************************ I wrote this essay a few years ago when I started to realize that wildfires were going to become a norm every fall in California. I saw the PBS documentary, “Leave It To Beavers” when it came out and I’ve been obsessed with getting the word out about how much they could help to […]
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A few weeks ago my friend Andrea called to tell me about her crow. She could see him from her bedroom window. He was living in her neighbor’s yard. He was hopping up and down and flapping his wings but was unable to take flight. “I think it’s okay.” She told me. “He’s surrounded by […]
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During the pandemic shut down I have hardly seen any pigeons. With all the restaurants and bars closed and everyone else sheltering in place there is no longer a free and easy food source where they can manically gather, gobbling up every crumb. I don’t see them fighting each other over every bean and grain […]
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Every California surfer lives for October. The bigger swells start to roll in, the weather is beautiful, offshore winds arrive holding up each peak perfectly and summer crowds go home. But for the past few years October has become a fiery hellscape for all Californians as every year we wake up one morning smelling smoke […]
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I went to move my truck for street cleaning this morning a little before nine. In my peripheral vision I saw what seemed to be a homeless lady that was maybe a little bit nutty, walking towards me in a pretty rose colored short bathrobe and white slippers. Well those aren’t going to stay clean […]
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I’ve been sucking it up and just getting on with things all week while I recover from ear surgery and it reminded me of a day where I was horrible and mean and terrible to Britt and demanded that he suck it up. Years ago we went on an early season snowboard trip. The mountain […]
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So tomorrow tiny magical elves will sneak into my ear canal and chip away all the bone growth that has formed because I’ve surfed in cold water for 30 years. JK, actually it will be Dr. Gupta but it seems way less scary to just think I’m going to take a nap and magical elves […]
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I walked by an inspiring blackbird in a parking lot the other day. His foot was perfectly severed and had healed back cleanly, with no clumpy scar left over so his leg looked like a piece of dry spaghetti, except it was black. And he didn’t care at all. He was just hopping around in […]
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On New Year’s Day, my husband Britt and I drove our dogs out to San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. We parked next to a guy that was about to go surf the jumbly, stormy waves. Out of the back of his truck he pulled out an orange soft top board. Britt and I exchanged eye rolls. […]
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I recently watched the 2013 Academy Award winning documentary, “Searching For Sugar Man”, about an amazing musician named Rodriguez, that was discovered in the late sixties in Detroit and released a couple of albums in the early seventies. His music is played throughout the movie and I found it to be beautiful and gritty. Both […]
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I’ve been feeling kind of, “Whah! Poor me!” lately. Will I ever get to where I want to be professionally? Is anybody out there who cares? Maybe it’s the political situation that is seeping into me and bumming me out. The entire shutdown of the US government is not reassuring. Or it’s last week’s head […]
Read more »A couple of years ago, outside of my apartment, a pigeon flew past me frantically flapping his wings but barely being able to fly higher than about my shoulder. A pink plastic bag was attached to his foot. With each attempt to fly, just as he was becoming airborne, the bag would fill with air […]
Read more »I woke up to an orange sky and a heavy brown haze hanging over the city. Smoke from a fire a few hundred miles away was pressing down on San Francisco. For the second year in a row I dawned my dust mask every time I left the house and a coating of ash settled […]
Read more »Last week a couple of American cities were wiped out from a giant hurricane. The people in Florida are still in desperate need of help so please visit AmericanRedCross.org if you’d like to help. I watched Hurricane Michael on TV as it was coming to shore. It pulled sheets of steel off of gymnasiums, uprooted […]
Read more »I took a walk early one morning in a nice neighborhood up the hill from mine. Half way through, I came upon two crows eating a rat. Of course I was totally grossed out but also worried because maybe the rat had been poisoned.
Read more »Two weeks before my wedding day I went surfing at Montara Beach. I came up under my board on my first wave and sliced my forehead open with my surfboard’s fin. It didn’t feel bad but blood began pouring into my eyes. I climbed back up the sandy path in between the cliffs and I […]
Read more »I used to take care of a lonely cockatoo named Buddy. His home was a greenhouse in the backyard of his owner’s house that was rarely there. I was supposed to clean his glass house and feed him when Tony, the owner, was out of town. At first I was terrified of the big bird […]
Read more »Fact: Senior dogs are the best dogs. They know the routine, how to communicate, how to act. They’re polite, gentle, disciplined and calm. It seems like they can read your mind, they’re always prepared for your every move. They don’t bound and spring through the world anymore, but who cares? Neither do older humans. […]
Read more »So it turns out that if you have a closed plastic bag of Hershey chocolate minis in a small compartment at the bottom of an 80 pound suitcase full of craft supplies locked in the camper shell of your truck in Tahoe, a bear will know. Wandering by, late at night, he will smell chocolate, […]
Read more »I finally figured out this spring how to successfully launch a white fly eating brigade of ladybugs successfully into my garden. Every year I used to try to use ladybugs to kill bugs but it was never effective. Then a nice gal at my local hardware store gave me these tips and they worked! Here […]
Read more »Because my dog ReRe is an innovative go getter she made the decision early on that when she has to poop at the beach it’s best to wade knee deep into the ocean and let the waves immediately dissolve and wash away any evidence of it. This makes people furious. They like to lecture me […]
Read more »Last week there was a break in the incessant wind and fog of spring on the coast. The sun came out and the surf calmed down at my favorite beach. It was a Tuesday so the beach was empty. The dogs and I were the only ones that saw the big grey whale surface just […]
Read more »***I am not a doctor! This is not medical advice, just my personal life experience! Please just go to a doctor, thanks!*** ___________________________________________________________________________ I didn’t have health insurance for about twelve years. During this time I tried to eat right, exercise and prayed I wouldn’t get into an accident. I became really good […]
Read more »Britt and I were enjoying one of the last warm days of fall, sitting in the water at Ocean Beach, waiting for a wave, when we saw it. At first we thought it was a rogue local storm raining down in the water south of us. But it was moving and reshaping itself unlike any […]
Read more »I recently witnessed the greatest moment of work rebellion ever. You know when you’re at work and you’re like, “No one’s the boss of me. You may have my physical body for the next 8 hours, but you can’t have my mind.” ? It was basically that sentiment being acted out with a six wheel […]
Read more »I’ve had a dream of growing grass in my mud pit of a backyard ever since I got my big, glorious dog Jasmine. Her two favorite things to do are relaxing and luxuriating and relaxing and luxuriating on grass. So this September I dug out all the useless clay soil around my patio and replaced […]
Read more »One morning last year, I got up before dawn to move my truck so I wouldn’t get a street cleaning ticket. I swung the door open and gasped. There he was, my neighbor’s raccoon. She had told me recently that there was a family of them living under her house. He was sitting on my […]
Read more »I was waiting at a stop light one afternoon when a big hawk dropped out of the sky in front of my windshield. He snatched a pigeon out of mid air and landed with it on the roof of a car next to me. The light turned green and I drove away still watching the […]
Read more »Sometimes I slip down the social media rabbit hole, swiping through one successful and amazing artist or designer after another. I scroll through them all crying out, “Why them? Why not me? Why are they so lucky and successful and I’m not?” Then my honest self, my adult self, answers my question. “Well Sunde, maybe […]
Read more »An Open Letter: Dear City of Pacifica, I was wondering if you could please not do an extra long and louder than usual emergency alarm test siren the day after the President threatens earth with nuclear war in a snarky tweet. I have experienced your weekly emergency siren test many times over the […]
Read more »Pigeons enjoy eating vomit here. Especially drunk, Saturday night burrito barf. (It’s the beans!) Save
Read more »Surfing for the Resistance The night President Pussgrab McGrifter was voted into office I threw up my chicken sandwich and went for a long, panic stricken walk. I cried for days and then became pissed off and outraged and wandered around talking to my TV and Twitter feed. Then my outrage evolved into purpose and […]
Read more »Well, as usual Saill’s been up to interesting stuff on her ranch like creating watering systems for her trees, watching cows and saving democracy with her voting research which you can see here: www.votesleuth.org. But the funnest thing she’s been up to is she adopted Frankie from the Petaluma Animal Shelter! He is the cutest, […]
Read more »Let’s check in with Saill and see what she’s up to out on her ranch in Petaluma. Since I’ve written about her last there’s been a lot of circle of life stuff happening. Her amazing cat that survived a coyote attack did not survive crossing the road. Saill was devastated and in her grief went […]
Read more »We have a whole selection of kooky coloring books! Our newest is Costumed Cats, A coloring collection of great cats in history! Color in and read about great cats in history like Napoleon Bonacat, Jackie Robinscat, Harricat Tubman and many more. Color in nature and animals in our coloring book, From the Sea to the […]
Read more »I’ve been so into painting lately so I can get my ideas out quickly and have time to do my Sunde White Industries stuff. After meeting my sister’s chickens, I just think they’re really funny and weird and cool painting subjects. I’ve done two of these Chicken Conversations. www.sundewhiteindustries.com #chickens #chickenart
Read more »I have a lot of ideas of I want to get out of my sketch book but I don’t always have a lot of time to do anything other than my greeting cards and coloring books which are much more detailed. But last year I just felt like painting and I’m excited about it because […]
Read more »Can a human please go to Petaluma and visit my sister? At this very moment she is putting together cow shaming signs for each and every one of these cows, especially the black one, Bossy. Feverishly constructing clear, grammatically correct sentences, on cardboard she recycled from a refrigerator box that she scavenged from the behind […]
Read more »When we last left Saill she was rescuing a cat which miraculously turned out to probably be the long, lost brother of her first cat, Maxwell. When I checked in with her last week she was incubating eggs in an incubator she found on line. She thought the chicks had died because it had been […]
Read more »We’re back from Tahoe and Jasmine ( who has inspired quite a few of my cards with her cuteness) is still sleeping this hike off. Her big body and skinny little legs just aren’t a good fit for deep snow. She got up to the top but the hike back down proved too much for […]
Read more »I know the snow is nicknamed “Sierra Cement” here but I can’t help it, I love Tahoe! There are no other views like it, standing on top of a mountain with the view of the lake.
Read more »www.www.sundewhiteindustries.com/ Our Bay Area summer is finally here. Well, it was at the begining of the week. 90 degrees in the city! So of course, for this rare occassion, I gave myself a staycation and canceled all of my responsibilities from Monday to Wednesday and just surfed the whole time. The first spot I surfed […]
Read more »I found this sparrow in my backyard. It had been injured by a cat and was totally freaked out. I put it in a box and brought it to Wild Care in San Rafael. This place is so amazing. They’ll take any injured animal no matter how small or big. People should stop in there […]
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