BOONVILLE'S wonderful Aquarelle restaurant is getting ready to re-open as Chef Christina fires up her kitchen just in time for Valentine's Day.
DOWN THE ROAD in Navarro at Fort Floodgate, the unique remodel of what started out life as the Avery's Floodgate Store, a new restaurant called the Bewildered Pig is up and running. Locals are raving about it, but everyone knows you can't get a bad meal in the Anderson Valley.
ALSO noted next door to Fort Floodgate there's a new business called At The Towns End — Design Consult Create. Good wishes to alla them.
SEVERAL BAD mudslides occurred during the recent rains, including a large one on Indian Creek. Most of the places the mud slid, it slid because land movers left freshly bulldozed hillsides exposed, and most of us know that cutting edge Mendocino County is the only county in the state without a commonsense grading ordinance.
ANON ASKS: "When hiking up Peachland Road, I noticed at the vineyard there where a number of sluffs on the hillside and dirt going down in the ditches on the road. How many more are up there that we can't see? Who owns this?"
OFF THE TOP, we know that Kendall Jackson bought 160 acres or so up Peachland. It was the property that Napa wine mogul William Hill, operating as Premier Pacific Vineyards, planted after he bought it from Jared Carter, the Ukiah attorney.
WE'LL TAKE a look and reveal the culprits. As we've just said, this is what happens when there's no grading ordinance.
TOM CRONQUIST'S property next door to Pic 'N Pay was partially denuded Monday of trees planted, what, forty years ago? I remember the late Wayne McGimpsey telling Tom, "Those trees you just planted will never grow there." Forty years later they were fifty footers.
REPORTS DRIFTING OUT of the Mendocino High School gym a week ago identify the Mendo jv coach who shoved the ref as Warren Lewis, which is wayyyyyyyy over the line but, as old timers may recall, rather in the tradition of the legendary Mendo coach, the late Jim Mastin. Mastin was kicked clear out of the gym a couple of times but even he, in full rage, never laid hands on a ref. Myself, I've never even heard of a jv coach getting angry about anything.
A MENDO PERSON says Boonville beat Mendo in the Mendo gym because of "twenty bleeping turnovers and really bad clock management by Coach Young. Mendo had 24 turnovers the first league encounter with AV and another 20 Tuesday night, their two highest turnover totals of the season. And for some reason Mendo coach Young kept Connor Woods, who had a great game against AV the last league game and was eligible to play, but Young sat him for some unknown reason."
MENDO FAN continues: "JV coach Warren Lewis went off on the ref after a foul was called on Mendo with one second left. It was a foul in my eyes, though. Some AV fans went to the refs at halftime to complain they were calling a piss poor game, and AV fans were cat-calling the refs, 'Why don't you retire" to one during the game.' All in all, par for the course for a Mendo - AV game."
MEANWHILE, the Boonville Panthers sail on. Varsity Boys Basketball — 9-0 league; 16-5 overall.
Their last two games have been squeakers: a 21-point fourth-quarter effort overtook Mendo 57-55 on Feb 2; and three days later the male-type Panthers survived a 39-point second-half surge by Round Valley in the Covelo gym to hold on for a nerve-wracking, 66-62 victory. Tuesday night, and too late for this week's paper, the Panthers took on Laytonville in the Boonville gym.
JADE PAGET-SEEKINS, a young woman with a positively elderly knowledge of local botany, may also be a latter-day incarnation of The Valley's Blanche Brown, the self-trained local genius and founder of our highly regarded annual Wildflower Show. Ms. Paget-Seekins writes:
"I'm working on letting people know about the Botany/Plant Identification class I'm going to be teaching through the adult school in Boonville.
Basic Botany and Plant ID a beginning class open to all levels
Anderson Valley Adult School, in the Rancheria Classroom (by bus barn) 8 Tuesday evenings from 6-9 pm February 23 - April 12, 2016, plus a Saturday field trip on April 9. This class will start with some basics of botany and plant classification, then discuss how to identify many native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers, as well as which garden plants are related to each other and to wild plants. Sliding scale $50 to $100 for all 9 sessions."
MS. PAGET-SEEKINS taught plant ID labs for 6 semesters as a graduate student at Humboldt State, and this is her third year teaching this class here. For more information contact her at sagejade@gmail.com or 895-3354.
THE ANDERSON VALLEY SCHOOL BOARD MEETING School Board Meeting for February will take place on Thursday, February 11th, 7pm in the High School Cafeteria. There is an opening for a new board member which must be filled soon, so anyone interested in being on the board is encouraged to attend. There are several new members on the board already and it is energetically working to improve school functioning. All citizens of the Valley are always welcomed to the meetings.
IS WINTER OVER? The National Weather Service's Long-Term Climate Outlook for the first three months of 2016 predicts "below-median precipitation... for the Pacific Northwest, which includes us, where the week began Sunday with temps in the 70s and rising.
UP ON THE ROOF. Three local high school girls, unaware that their beloved community newspaper never sleeps, climbed up on the roof outside our office window early Saturday night where they downed wine coolers (or whatever sweetened booze our nation's future guzzles these days) and giggled for nearly an hour. There were occasional shouts of "I don't have any more!" and "That's all I have!" When the trio of drunken maidens belatedly realized that an elderly reporter was laboring at his work station just inside the window, one of them yelled, “Don’t stand up! Don’t stand up!” just before they did stand up and wobble down the steps and on into the keen teen night.
THAT SMALL HERD of wild horses running loose for many years in the vastness of Upper Robinson Creek Road between Boonville and South Ukiah, now resides in Hollister. The six of them were rounded up by Sonoma Action for Equine Rescue a couple of weeks ago when they wandered down out of the hills to graze in the pumpkin patch on the Ukiah side of the hills.
FUNNY THING is these now neutered horses are all males. So where's Mommy Horse? She, and several more of the wild ones still range free, and a resident of the area says there's no more startling and beautiful sight in all of Mendocino County than to see the ghostly herd of mostly white ponies suddenly materialize out of the mist, galloping along the deepest stretch of Robinson Creek.
FROM COUNTY PLANNING AND BUILDING: "Highly Visible Violations that have been abated since July include the long standing 'graffiti sheds' on Highway 101 north of Laytonville. Four new cases have been opened which are highly visible, including three on Highway One near Manchester, Rockport, and Caspar, and one highly visible from Highway 253 (Boonville Road)."
WE KEEP a keen eye out for eyesores, and darned if we've seen any on the Boonville-Ukiah Road since the County hauled that shipping container outtahere several years ago. Even the Ukiah end of the road looks pretty good these days.
SPEAKING OF EYESORES, we received this anon note in last week's snail mail: "Yo, Mr. Eyesore. Yeah, Ricard's building is pretty bad, but the two modulars you just threw up on your place next to the Redwood Drive-In are a lot harder on the eyeballs than Ricard's place is. What the hell are you doing?"
PATIENCE, BOONVILLE, PATIENCE. Our project is a work in progress which, when it's fully progressed will have you rustics bursting into song every time you pass by.
TERRY RYDER WRITES: There is a new cemetery in AV located in Yorkville on the Hill Ranch. Named after the historical ranch owners the brand new Ingram Cemetery is available to any resident of the Anderson Valley, also any veteran. The setting is beautiful. For more information call Clyde Doggett at 621-1091 or Jan Wasson-Smith at 895-2352.
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