Columns

I love genealogy and family stories. There’s something amazing to me about how traits and characteristics get carried down, generation after generation, and in ties we have to the past. I look like my mother, think like my father and am built like my paternal grandmother.

Most of this month the Sun will be in the earth sign Taurus, perhaps the most methodical and conservative of the signs. However, there will also be significant energy moving through fire signs, which suggests this could be a time of creative action. Mercury,...

We don’t understand all the fuss about distance learning during the pandemic where almost all the schools are forced to remain closed. We should be taking advantage of this unfortunate viral invasion and start making all these school closings permanent. We don’t need schools any more.

Here in the newsroom at Sonoma West Publishers we often joke, in that black way that most journalists have, about our “extensive staff.” By which we mean each of our four newspapers has a single editor, who is responsible for not only all the management-type stuff, but we also write the majority of the articles and take the majority of photos you see in your paper every week.

We are inviting our readers to partake in a short quiz about America as we continue to distill the many outcomes and significances of last week’s elections. To honor the recently deceased TV game show host Alex Trebek, we are patterning the quiz after the Jeopardy format by listing a series of answers that need to be matched with the correct question. (Example: Donald Trump. Who was the 45th president of the United States?)

The smoke has cleared from the skies overhead but tons of ashes still remain where homes and whole neighborhoods once stood just two weeks ago before the northern California wildfires struck on Oct. 8. The skies may be clear, but our futures are not. Our county just suffered an historic natural disaster, the most destructive wildfire ever in California. We are facing questions and impacts that no one has ever been challenged with before.

As the months pass by, all of our collective writing addressing our anxiety and tribulations around the fires, smoke, election, etc., seems increasingly necessary. Even since I penned last month's column, we have had another major wildfire and the collective anxiety around the election has become yet more intense.