Almost as Fun as Burning Man…

I’m leaving tomorrow for Burning Man for a week so this will be my last post for a while, but if I wasn’t headed to Black Rock City, I know what I’d be doing this weekend – riding BART all night!
Over the past couple years, the Bay Bridge has been shut down a few times [...]

Cerrito Speakeasy Theater: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cerrito Speakeasy Theater Marquee, photo courtesy of the Cerrito
On Tuesday, I went to the Cerrito Speakeasy Theater in El Cerrito for the first time to see The Simpsons Movie. I’m sure if I had never been to the Parkway in Oakland, I would have really enjoyed the Cerrito, but I couldn’t help comparing it to [...]

Telegraph is Ready to Grow

Yesterday, I read a great post by dto510 about zoning on Telegraph in North Oakland. The planning commission will soon be considering updating zoning in Temescal, including raising height limits on buildings:
To fulfill the goals of the General Plan, it is absolutely imperative that the city bring its zoning in line with what private-sector developers [...]

Guess I don’t know everything about public transit…

AC Transit has become a pretty significant part of my life. I spend several hours on buses every week, I think about public transit all the time, I talk about transit issues to anyone who will listen, and I even write about bus conversations here. So you think I’d know most of tips and tricks [...]

Geese Crossing

I’m reading Blues City: A Walk in Oakland, by Ishmael Reed, and in it, he does an interview with Malcolm Margolin, author of The Ohlone Way. Here’s part of what Malcolm has to say about why birds keep coming back to Lake Merritt:
Along the northern Pacific coast the watersheds that supported migrating geese have been [...]

Community in Motion

 
Photo courtesy of actransit.org
One of the things I love about riding the bus is the sense of community. I know many of the bus drivers on my line by now, and at night, when there are few riders on the bus and I’ve had a couple drinks at Radio, I usually chat with the [...]

Emeryville – the Bane of Oakland?

Tonight I went grocery shopping. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Unfortunately, unless an Oaklander wants to frequent Safeway or the corner liquor store, it’s pretty impossible to do this in Oakland.
So I hopped in my car (my first guilt-ridden act of the night) and drove to Emeryville (my second) to shop at Trader Joe’s. Yes, it [...]

Oakland’s a lot like Black Rock City

It’s that time of year when I just can’t get Burning Man off of my mind, but lately I’ve been realizing that Oakland’s a lot like Black Rock City. Sure, a good chunk of burners are from the Bay Area so it makes sense that the Bay would be similar to the third largest city [...]

Broadway & 14th

Several months ago, I took a class at the Writing Salon in Berkeley, and one of the in-class exercises was to write about a place, with both a positive spin and a negative spin.
I chose to write about Broadway & 14th, in downtown Oakland, where I exit and return to the 1 or 1R bus [...]

A Cheat Sheet for Eating Locally

When I moved to the Bay Area from LA 7 years ago, I had never knowingly eaten something organic. And the concept of food miles didn’t even exist.
Things have changed a bit since then. Maybe it was watching An Inconvenient Truth, or maybe it’s all the food blogs I read, but lately, I can’t purchase [...]