Rainbows and Flowers
Congratulations Sonoma for making the back of this week’s New York Times Sunday travel section. It’s a great profile of some of our most treasured sites and peeps (Chateau St Jean, Gun Bun, Paradise Ridge, Rachel Hundley, Tips Roadside, Jared Childress, Sugarloaf, Glen Ellen Star). The story by Michelle Bigley is loosely about the fires but mostly about how awesome our home is. We have to remember this.
Did you go to the parade and fireworks and salami/potato toss on the fourth? Amazing as always. Did you receive a 4% bonus check from the school district? OK, maybe that was just the teachers. Did you see the new Nick Brandt exhibit at SVMA. Super awesome and a great message, and free on Wednesdays.
Are you enjoying Tuesday night Farmers Market and Sunday Springs Market (10-2) and Friday Depot Park market (9-12:30)? Are you happy watching Boyes Hot Springs transformation into the new Brooklyn? Did you finally get your Air B and B studio permitted by the county? (Modern and Luxe: Studio 455-book now, book often) Sorry, me again.
The weather is about perfect. On any given night we have Stompers baseball, world class dining, more local music than any city outside the City. Outstanding movies and special events at the Sebastiani (Come meet Ron Stallworth on the 11th), and the finest in people watching perches in the plaza or at the Swiss Hotel or my favorite cheap date dinner spot outside Mary’s Pizza Slice Shack.
Plus, my nuts are much larger this year which is nice: http://valleytalking.blogs.sonomanews.com/2018/12/03/laugh-now-laugh-later/And it’s fig season and the 10 public fig trees between my house and the high school are full this year due to the wet winter (No, I’m not telling where the trees are especially the yellow fig which has fruit the size of tennis balls).
Sure, life is not all rainbows and flowers, there’s headache and frustration and problems to be solved but sometimes you just have to put all that stuff on a shelf and Carpe Diem. That’s what summer should be.
Favorite day so far: Wife and I went to “our pool” (Agua Caliente Swim Center) and realized we didn’t have any reading material so we stopped off at the Charter School’s little library (those super cool little houses with free books). We both found total escapist novels, which we read for about 4 hours under a nice umbrella. That’s it, no flight hassles, no parking worries, no dog or house sitters, no planning.
Leave it to Yaz, an ex-student who put it into perspective during a visit at the end of the school year. Just when I was feeling down and ineffective she came into my classroom with the simple reminder,
“You know Walt I think about that thing you said all the time, ‘Every day above ground is a good day’ no matter how bad I’m feeling that cheers me up.”
I won’t get into the whole Walt Williams book of cliché classroom and coaching phrases, you’ve heard most of them here before: Stop swimming in the shit pool, don’t be a phoney, know better, do better, find your sweet spot.
Damn, it’s like I can’t stop the preachy compulsion. Can’t you just turn it off for one blog? Sheeeecsh.
But enough of that, the answer is to make things simple this summer, healthy food, love, beauty, appreciation, connection, acceptance.
Put all your troubles aside and head to the plaza with a good book.
Walt Williams is in it for the money, that and the prestige that goes with 22 years of teaching in California high schools (he’s not the smartest tool in the shed). He firmly believes in more standardized testing and that fitting all students into the same box is really the answer. He strongly supports fracking and that climate change is a fantasy made up by hippie liberals, also that the military needs more funding and that schools should just stop whining.