life on the central coast, early October edition

So the bus drivers are still on strike a week later. This is unprecedented in Santa Cruz so far as I can remember. The issue now is that the drivers and the board's negotiating team worked out and agreement and then, after the drivers voted to accept it, the board, in a closed-door meeting, decided to go back on the agreement. At least two of the board have publicly disagreed with this move (one being our "socialist" mayor Mike Rotkin who deserves a whole long write up for himself, seeing as he's a most complicated guy). The students at the University and the community college are stranded -- both institutions include bus fares in their student fees and the students ride the buses "free" with student ID. As far as I can tell, there's no special reason to think it will be resolved any time soon. I can't remember this ever happening before, at least not with the buses. Usually labor actions around here, at least in the public sector, involve people working to contract (meaning no overtime and no extra, usually unpaid, duties), and the occasional one-day strike. The teachers in the city schools worked to contract almost all of last year, and they got to the point of a preliminary strike vote, but they didn't walk out. The last couple of years, though, there have been threatened strikes, protests, working to contract, in almost every public field of endeavor. I think. It sure seems to be on the increase. Of course, I can think of a lot of reasons for this. Most of which amount to belated defensive moves in the class war.

A new detail is that the city is giving bucycles to stranded bus riders (well, that takes care of the able bodied bus riders but not the ones who are frail)

We have definitely moved into "will it ever start raining?" season. No big fires in the county this year, but there's been a huge one down South. The sky tends to be blue blue blue, with occasional days of low cloud and high fog in the summer pattern of morning and evening denseness and afternoon clearing. But mostly blue blue blue. And it's cold enough that I actually bought a sweater. None of the temperatures seem to me to be lower than summer lows, but without the afternoon warmup the chill just settles in and you have to respond to it. We haven't turned the heater on yet, though.

Lots of raptor action, and not just in the hills. Yesterday I saw two pairs of turkey vultures circling over downtown. I don't know if they were hunting pigeons or if they were doing something social. There seems to me that there's lots of pair action among the raptors. I would have thought that this is not the time for that . . . but I remember, just now, that eagles nest in the winter at Lake San Antonio, so maybe hawks and vultures do too. Nah, googling seems to indicate they nest in the summer.

And along that line, I mean the bird line, I've been wondering about the relationship betweeen the crow family and the parrot family, on the basis of behavior. Googling does not answer the question. I can only find the big clades (which I do not understand), or the raw families, not the relationships among the families. Here's why. A few weeks ago I went back to the Greenwich steps to watch the conures flying around their big tree. Last night I was watching the crows flocking in the pine tree at the corner. The experience was exactly the same. Their flocking and flying was the same, their calls were almost the same -- to the point that I think a lonely conure and a lonely crow, sufficiently motivated, could communicate as equals. The crows are beautiful. I can't find it in my heart to blame them for the drop in other kinds of perching birds.

The Band Review is coming up in a couple of weeks. I mean to go down and work.

About two weeks ago I took my first pictures of a plastic-wrapped field and what it looked like after the plastic was taken off. I'm several months behind in uploading pictures, but when I catch up, I'm going to start an album which is just for the progress of that one poor field.

I haven't heard from Frank since Friday or so, but he did say that he wouldn't be able to send any email for a while.

Edit: I forgot to add the story of Kate the Pig.

There's a guy in the mountains (you want quaint? He lives on whalebone Gulch Road in Boulder Creek) who has a half-wolf dog and a domesticated wild pig. If it's the kind of pig I think it is, it's one of the wild pigs which were imported to the mountains so rich guys could hunt them. They like the area a lot. They have multiplied and spread in all of the wild and semi-wild areas of the coast ranges. They are, of course, being pigs, voracious and rude. And occasionally dangerous. Kate is, according to his owner and even the neighbors who complained abou her, not dangerous, but exuberant, and she roots around the neighbors' gardens and overwhelms visitors like a friendly dog does. The current problem is that the guy who owns the pig has been evicted and he can't or won't move until his pig has a new home, ore until he has a new home the pig can move into also. The County Sherriffs came up to talk to him about the problem and he wasn't home and she came out and chased them around a bit and chewed on their car. She tore up the bumper and a headlight. The case in is impasse because nobody wants to take the pig into custody and it seems like everybody wants to give the guy a chance to work out a solution to the housing of his pig.

I don't know. I think the guy qualifies for mental disability SSI just on the basis of having domesticated a wild pig in the first place, which ought to pay the rent on a place with sturdy fences.

Either that, or the volunteer firefighters could use Kate for a fundraiser barbecue.