July 1, 2026
by Dr. Plastic Picker
The house is quiet this morning. It’s 5:15am and its Wednesday. I have about 2 hours to finalize a presentation for our pediatrician HMO group today. I finished it, but it needs to be personalized and pizazzed up! My sister-in-law, one of three, just left on a flight to attend to her family and mothering. It’s been a busy and family-filled 2 months since our youngest was admitted to Harvard and finished with graduation and all the celebratory things our family went through to celebrate. It was honestly exhausting. It was much needed, but for me it completely tapped out my social battery. It was all too much. Too much emotion. Too many family dynamics. Too much rebalancing and reshuffling. There were too many emotions and relationship dynamics. At some points, I really just wanted to go to work where I don’t have to feel and I don’t have to be intertwined with two very close and two very intense family groups. But OMG it’s finally over. I’m proud of our youngest, but she’s off to just go to college and live her life. She has goals and ambitions, and she’ll be at the right place to try to achieve them.
As for me! I want to tell you about our H3SD stickers!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Aren’t they fantastic???!!!! My climate collaborator Dr. Luis Castellanos has three very talented sons, and their oldest designed the stickers!!!! It was part of his community service hours for school and I got to sign off on his hours. We are so grateful for his design. Then I saw on Instagram that you can order stickers so I ordered stickers and used a coupon! I tried to get the best price but honestly it was a really good price! $100 for 200 stickers. I may order more. I have to spend down about $800 from our H3SD 2025 budget, so I need to order some AAP-CA3 Extreme Heat and Youth Sports Flyers and buy some more laynards and name cards for the summit. All the labor is volunteer, so that is why we are so cost-effective in our budget!
H3SD has been such a great training ground for our entire region. It’s so fun! Pretty much we make it fun and FREE and community oriented. Only people who want to come, show up. And we try to save the earth together and help our community become more resilient to global heating. This year has been so interesting meeting with our planning committee, and thinking together in terms of sessions. That we all fundamentally like each other and respect each other, and bring what we can to this great collaboration – makes it all flow. I spent so much time yesterday working with our Speaker Coordinator Wooch Kim in organizing the speaker schedules, and updating the spreadsheet that is there for everyone. We applied for HMO CME credit as well, and are finishing up that process.
But the stickers are just an example of the opportunities H3SD provides to our community. Speakers from all over San Diego from different academic institutions converge on this Saturday in mid-August. We always do it right before UC Berkeley starts since our oldest is now a senior at UC Berkeley. There are the four conference planning leads, there are the speaker coordinators, there are the tech team, and there are the UCSD AIP students who help with things. There are the opportunities for the medical students, to be part of the EJ Youth panel and moderating the sessions. There are the poster sessions where you can do a test drive of any research or advocacy posters one might have worked on. We have all the talks and just getting to be at the beautiful space at UC San Diego School of Medicine – I think means a lot to everyone.
So anyway, just wanted to show everyone the beautiful stickers that Luis and Lizette’s son designed! I ordered them! And then helped find funding from the San Diego Foundation to put the entire thing on.
The only way to get a sticker is to come to the H3SD summit! So come help us address global heating and human health in San Diego on August 15! https://sdpediatriciansforcleanair.com/h3sd-san-diego-heat-and-human-health-summit-resources
Oh, we have to udpate the flyer on the website and also the link to the youtube channel. I’ll let our webmaster know! Shogo is amazing!