In the season when hearts grow tender and hopes seem brighter, there is always room for a miracle, even one wrapped in fur and tucked beneath the fragrant boughs of a Christmas tree. Such a miracle came to light in the rolling hills of Valley Center, where December breezes carried the mingling scents of pine needles and chimney smoke. Amid this tableau of holiday cheer,…
We named him Squirt – not because he was the smallest of the 16 cuttlefish in the pool, but because anyone with the audacity to scoop him into a separate tank to study him was likely to get soaked. Squirt had notoriously accurate aim. As a comparative psychologist, I’m used to assaults from my experimental subjects. I’ve been stung by bees, pinched by crayfish and…
For many a year, Karen Carlson, a steadfast farmer and rancher in the rolling hills of Ramona, has tilled the soil and tended her groves with an unyielding spirit. Now, she’s setting her sights on something larger than her own five-acre spread. With a heart as big as the valley itself, she’s rallying to breathe new life into the California State Grange and rekindle the…
Who was it, you, to whom Santa brought a very supercalifragilisticexpialidocious holiday bounty down the chimney on Christmas Eve, 2015? Or was it a discarded scrap sitting amiably in an unattended drawer somewhere along the Highway 78 corridor around the Great Grapevine? Only the Shadow, possibly Santa, Mary Poppins and state lottery officials knew. And they were not telling. It was all over but the…
Christmas and New Year’s are days of celebration in many parts of the world when people gather with family and friends. One thing many typically don’t celebrate on those days is a birthday. That’s because Dec. 25 is the least popular day in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand to give birth. In England, Wales and Ireland, it’s the second-least popular, behind Dec. 26, when…
No matter what holiday you honor in your home, we decorate our homes to please ourselves and to welcome family and friends during the holidays. Although this time of year seems to be hectic for most of us, transforming our homes with dazzling decorations for the tree, sprucing up the mantel (no pun intended), setting a new, inventive holiday table scape, or hanging an exquisite…
Today I agreed to donate my brain to medical science. (I’ll pause here to allow regular readers of my published opinion pieces to stop laughing.) Twenty-two years ago, after an afternoon of heavy yard work, I reached for a cold beer and sat down to rest. As I brought the bottle up to my mouth I couldn’t keep my hand from shaking. I had to…
The fog, thick and unrelenting, crept from the coast to the valleys early Saturday morning, clinging to the ground like a conspiracy no one could escape. Visibility dropped to a quarter mile or less, stranding thousands of would-be flyers at San Diego International Airport, their plans grounded by a phenomenon as indifferent as it was inevitable. The dense fog advisory was supposed to lift by…
The sun had barely risen, casting a pale, hesitant light over a land that seemed unsure of itself, when the news came down like a hammer on an old anvil. The announcement wasn’t made with fanfare, nor with the solemnity one might expect from something so grave. No, it was delivered with the cold efficiency of machinery, as if humanity were an afterthought in the…
Well, folks, the holidays are upon us, and that means two things for Southern Californians: traffic jams and more traffic jams. Now, you might think the airports would be the worst of it, but no, sir, most of y’all will be playing bumper cars on the freeways. A record-breaking 8.7 million of you are set to hit the road over the next 12 days. And…