Opinion

“Hey honey, would you come into the kitchen?” This was how I was greeted as my bride was standing there with a cup of the very best coffee I have ever sipped. But there was someone else standing next to her that was unexpected....

If you have read any of my scribbling over time, you know I’m a lifelong conservative. I don’t know exactly when I discovered this. Although I can’t remember much about politics until my platoon sergeant and I were sitting on the hood of a...

The other day I had invited one of my best friends to come down from Oregon to have lunch and just catch up. Gordon has a son that lives off the grid up in Oregon, and so he spends a lot of time up...

At the present moment I am, to put it poetically, “far from the madding crowd,” I don’t even know who is headed to the World Series as “seeking the sounds of silence”; practically speaking, I am a ways up the Arroyo Seco Canyon sans...

I have notes scribbled on scraps of paper scattered about my work area, in pockets and various other places I will no doubt discover after this goes to print. But I have enough here for a short column to cap off another year in...

Do you have a “smart phone?” I’m not sure what makes a smart phone or a dumb phone, but I’m pretty sure I got the dumb one. I mean, I see folks walking around all day looking at their phones, and if the phones...

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” I don’t recall whose words those are, if I...

Local column by Joanne Banuelos

To the Editor: During the summer of 2020, many protests for racial justice and civil rights erupted all over the country. Many of these protests were an ongoing series of street demonstrations calling out police brutality and racism that tragically highlighted the murder of George...

My wife is pretty much the center of my life. She is constantly giving me gifts of items that I may have mentioned in a casual conversation weeks or even months ago. Oftentimes it is a great surprise and something that I would treasure...