I took a good deal of time away from blogging.  Which, in retrospect, wasn't a great thing to do when I said I would write something each week.  Such is life, I guess.  The freedom to say you will do something and not follow through is a luxury for run of the mill people like me.  I am not saying it is the right thing to do, but I definitely get more of a pass than our public officials or educators or government types do.  So that brings me to my topic today, what are the politicians saying they'll do and is there really any way to make sure they do it?

I am not really going to dedicate a whole entry to being cold and wet lately, but this is really not what I signed up for.  I know we live in a desert with more grass than beachgoers and we "borrow" all our water from other places, so the rainfall should be a good thing.  But it's really not.  Rain just stands in the way of walking the neighborhood and the San Diego crowd isn't really built for "weather."

Enough about that, I really wanted to post about my experience at West Coast Tavern recently.  For those that don't know, it's the restaurant formerly known as Hawthorn's underneath the North Park Theatre.  Okay, maybe not underneath, more like adjacent to.  Exact location aside, here's a photo I took

There is a budget crisis in the City of San Diego.  Anyone with a pulse has probably heard that we have 200 million dollars less than we need.  Over the weekend there was a Town Hall meeting or something over at Hoover.  I went.  Sat amongst the crowd, kept my mouth shut, and observed...it would have been insanely funny if not for the subject matter.  Here's my top 10 list of moments...

This is obviously VERY historic.  So maybe we aren't talking about things quite this old.

But one of the more interesting debates (for fuddy duddies like me, anyway) is about who can do what with his or her property and under what circumstances.  Everyone under the sun has argued both sides of this point, and I suppose it really matters in North Park because we have some pretty good looking old homes...like this one

I will skip all the niceties today. I dropped by Coco’s (he owns the printer supply store on U and Grim, not the un-good chain restaurant that my mother loves) and I saw something that made me ill. Physically sick, I tell you. Well, not really, but almost.

Don’t get me wrong, Coco and his staff of one were both lovely. She was playing a cool MC Solaar album (a French rap artist I used to know about…I haven’t always been prematurely old) and he was helping someone with a print job. It’s a good store, right next to where the old “new” location of Caffe Forte was (I'm missing Greg and Linda) and his prices are surprisingly reasonable for a small, local place. But when I left and got in my car, that’s when the fun started…