the flyer, "and also impressive he has dedicated volunteers that aren't dressed and groomed like Jehovah's Witnesses." I looked at the flyer while waiting for the event to start, and liked what I saw. Before sitting down, I spoke to a woman about what "Transition Mill Valley" was, and she told me about some of their upcoming events.

After some preliminaries and inspiring music (this youtube video isn't what they played but you'll get the idea), John Wick of the Nicasio Native Grass Ranch and the Marin Carbon Project gave a very enjoyable and detailed presentation of his work on ranching, carbon sequestration, and

Fall Colors... in July

The fall colors start on the coast in July. This year, I first noticed poison oak turning red on July 25th. Not a lot, but individual leaves on certain plants. The grass was already yellow, and the smell of mid-summer dust on the trails was in the air.

California Bay are evergreen, however there always seem to be scattered yellow leaves within a tree's canopy, which remind me of Christmas Tree decorations. These yellow leaves seem to fall more in earnest in August, piling up on the ground and on the trails beneath the trees and drifting into mini-debris jams at the riffles in the creek. It doesn't seem like the foliage in the tree looks any different, even though the yellow leaves seem to fall more frequently now than in early summer.

California Buckeye is

Tiptoeing up a mountain

The most careful mountaineers are the ones that wear sandals. I realized this two weeks ago when I was on my way up Mt. Warren, in the Inyo National Forest just east of Yosemite National Park--in my Chaco sandals.

Rising Air

This is the wettest place I've ever lived--over 44 inches of rainfall per year on average. Even a year with only half of average rainfall here would be wetter than the average rainfall of any place I've ever lived. This is the farthest west that I've ever lived and the farthest north I've ever lived in this hemisphere.

On the isohyetal map of West Marin in the "Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula" by Jules G. Evens, it shows 50+ inches of rainfall in the Kent Reservoir watershed. It really increases dramatically from Pt. Reyes, with only about 12 inches of rain a year at the lighthouse. I've moved from a rain shadow, where a reversed-but-similar-magnitude gradient exists east of the Sierra crest (close to 40 inches near the crest to 12 inches near Lee Vining), to an orographic hotspot. I'm now living on the wetter end of that gradient.

Peter was telling me about how the wettest area in Marin County is