Author: FauxPaws

More signs that SacTown is going to hell in a handbasket with a broken handle

Beancounters admits she no longer holds garage sales because the stealing gets on her nerves:

Stealing from sales has gotten more rampant. I get unreasonably mad at people who steal from my sale. Or bundle stuff tightly under their arms and come up to me and try to offer me a quarter for everything. Or hide stuff under their clothes. Or pass unpurchased stuff to a confederate who has already made her purchases. Or make their kids distract me while the adults throw shit into their car trunks or into the milk crates on the back of their decrepit bicycles, and then take off and meet the kids around the block.

When I see this behavior, I get. really. mad. It’s stupid, but I do. I am the first to tell you that the Rules of Garage Sale Engagement are sometimes nebulous, but the line is drawn at actual stealing! If you don’t know that, you are not fit to be out in polite society.

So, I hear myself yelling impossibly surreal things like “Yes, I see that Travel Scrabble game under your t-shirt, and it’s still fifty cents!”

Read the rest …

The Maloofs like losing

Racehorses, it has been said, are the perfect sports franchise. They always try their best, they don’t shoot their mouth off and they never renegotiate their contracts. Maybe that’s why the Maloofs dipped a toe into horse-racing, with a 5-year-old colt named King Palm.

The horse is something special: He can’t win, and he has nine straight second-place finishes. From the Bloodhorse online:

The streak is believed to be a Thoroughbred record, but no one seems to know for sure.

“I don’t know anyone who keeps track of seconds,” said trainer Vladimir Cerin, who has never seen anything like it in his 27 years of conditioning.

“It’s actually easier to win nine in a row – if you have a really good horse – than finish second nine times like that,” he added. “You have to beat everybody else except one horse each race. We’re trying to win every time, but something always seems to happen.”

The Maloof brothers – George Jr., Joe, Gavin and Phil – see the irony that King Palm has the same bridesmaid tendencies as their NBA franchise. The Kings are perennial playoff contenders without a crown.

“It’s hilarious,” Gavin Maloof said. “It’s the only time I’ve ever been happy about finishing second in my life. Everybody into racing knows our horse.”

Downtown stadiums

I’m sitting in a room on the 21st floor of the Omni in San Diego, looking down into PetCo Park, where the Padres are playing the Giants. I can tell every time Bonds makes an appearance — the boos rock the ballpark and practically vibrate the foundation of the hotel (which has a four-floor skywalk into the park).

Why am I not at the game? Three tickets, four people (late entry to our party), so I opted to stay “home” and get some work done. (The Omni has to be one of the most efficient business hotel chains around, totally dedicated to helping you get everything you want done, from hooking to fast, flawlessw WiFi in every room to getting your 14-year-old niece some tourist options to get her out of your hair for a while. Oh, and great handmade chips!)

Sounds like the seventh-inning stretch down there now …
Continue reading “Downtown stadiums”

Grounded!

For hours now the news has been full of reports that mass murder in the skies has been averted, thanks to arrests of suspected terrorists in the U.K. New security measures are in place, and lines are reported long.

What does this mean for anyone trying to fly out of Sacramento International now? A friend just bailed on a business trip East. Her morning flight hadn’t boarded by afternoon.

We’re supposed to go to San Diego Saturday. Part of me says, “oh heck, just drive!”

Have to see how things develop in the next 48 hours. What would you do for a short trip? Is it worth the drive time to skip the airport?

The other shoe falls

Taking a break from our regularly sheduled arena-gate programming to report that my electric bill arrived yesterday.

My billing cycle runs nearly from the beginning to the end of the month, so it included the entire run of the heat storm. My house is about 1,200 square feet, and I did try to conserve energy. Even at that, the air conditioning ran 24/7 for at least a week. Setting it at 78 … 80 … 82 didn’t help — it still ran 24/7.

And it cost me: $190.66 for the month of July.

Yes, it’s a hit. But I take consolation from the fact the SMUD is one of the least expensive energy outfits in the state — we’re paying one-third less than PG&E customers in West Sacramento, for example — and, of course, I’m grateful that I had air conditioning (thinking of the people who didn’t, and died) and could afford to run it.

So I guess I can’t kick much. But you’re still going to hear a lot of howling across town as people open those envelopes.

Hope August is relatively cool.

Arena deal just gets better and better …

… if your last name is Maloof, that is. From R.E. Graswich in this morning’s Bee:

Sacramento City Councilman Steve Cohn figured taxpayers would get a raw deal from the new Kings arena proposal. Then he ran the numbers. It’s much worse than Steve dreamed. “Incredibly, we would be better off building the arena and giving it away to Joe and Gavin Maloof,” said Steve of the happy Las Vegas brothers who own the Kings. “The rent they will pay is less than what they would pay in property taxes, by 2 or 3 million dollars a year.” As proposed, the public will own the new arena. That means zero property taxes.

Here’s the rest. Read it and open your wallet … or vote “no” on the arena measure that won’t be mentioning “arena” in it.

World-class city or world-class suckers? I’m not opposed to a downtown sports venue — love Denver’s and San Diego’s — but this deal doesn’t work for me. As for the Maloof’s recent civic generosity … oh, puh-lease.

Attention criminals!

Do not get excited by the fact that I am so deliriously enchanted with the end of the heat wave and the return of the Delta Breeze that I am tonight leaving most of my windows open (with screens, of course, hello, West Nile virus). I have three very large dogs and one small yappy one. OK, so the small one is all bark, no bite, one of the big ones is old and losing her hearing, and the two youngsters are very friendly.

I also have a parrot who’d as soon bite you as look at you. So don’t get any ideas.

Cool breeze! Cool breeze! I don’t remember ever appreciating it so much.

You know it’s getting cooler …

… when people switch from talking about how their air conditioners can’t keep up to worrying about what all that power has cost them.

The next round of SMUD bills was the buzz at lunch today at Corti Bros. Of course, every lunchtime at Corti Bros. will find SMUD employees in line, with their salads and sandwiches to go. (SMUD’s warehouse and supply buildings are next-door to Corti, and the rest is around the corner.) That’s probably why the clerk, after bemoaning what will surely be a whopper of a bill next month, smiled and said:

“Well, yes, but at least I don’t have PG&E!”

Small consolation perhaps when the SMUD envelope comes next month, but bills from Sacramento’s homegrown and customer-owned electric utility do run 29 percent lower on average for residential customers than they do for our neighbors in PG&E territory.

Do you know the way …

… to San Jose? The car I’m driving this week has a navigation system (!) so even if I didn’t know, it does.

Heading there for a blogging conference. It’s called BlogHer, but BlogHims are welcome, too. Here are the details.

Oh sure … just when it starts to cool down and maybe we’ll get a nice few days, I have to blow town …

Old Sacramento

We took a frantic run to the river just after dawn yesterday, in hopes of taking the edge of the energy levels of the two youngest retrievers with an hour or so of running, swimming and fetching.

It was already hot, and my glasses wouldn’t stop steaming up. We spent an hour or so there in the company of many others — runners, hikers, other dog-lovers — all desperate to get in some physical activity before the oppressive heat drove us all inside.

By 10 a.m., dogs exhausted, errands run, I was hunkered down in my air-conditioned bunker, hoping to heavens that the state had enough power and that my aging AC unit can hang on for another season. Using energy conservation as an excuse to skip the laundry, I cracked the cover of Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From” and settled down onto the couch.

The title refers more to California in general than to Didion’s home town of Sacramento in particular, but there’s plenty in the book about her growing up here as a member of a pioneer family. She herself may be one of the most famous natives of Sacramento, but she couldn’t say much about the place now: She left for Cal in the ’50s and never came back.

Still, I had to laugh at one passage where she writes about her father:

My father did not believe in air conditioning.

My father in fact believed that Sacramento summers had been too cold since the dams.

Joan Didion’s father died in 1992, but i bet these last few days would have had him re-appraising his beliefs.