Happy Halloween! I can't believe Halloween has already come...and almost gone. The haunted house was great this year, first time we had lines of people waiting outside the door. I'm glad Kay, Candice, and Erik made it down....specially since my two oldest friends forgot they had told me they'd come.....like they had for the past 5 (or 7) years and went to Cal Poly instead....oh well.

Kay, Candice, Erik, Joella, and I tried our best to run it when my dad, Chris, and his friends were gone....we did our best! First group of people we got, a bunch of 9 year old girls....everything didn't work. They came out of there yelling it wasn't scary at all. Second group we scared em good! Ha! All together I think we gave away over 65 treat bags of candy, and dozens of individual pieces after that. I wouldn't be surprised if about 100 people came this year!

Mountain View is a great place to be at Halloween now. There are at least four haunted houses in the city, one that is at Haunted Mansion-level when it comes to technology and special effects. It was great to see all the streets lined with the shadows of trick-or-treaters and families, to see pumpkins glowing on so many front porches, and to hear laughter.....and the occasional scream.

Whew. Where did that weekend go? Even with the extra hour it was way too short. My home is all decked out for Halloween, the haunted house is half way set up, La Llorona is ready to scare the neighborhood kids. Went to a birthday party for my little cousin Angelica. She turned 6. Erik got to meet most of my mom's side....and even baptised my Aunt Lydia with diet coke by letting a basketball slip past his hands and on to a table full of drinks that my Aunt was sitting at.

Got to see Lesley play field hockey against Stanfurd. What can I say except...wow, boo to Stanfurd. This lady sitting next to Erik and I, all decked out in a fancy Stanfurd vest was an living breathing steriotype of a Stanfurd fan.

Excerpts from her conversation with a friend sitting next to her:

"(so and so) FINE-AL-LEEEE bought a new house. Her house in Cupertino was sooo tiny....it only had THREE Bedrooms and TWO Baths you know. Can you imagine, it didn't even have a den."

"It is soo great to have her with us (referring to her maid). We took her with us to Mexico City. It was great because she speaks the languague of course, and was able to help us find our way around. I mean noooo one speaks a WORD of English down there!"

(Blissfully ignorant of the fact that there are groups of UCSB fans sitting around her as the score approaches 11-0 Stanford): "This is a wonderful game! It is just great that all the freshman get to play against this club team. (yells) GO FRESHMAN!"

....and so on. We had better win the Big Game.

The homecoming game was awesome! Just awesome. Cal beat UCLA! We rushed the field at the end of the game and celebrated. It was so much fun. I saw one of the football players and realized I went to school with him in kindergarten, and he was one year ahead of me for the rest of school. So I shook his hand and said hi. I hope we can rush the field again come November 23. We Want the Axe!

Good news on the studio front. My project was extended till Wednesday! Bad news why, a girl in another section cut herself pretty bad in the shop....but didn't loose any fingers or anything luckily. However, it caused the shop to close down for a day,....which made it impossible for a lot of the class to finish their projects. I was going to go home tonight, but decided it'd be better to just stay here for the weekend and catch up.

Good news on the City Planning class front too, I got a 23/25 when the curve made a 17 an A. Let's hope I did something similar in stats...by some miracle.

Good times.

So, midterms have come and gone. All two of them. Lucky me. I have no idea how I did on either of them. Not fun. I have a bad feeling about my Stats midterm, and a slightly optomistic feeling about my City Planning midterm.

But...I really don't have too much time to think about them. After classes today it was off to studio for me. Where I remained, with a nice break to celebrate Ryan's birthday, until midnight. It was nice to have the whole group together. Hope we do it a lot more often. Erik and Ryan came to visit me at Wurster and walk home with me after they went to the RSF. Thanks guys.

My goal: finish my model tomorrow and finish my presentation board by 4:00pm on Saturday! Will I do it? Check back on Sunday to find out....

Things that really irk as I cram for my stats midterm:

-An EECS major who is too busy reading his EECS reader to pay any attention during my Stat Section's midterm review. Dude, if you're not going to pay attention why don't you just go to the library
and read about EECS? Huh? Why you have to sit there next to me and make me feel less intelligent than you because you are just so freakin smart that you don't need to pay attention to the review problems that have my brain spinning. Be gone evil one.

-The growing number of jugglers and unicyclists that are congregating in La Loma and outside Evans Hall. How can you possibly have so much free time in college to practice juggling on a weekday!? How dare you stand their juggling your bowling pins as I hurry off to go lock myself in Doe Library to study till who knows when? Even if I didn't have this midterm, I'd still be doing work in studio. Seriously, even if you had that much free time, why would you spend it juggling, or unicycling. Why not do something worthwhile? Like sit in your room and watch TV, or save a historic house. Jeez.

The wonderful thing about having a large, close-knit family is that you have so many people you love and never want to loose.

The hard thing about having a large, close-knit family, is that you have so many people you love and never want to loose.

The saga continues:

On Tuesday at McDonald's in SF, my friend from studio Flavia, was the first person at Cal to actually guess I was half Portuguese. I guess it helps that she's from Brazil. But oh ya....she guessed Indian before she guessed Portuguese. Ah well.

Have you heard? A certain girl we all know and love told us at the concert last night that she's gonna be a pirate hooker for Halloween. Argh matey! Since she is going to yell at me as soon as she reads this, I might as go all the way and mention erotic bagels. Harhar!

"Are you gonna live your life wonderin' standing in the back lookin' around?
Are you gonna waste your time thinkin' how you've grown up or how you missed out?
Things are never gonna be the way you want.
Where's it gonna get you acting serious?
Things are never gonna be quite what you want.
Or even at 25, you gotta start sometime.
I'm on my feet, I'm on the floor, I'm good to go.
Now all I need is just to hear a song I know.
I wanna always feel like part of this was mine.
I wanna fall in love tonight."

Ahhhhhhh. The Jimmy Eat World concert was so good. I had the greatest time, and it seemed like everyone else that went did too. Anyone who thinks that they sound bad live......well if they ever did, they sound great now.

This is the first group thing I have planned in Berkeley. I used my awesome City Planning skills to make sure we didn't get lost in the Tenderloin on our way to the Warfield (which is an awesome building). That would have been not so fun. But the concert was just great. I wish I could turn back time and go to it all over again.

So....I decided to take a chance, be a good dorm resident, and brave out the DC tonight. It's been over a week since I went there for a dinner. But....when I saw what was being served (the normal slop) and the long lines to get the slop.....I just decided to leave.

Not worth it. Nope. They didn't even have any ice cream for me to take home. Waste my swipes. Humph.

I spent most of tonight wasting time. I couldn't help it that I stumbled across the on-line archives of the Los Altos Historical Association! (Yes...I know...I'm a dork.....bare with me here)

I just couldn't stop reading the scans of newspaper articles and flyers from the 50s when Los Altos and Mtn. View were in annexation "wars." Some of those Los Altans really hated Mountain View. They portrayed Mountain View in political cartoons as a vicious drooling dark wolf ready to attack Los Altos (portrayed as a fluffy white lamb).

Their whole thing was that Mountain View was going to take over the supposed "countryside" of Los Altos, and ruin their semi-rural country/suburban way of life. But....if you read between the lines of any of those old articles....you can see some pretty strong ulterior motives that stand behind the mantra of "keeping our semi-rural way of life."

MV was allowing residential lots to be subdivided to less than 1/4 of an acre.... making them affordable for people that were...well undesirable in certain communities in the 1950s because of their income and ethnicity.

So even though Los Altos pretty much got all the land it thought MV would take, they went ahead and developed all those orchards into neighborhoods that are now filled with homes selling for way over one million dollars. So much for preserving that countryside.

There was one swath of land however, that Los Altos couldn’t get….the area adjacent to my own neighborhood between El Camino and the train tracks. Los Altos wanted to cram all of its industry into that area, right up against Mountain View's oldest neighborhoods. That way, it wouldn’t have to put anything ugly in the orchards near its own existing residential neighborhoods. No big deal that it would replace the small orchards and farms that were next to Mountain View’s neighborhoods.

Regardless, Mountain View got the land instead….and developed it into a higher density neighborhood that is one of the most diverse areas of any place in the entire county. Los Altos was confined to the area south of El Camino Real. Things have come a long way since those years.... but the patterns of development set in the 1950s, and the resulting divisions in demographics that are rooted in those patterns still define the character of these two cities and the way they address certain issues.

So....it's no coincidence that Mountain View's population ended up being made up of about 45% minorities, and Los Altos', 15%. Mountain View has a median income of $40,000, Los Altos $80,000. These figures are from 1990.....the differences are problably more apparent now.

So now, in the same zip code you have the wealthiest of the wealthy on one side of El Camino Real, living in the semi-rural splendor of their nice homes lining streets without sidewalks on their quarter acre lots, and on the other side you have rows of apartment blocks where some of the poorest residents of entire county scratch out a living as the blue collar workers of the valley.

And along El Camino Real, the very street that splits this zip code in half, stand dozens of Hispanic immigrants, day workers, literally searching the street for jobs every day. Most letters to the editor regarding this issue in one city’s paper cry for the removal of these “illegals.” Letters in the other city’s paper speak of how to help them and immediately come to their defense when needed. Maybe we haven’t come quite as far from the 1950s as we’d like to think……..