A 12-year-old Alameda boy, Joe Carter, found a diamond ring in a little black box Sunday when he was boating with his father off Crissy Field. He then set off on a quest to find the owner. First posting on craigslist, and then catching the attention of Alamedan and Chronicle reporter Steve Rubenstein, who penned this article. If it is your ring—it’s a one-quarter carat diamond ring with a price tag indicating it was on sale for $499—or you know whose it is, you can reach the Carters through their craigslist posting.

On Sunday morning a message, which had been posted to several neighborhood google/yahoo groups, appeared in my email inbox:

We lost one of our black silkie chickens near Santa Clara and Court. If you see a small black chicken roaming around please call us 301-xxxx (cell) We miss her. She is a pet, not dinner.

Thanks,
Meresa

PS If you want to see what silkies look like check out this site.

Backyard chickens are becoming, it seems, an increasingly common Alameda phenomenon. Local writer Susan Davis described the trend for the March-April Alameda Magazine.

I didn’t go looking for the chicken, but I did wonder about its fate. Sunday night, around 10 pm, another message came through:

Our chicken is home! Thanks so much to everyone who read the email and spread the word. We are once again a happy family!

-Meresa

According to Meresa, an Alameda native who says her family also had backyard chickens when she was growing up the chicken, Mama, wandered off Saturday afternoon when Meresa’s husband was doing some yard work. When they went to put the chickens in their coop at dusk, they noticed noticed Mama’s absence. After scouring the neighborhood, they went to bed, hoping the chicken would return in the morning. When it did not, Meresa posted her notice. Late Sunday, around 10 pm, she got a a call to her cell. It was a neighbor who’d found the chicken in her yard. Chicken and family were reunited! “Turns out my chicken crossed the road and was hanging out in the backyard of our newest neighbor,” Meresa told me by email. “The neighbor had talked to a friend and mentioned the random chicken in her yard and luckily her friend had read my email….So Mama is back home and we will try to keep our side gate closed at all times!” In this case, it seems the chicken crossed the road simply because it could.

Hola! “Life on the Island,” the column I write for the print edition of the Alameda Journal is up online already. It’s about the little friendly things that I enjoy about living here. Enjoy.

This Saturday will be the first of the “Alameda Walks!” a series of hour-long, morning strolls around different neighborhoods in our fine town.

Hosted by the Alameda Collaborative for Children, Youth & Families in partnership with the city’s Park and Recreation Department and Pedestrian-Friendly Alameda, the community walk program is now in its fourth year.

The Collaborative’s co-chairs Mayor Beverly Johnson, School District Trustee Janet Gibson, and Alameda County Supervisor Alice Lai-Bitker often join the group, which is out and about the first three weekends of each month, May through October. “We just walk. It’s not a history walk. It’s not a power walk,” says Audrey Lord-Hausman of the Youth Collaborative. “It’s a chance to meet some neighbors, and explore the nooks and crannies of Alameda.”

All walks start at 9 a.m. and are routed through different neighborhoods. “People get a chance to know each other and explore new places,” says Lord-Hausman. “I’ve heard people say, ‘My gosh I was born and raised here and never knew this was here.’”

The first stroll of the season will be this Saturday, May 3. Participants will meet at the Lincoln Park High Street entrance (between Central and Santa Clara), for a meander that includes Alameda’s often-unexplored East Shore neighborhood. On the May 10, walkers will meet at Central and Gibbons to explore the a Sather Mound area and on May 17 the meeting spot is at Encinal High. The complete schedule is here.

Morning, Alameda! Anyone out there want to discuss, face to face, eye to eye, any heated topics like, say, Measure H? Want to talk about our moral/ethical obligations to our fellow citizens? Want to discuss how, despite, say, an ideological commitment to ‘liberty,’ we all at some point in our lives, as infants or elders, or when injured or sick, require the help/support/even money of others. And while we might, on a good day, be able to keep up the charade that our ‘liberty’ is not contingent on others, at some time that notion will be faced with the cold, hard reality of its impracticality. Coffee anyone?

[A note: Tom Pavletic, who has not Read the rest of this entry »

You can now read the online version of my first print column for the Alameda Journal. (Of course, you can also pick up the print version of the Journal and read it in actual ink—I know my father will!) Today I write about the light brown apple moth, lice, ants and snails.

Also look for Peter Hegarty’s coverage of Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight is the opening of the second annual Alameda on Camera show at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts. The exhibit collects the works of 48 photographers all of whom, over a rainy, cold 48 hours in late February, photographed their 1/48th assigned area of the city. (Last year, I went to the launch party for the event and watched as the photographers drew cut-up pieces of map from a brown paper bag.) Pictured left is an imaginative photophgraph, “Man in the Bouy,” taken by one of the show’s contributors, Jeffrey Heyman, who was sent to an unpromising area near the water off Ballena Boulevard. Here’s his description:

It was raining nearly horizontally in Area 43, and I had to keep wiping away rainwater from the lens of my camera…Besides photos of the surf and the Army Corps of Engineers-lain rocks that made up the shoreline, I took a number of pictures of this large steel object, a ball-shaped thing that I later learned was a docking buoy.

Later, when I was looking over my take for the day (after I dried off), nothing else seemed nearly as interesting as the 4-foot weathered ball.

You can see all the works in the show at the Frank Bette Center through April 26.

At last night’s city council meeting—after a brief presentation on California’s strategy to control the Light Brown Apple Moth—a couple of dozen Alameda citizens stepped up to challenge the plan to spray an as-yet-unformulated concoction on Bay Area cities and towns.

While the politics of the situation are intriguing—the ‘emergency’ which allows government agencies to sidestep normal health and safety requirements, the fact that the manufacturer of the synthetic pheromones is a Schwarzenegger campaign donor, and, too, that the state recently had to cancel a $500,000, no-bid PR contract to promote the spray—the basic facts remain the same: Read the rest of this entry »

At tomorrow night’s city council meeting, representatives from California’s Department of Food and Agriculture will present their plans to control the spread of the Light Brown Apple Moth—a plan which includes the aerial spraying of synthetic pheromones three to five nights a month for five years. I wrote about the moth a couple weeks ago, and you can read that post here.

The moth item is high on the agenda, so it should be addressed pretty early. And you can always watch on cable from the comfort of your own home.

Both Lauren Do and Michele Ellson posted this morning about rising sea levels and their impact on Alameda: Just what will be under water here as the ocean rises? A few months back, my presciently helpful research assistant sent email on this topic to Read the rest of this entry »