You must be having a good summer, since there have been so few posts at 6 a.m. said a reader recently.

Yes, my family and I did get a week out of town, on a tropical island, no less — but also preparations for the Otis bike bus, Alameda's infrastructure measure, and the everyday realities of parent life and work life have kept me away from turning murky ideas into words — such as one potential post in which a drunk David Brooks (after his assistant accidentally books him a flight to "Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport" instead of SFO) randomly rolls into Alameda and makes his way to a City Council meeting. While sitting and stewing over his assistant's mistake, the pundit begins musing about the "two Alamedas":

In one Alameda, front yards feature pea gravel. In another Alameda, decomposed granite...

In one Alameda, a bike is for riding. In another Alameda, a bike is for passing...

In one Alameda, the City Auditor and the City Treasurer are vital roles. In another Alameda, they are sinecures, duplicating responsibilities already held by professional staff and the elected members of City Council...

In one Alameda, swimmers dream of competing in a cool Olympic-sized swimming pool. In another Alameda, parents dream of kids learning to swim in a warm shallow public pool...

In one Alameda, an apartment is for living. In another Alameda, an apartment is for earning...

The bestselling author would continue on in his reverie, culminating in a realization that there is actually only one Alameda in which all live together —

— but maybe that's a draft better left unwritten.

I went back to read through old posts for my own amusement — and to also pluck some that may have stood the test of time and may still be interesting or relevant for others to read:

This post on the reality of "CEQA" power politics was fun to write — and fun to read when I just went back to it again. But CEQA is still broken.

After writing that post, I bought a copy of Island of the Blue Dolphins:The Complete Reader's Edition from University of California Press and was fascinated by the editor's introductory essay on the book's writing and its place in American educational culture. After we pass the infrastructure bond measure to shore up this island, time to organize a book club about another island?

California's Channel Islands are also featured in the California Vehicle Code in a single clause that could be edited by legislators to give Alameda the abilities to regulate all vehicle designs in the city. (The legislative aides who read this blog have not reached out about this one :)

As a cisgendered straight man, I can sometimes forget how special of a place the Bay Area is and how hard-won our inclusive community is — this post is about listening to an archived KQED Forum episode, featuring current Councilmember Tracy Jensen, among other local leaders.

While listening to Alameda public meetings and advocating on behalf of some topics myself, I've been gradually learning the many ways that "no" can be said...

This post gets a ton of regular traffic from Google searches that appear to be engineers in school or early in their careers tasked with writing reports. They search for the "three E's of traffic safety" — and then they land on a long narrative on a blog named after a pastry about how their profession ~~sucks and is stuck in the past~~ (pardon) is adapting to the challenging realities of American driver behavior.

This blog has also, oddly, become an extremely popular destination for the search phrase yacht stanford.

Each school morning, the Otis Bike Bus crosses "State Route 61" with the assistance of multiple adult volunteers and a crossing guard at Mound Street. (Didn't see that coming when this blog started writing about that gnarly intersection 3-1/2 years ago!) Caltrans has pledged to address this site of multiple crashes with a road diet. We're all still waiting...

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to having more to post — whether or not it involves an imaginary drunk author of the bestselling "Bobos in Alameda".