For those of you wondering, as I have been lately, when exactly Daylight Saving Time starts, it’s Sunday, March 9 at 2 a.m. That’s when the clock springs forward for some inexplicable reason and, voila, an extra hour of daylight appears magically and the days grow longer marching toward summer. Leave the clock alone would be my preference. It’s just a weird cultural fluke from days gone by at this point.
At this point, my favorite pet supply store in South County is An-Jan in the Vineyard Town Center near Nob Hill in Morgan Hill. The small, family-owned “chain” is staffed with nice, helpful people and the products are fairly priced. Plus, they carry the favorite chow for my two hounds. Rocco and Roxy happily munch the Fromm Family Dog Food which has been made in Wisconsin since 1904 and is now operated by the family’s fifth-generation.
Mark Hoffmann is generating some cool and creative ideas – the kind that could be a hit on Pinterest. We featured the postal carrier slash artist on our Lifestyles section cover last week and what really caught my eye were the wedding shoes he painted for his goddaughter. They were what Miss Jenny and youngest daughter Mariah would call “way cute.” The left painted shoe had an “I” embossed on the heel, the right show a “Do.” Call me crazy, but I think personalized wedding shoes, tastefully painted by MH (that’s Mark Hoffmann, not Michael Kors), would sell like champagne at a wedding toast.
Toast: May I recommend Dave’s Killer Bread, the green labeled 21 whole grains variety, with a 4.5-star rating from consumers on Yelp. (Who knew Yelpers rated bread?) Anyway, the feel-good story of David Dahl, 50, the ex-con turned bread empire entrepreneur, took a sad twist in November. He was arrested for second-degree assault after ramming sheriff’s deputies during a wild chase. Dahl, court records later showed, was on leave from the company due to stress related to the business and “self-medicating with alcohol.” Hope this story ends well and the company keeps making that “killer” bread.
It would be “killer” – the colloquialism we used back in the day to describe something that was “cool” – if the libraries in Gilroy and Morgan Hill were open on Sunday, too, and there’s forward progress on the possibility. Derek Wolfgram, the Deputy County Librarian for Community Libraries for the Santa Clara County Library District, estimated the annual cost to open the library from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday would be $150,000 per year. Shortening the hours from 1 to 5 p.m. would lower it to $100,000 or so. The library district, Wolfgram says, has a practice of absorbing infrastructure costs in other communities that pay for extended hours. So there would be no utility costs, for example, to either Gilroy or Morgan Hill. Given the heavy use in South County, that sounds like a well-worth-it deal.
Not sure why Gilroy isn’t following Morgan Hill’s lead with regards to fire department protection for the community. Morgan Hill has its own department and stations and equipment, but contracts with CAL FIRE for personnel. That saves about $800,000 per year, according to Morgan Hill City Manager Steve Rymer. That’s a tidy sum indeed that could pay for quality of life improvements like increased library hours or park police patrols or downtown fee waivers … Here’s the bottom line: Gilroy’s City Council should get fired-up about this and direct its top administrators to conduct a thorough review and kibbutz with Morgan Hill officials. There’s a lot of good that can be done with $800,000 annually.
That’s about what the bill feels like every month, the one that weighs in at ridiculously heavy and inexplicable amounts. The elephant on my desk in my home office is – surprise! – the PG&E bill. Holey moley, what in the world is going on? I understand the Christmas season bill with the lights up and people over and lots of cooking, but that’s supposed to drop precipitously the month after, not inch down. Think I’ve had it paying the Pompous Gouging & Elite Company. It’s time for the Solar Super Hero to rescue me from sending my entire retirement savings to the energy thieves.
Plenty of thieves and murderers and other rogues in the Game of Thrones, which I’m reading because my voracious-reading daughter, Cayla, recommended it. I’m on book four. The series is rather like a combination of the Lord of the Rings and War and Peace. It’s not for the undetermined. Folks tell me the smash made for TV series is wonderful, but I’m not going to even sneak a peek until I finish all the books.
The “book” – or common lore – on the wine industry is that there are too many grapes and not enough drinkers. Not true. Check these Wine Institute numbers out: “U.S. wine exports, 90% from California, reached a record high $1.55 billion in winery revenues in 2013, up 16.4% compared to the previous year, an increase for the fourth consecutive year by value. Volume shipments reached 435.2 million liters or 48.4 million cases, up 7.5%.” The European Union gobbles up our exports and here comes China. Cheers.
Reach Editor Mark Derry at ed****@ga****.com
