Columns

What is the Roodat?

Sanitation a basic need

We’re going to the park today. Let’s go to the zoo! Spring break, we’ll take a drive to Disneyland. How about Sunday at Golden Gate Park?

We have seen an inspiring outpouring of support, compassion and selflessness  these past few weeks. We have also witnessed price gouging, looting and lightening-quick litigious trigger fingers.

In my last column I wrote about how I was responding to stress by sewing. I guess the current totals can attest to my method being a) soothing, b) proactive, and c) extremely productive: in four weeks I have started and completed one quilt (for a Christmas present), two dog blankets, two flannel comfort blankets for teens who lost their homes — and started another two — and I’m halfway through another comfort quilt for a friend who lost her home. I’m in rhythms of cutting, pinning, sewing, and it’s incredibly meditative.

Last month I wrote my column a week before our beautiful county went up in flames. I went on about fall and pumpkins, excited about the festival, craft market and the upcoming remainder of the season. Little could any of us have known what Mother Nature had in store for us. I know many suffered losses, great and small, and my heart goes out to all who were impacted. This was a tragedy like no other in our history, and will affect us for a long time to come.

In 1966 the movie “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming,” was filmed along the local Mendocino-Sonoma coast. In the plot, a lone enemy submarine crashes offshore, igniting a runaway rumor chain that almost leads to a machine gun battle, hostage taking and a U.S. Air Force strike. We can only imagine that if the players in the film all had Facebook and Twitter accounts how much faster the rumors of attack would have flown and how World War III might not have been avoidable.

Thanks from Courtney’s

Windsor wonder twins protect Wine Country by day, distill spirits by night

100 years ago – November 1, 1917