Longtime waiters Daniel Byrne and Mark McKenzie won’t be serving on Thanksgiving. After waiting tables for a combined 80 or so years, they’ll celebrate the holiday and their retirements with dinner at Equus.   “We kind of consider ourselves the Sunshine Boys of the restaurant business in Sonoma County,” said Daniel, [...]

What a ride I took today, Tuesday, with the 38 Petaluma-based National Guard combat engineers who came home after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. The Guard allowed me a space in a caravan of police cruisers and motorcycles, Patriot Guard Harleys and other vehicles that gathered at San Francisco International [...]

Cloverdale’s Jessamyn Sobecki-Engle isn’t complaining. But the National Guard staff sergeant will admit it was a pretty mild, quiet welcome that awaited her when she returned home from a difficult and sorrowful tour in Iraq four years ago.   But that was then. Now, Jessamyn is helping to coordinate today’s [...]

You tell me, but I have a hunch that everybody involved in the saga of recalled Cotati Councilman George Barich - including Barich himself - knows that Tuesday's overwhelming vote puts him  back where nature intends for him to be. That is off the City Council and back in the gallery, [...]

Maybe 60 rubberneckers gathered near Michelle and Kevin McCarthy's new place in northwest Santa Rosa to gawk at the spectacle of a house virtually hacked in half by a bizarrely up-tipped crane. I was just another of them, but snooping is my job. I assume we all felt a bit guilty to [...]

Suddenly, officers with Sonoma County's least understood and perhaps most under-estimated police department are very much in the news. The vicious assault on a woman in the theater-arts department at Santa Rosa Junior College and the JC's expanded no-smoking rules both are commanding attention from officers with the SRJC police. [...]

Were you at the Veterans Day parade in Petaluma? It was huge, a moving festival of rifles, flags, boots, smoke-trailing aircraft, chest medals, jeeps and other battle hardware, cheers, tears and crisp military salutes. If you didn't know better, you might have thought it was a celebration of war. And hereabouts some [...]

Guy Schott persists at showing us what we're capable of. Guy, a 46-year-old water engineer in Santa Rosa, pushed himself in recent years to set two world records on a pull-up bar. I am in awe of the man and am so grateful that he never asked me how many pull-ups [...]

Sara Bei Hall, one of the greatest runners ever to grace an oval track in Santa Rosa, will be in town this weekend (Nov. 7 and 8)  to switch roles with one of her greatest fans. Sara's mom, Karen Bei, will run her first 10K in Sunday's Redwood Empire Food [...]

Say you’re Jeff Kolin. You’ve worked as Santa Rosa’s city manager for nine years and built such a strong professional reputation that the city of Beverly Hills — swimming pools, movie stars — concludes that you are the top choice as its new city manager. You’re asked if you would [...]