WELL, I spent two weeks on the East Coast (more in a moment) and arrived back at SFO around 1 a.m. Sunday, with two kids in tow and enough gear to outfit General Sherman's army, and learned that all of the luggage cart dispensers in the international terminal, where Independence Air flights land, were broken.

You see, you have to have three bucks, in singles, to get a cart, and all of those infuriating dollar bill-sucking slots were jammed and wouldn't take bills, and of course it was 1 a.m. Sunday and nobody in airport maintenance was around, but it wouldn't matter anyway, because a private vendor operates the damn concession. (That, Kandace Bender at the airport told me, is why you have to pay $3 in the first place: It's a private concession. That's also why the airport can't use an honor system that wouldn't involve those consistently malfunctioning money-collection units.)

And then I got back to my house, around 2 a.m., to learn that a new neighbor in nice, friendly Bernal Heights had called the cops and had my car towed and impounded. Welcome home.

But there is something comforting about returning to San Francisco from the East. We were out on Cape Cod for a week, visiting friends, and there's a sense of snobbery in the Eastern enclaves that operates on a level beyond the worst of California. I think it's a feeling of inherited entitlement, of disdain for anyone who isn't quite up to Brahmin standards. We saw it in a restaurant in Falmouth, when my kids were running around looking at the mounted fish on the walls and laughing (which is what kids do in restaurants that have fish on the walls) and an icy woman at the next table gave me the most vicious children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard-you-dirty-hippie-rabble look that I've ever encountered.

So it's good to be home.

While I was gone, three key unions split with the AFL-CIO. My mother, the United Auto Workers District 65 union organizer, thinks it was a horrible mistake; a lot of my friends, who are close to Andy Stern's Service Employees International Union, think it was the right move. David Bacon, one of the nation's top labor reporters (and host of a KPFA labor show) is skeptical – and he sorts it all out for you on page 18.

Tim Redmond