Tag: Pride

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and just like that, it’s June

I’m not really sure where January, February, March, April and May have all gotten themselves off to, but I hope they’re having fun.  It seems like just a day or two ago I was struggling to remember to write 2017 on things instead of 2016 (or the inexplicable occasions where I wrote 1996….what?), and here we are on the first of June.

We sent May out with a bang though.  My niece graduated high school on Tuesday.  She is the youngest of my brother’s kids, and I couldn’t be more proud of the woman she is becoming.  The school she graduated from is one of the top 1% of schools in the country and her classmates are all amazing students, most of whom will be attending four year universities and colleges in the fall.

I got back from all of that frivolity last night, and when I woke up this morning it was June.  Already, my calendar is jam packed for the month.

babf_logoStarting this weekend when I will be at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, California signing (and selling) books.  I will have copies of my two novels, Forever and Through Shade and Shadow as well as my small collection of poetry.  Sale pricing is $12 each for the novels and $2.50 for the poetry collection.

I can take cash, credit cards and paypal.  It should be a fun day for the whole family.  With all of the vendors and authors, there should be something for everyone!

San Francisco Pride is at the end of the month, for a completely different festival to bookend the month.  Pride likewise has something for just about everyone.  If you come out to one or both days of Pride remember to wear sunscreen, dress in layers, wear comfortable shoes, and please consider dropping a dollar (or more) into one of those pink buckets.  Every penny goes to support the organization that creates the festival and/or the organizations that take care of our community.

Somewhere between those bookends, I will be taking a couple of days to head out to Yosemite with my mother, to enjoy some nature and some truly breathtaking views, like this one, which I took on my last trip to Yosemite in 2010.

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But for now, I should go pour my second cup of coffee and get to working the day job.  Hope you all have a pleasant day!

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donations, community, partners

Sometimes I think that the Mondays that follow productive weekends are harder than the ones that follow lazy weekends. We’re heading into the time of year when I have little time for lazy.  There are obligations and volunteer duties, family time and other crazy stuff.

I have volunteered with San Francisco Pride for better than ten years, working in the Donations Partners department.  Essentially, we are the people who greet festival goers with big pink pickle buckets asking for donations to help support the parade and festival. This year I have stepped up to manage the Donations Partners.  It’s a huge task, and a lot of responsibility, but I confess that I love the challenge.

You may wonder where that donation money goes.  And who are all of those people with the buckets anyway?

We partner with community organizations, non-profit groups that work with the LGBT community in some way.  They come from all sections of the spectrum, from groups that work with the homeless, to social organizations, from youth groups to cheerleaders, from churches to other religious groups, from local community centers to drag queens and their courts. Each of these organizations provides volunteers to do the bucket thing.

It’s a long day of work, but each hour that a volunteer works earns money for their organization.  At the end of the festival, the donations money is tallied up, and some of it goes back to the Pride organization to help pay the bills.  The rest is divided up into an hourly rate, and each of the partner organizations gets a grant based on the number of hours their volunteers put in.

Unfortunately, the work puts a bit of a quash on my writing.  Which was my long winded way of saying that I didn’t get much writing done this weekend.  But I did get to take my 68 year old mother to a tattoo shop for the first time in her life.  We took my niece to get her ears pierced.  It was an experience, I’ll say.

But no writing.  I guess I’ll have to try harder through the week.  I need to finish my short story so I can start editing for the anthology, and then I can get back to the world of Shades and Shadows.