Columns

Q) My printer was very old and needed to be replaced, so I went to Best Buy and bought an all-in-one printer. The young man demonstrated it in the store and I liked the quality of the text and the photos that he printed. I brought it home and a neighbor helped me set it up. But it doesn’t work at all. What did we do wrong?

100 years ago – October 3, 1918

Newsroom Notebook is a new monthly column written by one of our staff members.

Twenty years ago, December 1999, I asked my fellow physicians in Healdsburg what they thought were the major medical advances of the twentieth century. Their responses were extensively covered in the Healdsburg Tribune.

If you drive on Arata, you’ve probably noticed the field full of chickens. They are in a smaller, fenced pen that is rotated to different spots, and when they are near the road you can see them up close, wandering around, pecking at food and doing other chicken things. I always look for the big off-white dog that guards them—sometimes while dozing in the sun or in the shade, depending on the time of year—and it makes me happy to live in a place where we can enjoy such bucolic scenes.

It seems a good bet that if there is a chicken in residence anywhere where there has been a culture of reading children’s literature out loud, the name Henny-Penny is naturally a popular choice for that fowl. Oddly, it isn’t true for the other names in this old English Folk Tale. When was the last time you heard somebody call the Thanksgiving bird, “Turkey-lurkey”? Or how about “Goosey-poosey” and “Ducky-daddles”?

Pumpkins

Last weekend, I went to the hair salon to get some highlights. The guy that colors my hair is fabulous, in his early 30s, really sweet. We were gabbing about life, how my teens are liking their new school and our gossip drifted to the topic of social media. He uses it for his business, a necessity we all know in order compete and thrive professionally. And then the conversation turned personal. We joked around about how old we are and feel when it comes to comparing the world now and the world 20 years ago. And then he asked me a very interesting question.

Bud break is a harbinger of spring’s warming. It’s been rainy and cold the last couple of months. Now that the sun is rising earlier and days are getting longer, Mother Nature is responding. Bud break occurs when warmth and sun encourage nutrients to...