“A thousand bucks? To fix a chicken??” My outrage echoed through the Twain Harte Veterinary Hospital lobby. A gaggle of waiting cat and dog owners looked up, suddenly alarmed that their own bills might also be unexpectedly high and perhaps put their families on all-Alpo diets for months to come. “Can this possibly be right?”
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“It doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue.” So said one critic when the Tuolumne County staff in November suggested naming a short road leading to the new Law and Justice Center site “Justice Center Drive.” County supervisors delayed their decision for a month, professing to be open to more engaging, mellifluous suggestions from the public.
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This year it came early. Tuolumne County enjoyed its annual 15 minutes of fame on Feb. 12, when a woman, 72, and a man, 62, were caught by the cops naked and having sex in the back seat of a Ford Taurus. They were cited for indecent exposure. That the couple was nabbed in
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Coincidence? Fate? A miracle? Or some harmonic convergence of all three? Whatever it was, Sunday’s reunion of owner Renee Clopton and Cash, the beloved Australian shepherd who ran away from her Columbia area home on Jan. 4, defies logic, probability and common sense. If Vegas bookmakers had laid odds on Renee recovering her dog, they’d be
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“You’re not really thinking about buying that thing?” My wife gave me a look. “Are you?” “No, no,” I said, waving her off. “It’s just for a story.” Yet the image kept going through my head: Me, a semi-retired journalist on an income that’s fixed pretty low, tooling down Sonora’s Washington Street behind the
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We used to call it the family room, but our kids are gone. And if you walk into that room today, there’s only one thing you could name it after. You might call it the TV Room. Or maybe, as the folks at Panasonic, Toshiba or Sony might prefer, The Home Theater. Or, given
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Cash tends to bring out the worst in us – greed, deceit, dishonest and all manner of underhanded dealings. But Cash has brought out the best in Renee Clopton, a 34-year-old Sonora-area woman who cuts hair at the Envy Salon in Columbia. Cash, her lost Australian shepherd, that is. Renee’s unwavering, unyielding three-week search for
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“Some assembly required.” The words get my blood running cold. Add that an Allen wrench, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers are necessary to transform dozens of parts into a useful appliance or piece of furniture, and I’m tempted to send the darn thing back. If I’m in a store, I’ll take a beat-up
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It has come to my attention that a few readers of this blog may live in the netherworld beyond the Tuolumne and Calaveras county lines, and thus have no context in which to put the tales that unfold here. Which is like reading stories of orcs, ents, trolls and hobbits without knowing anything of the
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So what if the church burned down the night before your wedding? Would you find the nearest bar and go through with it anyway? Had Westminster Abbey gone up in flames on the eve of William and Kate’s much-ballyhooed multi-million-pound-royal nuptials in 2011, do you suppose the prince’s backup plan was to look for the
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