POWER WAS OUT for most of Anderson Valley from 6:45 to 10:45 Wednesday morning. Given the timing and duration and a robotic message from PG&E’s outage line, locals suspected that the cause of the outage was the hyper-senstive switches/circuit breakers that PG&E has installed in the wake of their being held accountable for the most devastating wildfires in recent years. When the breakers twitch off, it takes line crews several hours to inspect the lines, find the flipped switch(es), and turn the system back on.
AV FIRE CHIEF ANDRES AVILA REPORTS: “We had one heat related medical call on Wednesday afternoon for a very remote Signal Ridge resident with a severe heat illness. The patient was flown out by CalStar-4 for medical attention. Thanks to a friend who had checked in on the patient, a callout to 911 was made for an emergency services response on the patient's behalf. Please stay hydrated and keep in touch with those who are alone and vulnerable to heat issues during this hot spell!”
THE LAST TIME I had to resort to a Have-A-Heart trap for stray cats, I snared a skunk. Which presented me with the tricky problem of freeing the troublesome little critter. Slow as skunks are in maneuvering themselves into position to spray, when they’re confined to a small space there’s no way to simply open the trap door to let them walk out. You’ll get hosed down for sure. Skunk spray, incidentally, is a unique shade of lime green and quite beautiful, as I discovered in the long process of removing a skunk from my Have-A-Heart. And my skunk had a seemingly endless reserve of his liquid armor, which he kept up in my general direction for a couple of minutes while I admired the display. Finally, I threw a tarp over the trap and maneuvered the cage with a ten-foot bamboo pole to where the trap’s gate would open on its own, and the skunk, having been turned upside down a few times, finally sauntered out to resume his cozy life under my front porch, with nightly dinners in my compost bin.
HERE'S how the Major’s father Gene Scaramella got to school as an 8-year-old in Gualala circa 1916: “In the wintertime when the Gualala River was in flood stage my brother Charley and I would have to take a boat to cross it to go to school and then cross it again when we came back. Each time we had to put the boat in several hundred yards upstream because as we rode it across it would float downstream. If we wanted to land at point A we would have to set the boat in about 200 yards upstream on the opposite bank and row and then finally get across to Point A. In the evening on the way home we would reverse the procedure. It was about four miles to the one-room schoolhouse each way.”
BOONVILLE FAIR MANAGER JIM BROWN:
Come Celebrate "100 YEARS of the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show"
Entries are open.
If you're still old school paper entry those are due August 12th - If you need entry forms Call the Office we can help you out.
Online Entries Close Midnight August 30th
All Livestock entries Close September 2nd
Please check the exhibitor guide book for exact dates.
mendocountyfair.com
THE ANNUAL BOONVILLE FAIR is a county fair although Boonville people have always had an exclusive lock on the board because the fair started in Boonville long before the state took it over. (The photos of the original fairgrounds compared to the architecture of the present fairgrounds are a study in the devolution of architecture generally.)
THE BOONVILLE PEOPLE on the Fair Board have as their first priority keeping people they don't like out of Fair business and off the Fair's board of directors. The people they don't like comprise, at a conservative estimate, 92% of the current population of Mendocino County, hence the ongoing top-security sequestration of the Fairgrounds as other communities in the state with fairgrounds in the center of their towns devote their grounds to the public as public parks, town squares, public space.
IF OUR top security fairgrounds were available to any old body, the thinking goes, all kinds of undesirables would be roaming the Fairgrounds like they owned the place, which they do, of course, because it's public property.
THE FAIR BOARD and the Farm Bureau are interchangeable entities, intellectually speaking. One year, the local branch of the Farm Bureau used the Fair to distribute an unsigned, unattributed think piece that, boiled down, said the industrial, chemically-dependent, water-thieving, Mexican- exploiting wine industry is also farming, and seeing as how the hippies have already destroyed logging now they want to kill off cows and horses and do a lot of other crazy communist stuff like a county grading ordinance.
VICKI WHITEHEAD (facebook): There has been a request for a multi AV reunion at the fair this year. We are open to suggestions as the planning process is in the early stages. We’re looking at the years 1974 to 1984 with the possibility of having dinner at one of our local restaurants. Everyone paying for their own meal. If this interests you, or you have other suggestions, please respond to this post. We want to get a headcount of interested participants. Go panthers. Sorry the request was for breakfast not dinner. The heat must be getting to me.
SUNDAY'S CHRON ran a NorCal campground guide which, natch, included Hendy Woods: “We could wax endlessly about Hendy Woods prime location in Anderson Valley where vineyards line the highway, tasting rooms are casual, and the sweet town of Boonville and rugged Mendocino Coast are just down the road…”
“SWEET TOWN OF BOONVILLE”? We've been called a lot of things, but never “sweet,” a designation that would have provoked violence in the Boonville of yesteryear.
Be First to Comment