“This country ain’t big enough for the two of us. So I’m giving you ’til sundown to get out of town.” ~ The Virginian

The Great Newt Commute is what happens on the way to the Great Newt Party. From the first winter rains through early spring, California Newts migrate from their summer homes to their winter breeding grounds — to ponds and streams where they mate and lay eggs before trundling back up the hills and into burrows
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We used to live down the road from a lightbulb store called “Lightbulbs Unlimited.” In Los Angeles. The shop had an illuminated sign. Naturally, of course . . . it was a lightbulb store. But for seven years, the shopkeepers never replaced the dead bulbs in their sign.
So for the entire time we lived in
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Excerpted from Herb Caen’s What Is San Francisco?
“It’s the magic towers of a steel fairyland — the beacon atop the proud Mark, the red, thermometer-like cap of the Drake, the sturdy, four-square crest of Mother Russ, the sudden, blunt end of Coit Tower — that make up the minarets of a metropolis . . .”

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Until this week, I didn’t know how much gratitude I owed Mr. Hulet Hornbeck. The sign below marks the head of a commemorative trail at Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline — a park in the vast and lovely East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD).
When Hornbeck began his tenure as Chief of Land Acquisition for EBRPD
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Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve isn’t haunted, but it’s a park grown upon the ghosts of California’s history.
In terms of our earliest history, the spirit of the Ohlone and Miwok people still permeates the land. When I stand on our remaining wild hilltops, I look to the expanse of tract development over what, by
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I almost expected Man-Thing to come crawling out of the mud this morning. The humidity evoked spirits of the bayou: moss, mosquitos, mint juleps. The only time California resembles a swamp is in the wake of a tropical storm, the same wake which pummeled us with record rains a few days ago.
We did about four-miles
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