Columns

Citrus time of year

Of all years, this would be a good one for us to find, resurrect and share as many Christmas and holiday season miracles as we can. Together, we have the power to make true miracles happen. We need both faith and determination but we can brighten this holiday season with practical acts of giving, sharing, being joyful and guarding our health.

“Real Newspapers, Real News” is the theme of this year’s National Newspaper Week (Oct. 1-7.) Indeed, there’s always been lots of “real” at newspapers. Real stories, real journalism, real work, real deadlines, real honesty, real facts, real changes and now, real threats.

100 years ago – September 26, 1918

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Season Greetings

All across America teachers are going on or threatening to go on strike and it disgusts me. It disgusts me that this is necessary; next to a parent or a preacher, who has more influence on our children, and our future, than a teacher? Americans...

My beloved van is on its last legs, so Matt and I have been looking at possible replacement vehicles. We’ve narrowed it down to two makes and models, so we went down to test drive one of the contenders at Car Max in Santa Rosa. The car was nice, with many of the features we’re looking for… but it was a really, really weird dark brown. Luckily we’re in a nice position of not NEEDING a car, and we can keep looking, because I am not at ALL partial to brown, and by that I mean I hated it.

Sonoma County’s COVID-19 case data shows a climbing line upward, marking hundreds of new positive cases each week and a quadrupling of deaths in just the last month. All predictions are for this line to keep moving upward across the page to the right where it might meet up with a “second wave” of coronavirus infections just when flu season gets here in a few months.

This is the Memorial Day that will not be happening. But most of what Memorial Day is about is words: words that are spoken at gravesites and written words read from time-honored tributes to America’s fallen heroes. For this year, in lieu of graveside...

To many of us, especially to those now marching in our streets in protest over police brutality, this feels like a moment of inflection, when our community and entire nation makes a decisive change of direction and policy. These are very rare and hard-won...