Opinion

For members of previous generations, a “wakeup call” meant having a hotel employee ring their room at a certain time to rouse them from bed. Today the term is used when we’ve been doing something self destructive for some time (perhaps without realizing it)...

Crossing Nevada is similar to my memory of crossing Texas. It goes on forever. And just when you think it has to end, it carries on. Acres of mining, solar panels and corrections. Electricity poles line the freeway for miles, as if there were...

I wish more people read books. I’ve said that many times in my life since the Internet has become near everything in people’s lives and books were placed on the back shelf, as it were, where they have become very dusty. Occasionally I’ll get...

Saturday afternoon around 4:30 I was 410 words into my column for this week when my cell phone rang. The choice to interrupt a train of thought while writing usually falls to the “let it ring and go to voicemail” protocol, but in this...

When I was a very young man, I rode around with my dad as he went from field to field down in Santa Maria. It was just about my favorite thing to do. My dad was the foreman of a company that grew flowers...

Readers will recall last week’s column left off with my first solo truck run to the other valley to gather grape rootings for transplant here on the Oasis Road development we now know as San Bernabe Vineyard. Before we head over the hills, though,...

I was under the, apparent, misunderstanding that it takes three weeks to form a habit. (Some bad habits maybe sooner, but a life-changing habit, that is!) Come to find out in a study published by the European Journal of Social Psychology (I guess they...

You knew it was going to happen. What’s that? You didn’t know. Well, let me tell you it’s true! Last week I got on my soapbox about taxes, and since it’s April, why not continue my rant.  Instead of working on helping “We the People,”...

There is something about eye contact that lets two people know that for just a split second, just a flicker of time, there has been a meeting of minds, a very brief acknowledgment of each other’s existence. I had just such an encounter last...

What is patience? In my handy College Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary, patience is described as “The act of waiting calmly for someone or something.” Now that we know what it is, can anyone tell me if you have patience? I used to have a...