Columns

California may no longer be in a drought (for now), but we still have three primary goals to make water conservation a way of life:

This is an attempt to wrap up the history of our Healdsburg Farmers Market within this column. It needs to cover my management from 1990 to 2004, followed by Mary Kelley’s 10 years of guidance bringing us up to 2014.

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.

Summertime is here and the living is what? Is it “easy” or “lazy?” We can’t quite remember the lyrics to the Gershwin song.

The other day, I learned heaps from Jamie Evans, a lively cannabis educator and an innovative cannabis cook, who will speak at the third annual Wine & Weed Symposium in August. (wine-weed.com/nc/) Evans isn’t just cooped up in a kitchen or at one of the many cannabis events she produces. She gets out and about and into fields.

Summer is upon us. We have completed our spring cleanup around the yard, made sure no standing water is present on our properties attracting mosquitos and set up our outdoor furniture. Summer also marks an important time of the year for water conservation. By using water wisely in the summer, it helps preserve our healthy watershed for the remainder of the year. Even though we received a lot of rainfall this winter, it is important to minimize water waste throughout our community.

Our nation was founded upon the argument that no government can be fair and just unless the people who are being governed remain forever devoted to liberty and virtue. Our Founding Fathers argued long and hard about this predicament. They neither trusted themselves to be infallible, nor did they put their faith in the rule of a pure democracy or a monarch. What they did instead was, they compromised. They authored a constitution designed to preserve the rights of individuals and protect against the tyranny of the majority. They inserted many levels of “checks and balances” and they structured a government with clear separations of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. They awarded every man the right to vote, but only for a representative and not a direct vote in the new congress.

It’s a cool, foggy morning and weeds are loving the fact that an extra cup of coffee will give them more time to climb.

This summer, Sonoma County Library is bringing several high-profile speakers to libraries around the county, each notable for their own creative contributions. This includes Nigel Poor, visual artist, creator, producer and host of the podcast Ear Hustle; Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold; computer scientist, composer, visual artist and author Jaron Lanier; acclaimed book critic and author Maureen Corrigan; and Firoozeh Dumas, bestselling author of the humorous book “Funny in Farsi.” These events occur all around the county at different times in June and July; a full list of upcoming speakers may be found at sclib.us/dss2019.

I  have been writing newspaper columns since the 1980s and I always try to alternate a serious one with a lighter one.