Erik, Alabama dog, and I took last Friday off work and headed for the mountains to camp at Blue Lakes, one of our favorite campgrounds in California. Located near Kirkwood at about 8,000 ft, it is just beautiful, and we were excited to see patches of snow scattered around. We even had some in our campsite.
Even though there is trash all over the streets, a boarded up or burned down house on every block, and crackheads and prostitutes roaming the streets at night, it is Lavonne Sallee’s art gallery on downtown Virginia Street that is causing an uproar in Bay Area locality forums on Topix. The pieces displayed in her gallery windows have been called “gross,” “pornographic,” “occultish,” “sick,” and “x-rated shit” and Sallee herself has been the target of very stinging insults. The funny thing is that Sallee is very possibly the most classy and gentle-looking woman I have ever seen in Vallejo; she often takes walks downtown, wearing long, flowy skirts with her adorable Yorkie lapdog by her side. It’s very hard to imagine anybody being able to say such things to her face. When she got wind of the virtual cat fight going on in the Topix forum, she was far from shy about taking part in the discussion herself.
I have been living in Vallejo, California since January 2009 and have been making observations the entire time. All I knew about Vallejo as a teenager growing up in the South [San Francisco] Bay Area was that rapper E-40 was from there. I remember hearing about the history-making city mayoral race of 2007, when there was a dead tie between Vice Mayor Gary Cloutier and former Solano County Supervisor Osby Davis, who each received 5,158votes. I remember when, a year ago today, the city of Vallejo declared bankruptcy.
My dog Alabama is just as much of a commitment as your child and whoever said dog rearing is practice for child raising definitely never met her. The reason I can say with such conviction that being Bama’s owner is no easier of a job than being your kid’s parent, is because all it takes is a Bama-story or two and even my friends that are parents are agreeing with me on this one. Hear me out and then let me know if you think I might be right about this, or if you think I need to get a hobby and stop paying so much attention to my dog…
Reason #3 (for not being sad about issue #10 being the last printed issue of CRAFT Magazine):
There is something much, much bigger to be sad about…the death of Ana Poe’s dog Paco, of Paco Collars fame.
I was so excited when I opened the last issue of CRAFT Magazine to page 111 at random. It was a great surprise to see Ana Poe and Paco and a how-to article on making dog collars the Paco way. Ever since I met Ana and Paco last summer I’ve had so much respect for Ana and her business (and Paco of course), and I was thrilled to see them featured in one of the coolest craft mags.