Columns

Are you ready for some football? The NFL television season opened last weekend, and the Friday Night Lights have been flipped on at many (but not all) local high school fields. All across America the sights and sounds of these pigskin rituals are marking the changing of seasons from carefree summer to earnest autumn.

Cows, pecans and oil: that’s what put food on the table when I was a child. That’s what placed basketball shoes on my feet as a youth, and that’s also what helped purchase my first car.

A few weekends ago I went antique shopping with my teen daughter and my mom. It’s something the three of us really enjoy doing together. Knick knacks of the past are cooler, better crafted and remind me of good memories and simpler times. Things just happen to find us, forgotten items, dusty and old that seem to shout “remember me, bring me home.”

Rather than placing priority on a lot of internal programs and activities, members of the Shiloh Neighborhood Church share a mission that involves reaching out to volunteer and serve those in the community in keeping with the greatest Bible commandment found in Mark 12:30-31 – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Traditionally, each step of the human water cycle — how we acquire, treat, use, treat again and dispose of the water, was dealt with as discrete, isolated activities. Separate departments, divisions and districts were created to handle each of these isolated activities.

It’s a big job, community journalism. It doesn’t pay well; there are long hours and holiday work. For every uplifting story we write about sacrifice, accomplishment and joy, there’s another one about betrayal, conflict and disappointment.

100 years ago – September 5, 1918

At the Aug, 20 Healdsburg City Council meeting, the council tackled the question of how many hotel rooms should be allowed around the Plaza within the Plaza Retail District, how many hotel rooms should be allowed in the Downtown Commercial District and whether the city should require all new hotels to provide affordable housing as part of any new project.

Approaching the one-year mark since the devastating October fires, I am practicing gratitude. Only last week did I have the heart to venture back to Deer Trail Road.

Last week our local newspapers made big news with a write-up in The New York Times. The article covered our new model for small newspapers to become community-owned with a reader-powered newsroom and dozens of new individual investors.