Suicide barrier - again

This is turning out to be a definitely no fun at all blog, isn't it?
A week ago Sunday, the local paper printed an article about the suicide barrier (I can't find my link and it's very much like the link my friend Marilee posted in her comment, so I'll just use hers).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/13/AR2010021303314.html

I spent my Valentine's morning writing a letter to the editor because the numbers mentioned were too low, as always, and I wanted to add a bit more info to the whole thing. When the letter still hadn't shown up by Wednesday, both DH and I decided it wasn't going to happen. I was very surprised to find it in today's paper, not just as a letter to the editor, but a "my turn" contribution:

http://www.napavalleyregister.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_ba3ed288-1f79-11df-9891-001cc4c002e0.html

The photo collage, BTW, is courtesy of a young facebook friend of mine.

RIP Eve

My mother-in-law died yesterday afternoon. She had suffered a massive stroke a week ago and fought hard but it just wasn't meant to be.
Her name really was Evelyn but she preferred Eve. She was adventurous, fiercely independent, fun and interesting. We never lived close enough to see much of each other but she was a very good mother-in-law and grandmother to my children.
She was born and grew up on the East Coast but much preferred living on the other side of the country. She liked the casualness so much more. White gloves in church wasn't her thing.
She loved to travel and did lots of it, several trips to Australia, cruises down one side of S America and back up the other - and that was just in the last 15 years or so.
She must have been tremendously organized because the family moved a lot - from CA to the D.C. area to CO (more than once), to the Netherlands with 4 children. There were more moves after my father-in-law retired but with fewer children all the time.
Ever since I knew her, she had been taking classes, art classes, computer classes, exercise classes. She worked part-time, more for the fun of it than anything else, doing transcriptions for doctors, typing for college students (this was before computers), even working for the sheriff's department in Reno.
My father-in-law preceded her in death about 15 years ago and she then moved her ailing brother out to NV to look after him. When he, too, passed away she reconnected with an old family friend and eventually married him and moved to Florida where she had lived ever since. She took up sailing in her late 70s and even bought her own little boat.
Losing most of her sight and some of her mobility in the last couple of years made things difficult but - until the stroke last week - she hadn't changed much.
This one's for you, Eve :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqUQduCNgK4

It really happened

I just found the news report on what I wrote about in the last post. Still thrilled about it, still concerned about the money aspect. I was part of the group that visited legislator's office this past summer to explain and talk to them about the need to change federal policy so money in the transportation bill could be used for suicide barriers. Because this is not just a Golden Gate Bridge problem, far from it. It's just that it's worse here than anywhere else.
Okay, done now. :-)

GOOD NEWS

Yes, I know, capitalization amounts to yelling, but, in this case, it's appropriate:

The Golden Gate Bridge Authority met this morning to, among other things, "approve actions regarding the approval of the final environmental impact report for the Golden Gate Bridge physical suicide deterrent system project with with alternative 3, installation of a net system, as the locally preferred alternative" and they voted unanimously to go ahead.

Of course, the money doesn't exist yet - $50 million is a lot of money to come from grants and private donations. Bake sale anybody?

This was very welcome news - a friend called to tell me she had seen it on the news at noon. We've been dealing with a family health crisis for a week now and haven't been as on top of things are we usually would have been.

The good, the bad, the necessary and the questionable

Yes, we went to the flea market again, didn't buy any of the things shown (just as well in some cases), but did find a few treasures.

The February newsletter from the Bridge Rail Foundation

I know you've all been waiting for this ..................

This newsletter includes an excellent cartoon from the Berkeley Daily Planet. Since I can't find a link to it on the web, I've copied and pasted. I'm sure I'll be forgiven for that.

Note to self

When taking pictures of yourself:
either wear both sleeves up or down, not one up and one down;
clean mirrors first;
try to keep camera strap out of the way.

I ♥ scarves and shawls

And while I absolutely love wearing them and possibly even making them, I'm not very good at photographing them. So, I apologize in advance for the not terribly good pictures. Dark blue is almost impossible to photograph. Oh, sure, you can take a picture of it but you're not going to be able to see detail. So, here we go:

As you can see, there's a variety of scarves, if not colors - I was trying out things in dark blue. Love the ruffly scarf, even if I never could get my machine to sew with the elastic thread. So, I just tried something different (and I will give links to tutorials I used soon). The pale aqua was a repurposed Tshirt, it's a little thin and I'm going to try something different for my next trick.
I'm wearing one of the ruffly scarves, the thinner one, the thicker one is too much for me. This one was literally a 15 minute scarf - I made all the mistakes on the first one. That one took a lot longer, used up a whole spool of thread and destroyed 4 sewing machine needles.
The red shawl is from a knitting class I took recently. Even pacing myself severely because of a repetitive stress injury that just won't go away, I finished it in 6 days. Love the feel, not so thrilled with the fringe. The next one won't have fringe.
The close-up is of a scarf made from yet another tutorial and that's one's good, too. A bit more work than some of the others but well worth it.
And the cotton scarf is made with Anna Maria Horner voile fabric, feels lovely and is fast to sew. More later.........