Make
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Follow the Wood
My best friend’s husband, a home cook with professional culinary skills, has impeccable taste and exacting standards. Every holiday season I effortlessly shop for his wife and son, and toy with the idea of getting something for him too, but usually chicken out. I figure he already has everything he needs, or I would get…
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Make Local Gift Guide
Brick and Mortars Worth Leaving Your Couch For Treehorn Books With its towering, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and intoxicating bibliosmia, this sanctuary is any book-lover’s dream. A downtown Santa Rosa fixture since 1979, manager of this general-use bookstore Grant Hotaling tells me, “My dad was one of the original owners, and my mom was a…
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Blue Anon
The Velvet Bandit Strikes Again! Just two days after her 42nd birthday early in the spring of 2020, The Velvet Bandit pasted her first piece of street art, along the Santa Rosa Creek Trail: a toilet paper roll with the words “Let’s Roll,” a nod both to the hawkish era of George Bush, and, of…
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Snared
Drummer Dan Ford Plays at a New Craft. Most people in Sonoma County know Dan Ford as the lanky, quiet, Dave Grohl-resembling drummer with a sly Sagittarius grin who backs multiple musicians like Emily Jane White, John Courage, Frankie Boots, The Ironsides, and others. His employers know him as a skilled and dedicated woodworker who…
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Bulking
Towards a Plastic-Free Bathroom When I found out that China quit taking our recycling in 2018, and it’s now piling up on docks, in landfills and on unsuspecting island nations around the world, I went a little nuts (Netflix, Recycling Sham). I read Zero Waste blogs obsessively. I labeled jars and filled them at bulk…
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Meet a Local Farmer
Jen Beretta: Beretta Family Dairy Dairy farming has deep roots in my family. I am a 4th-generation dairy woman at Beretta Dairy in Santa Rosa, which has been in the family for 63 years and counting. I am also fortunate to be a 6th-generation dairy woman with Dolcini Jersey Dairy, which has been run by…
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The Power of Small
How our daily choices can make a big impact. When Trathen Heckman was 31, he started printing a zine called Ripples, about the effects wrought by small acts of change. He’d already made a huge pivot in his own life a few years before, leaving a Fortune 500 consulting firm to travel, snow-board, and make…
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Meet a Local Farmer
Rebecca Bozzelli of Lantern Farm Twenty years ago, I hopped in a car with friends in New Jersey and drove West. I landed in San Francisco, and have been growing (food) ever since. After a farming apprenticeship at U.C. Santa Cruz in 2012 and a few farming stints in Sonoma County, I branched out on…
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Savorbang!
Three Divas Frosting Welcome to our regular recipe column from teacher and stand-up comedian Sarah Whitmore. STOP WONDERING Um, is it time for dessert yet? Have you been holding your breath, crossing your fingers, waiting for confirmation that it’s safe? Stop. It will never be safe. It’s time to celebrate. Blow up a balloon, follow…
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No Can Stands Alone
Green Mary on her Decades-Long Mission to Create Less Waste While waiting for her latte at Coffee Catz one January day, Mary Munat wandered over to the nearby Sebastopol Inn to ask what they were doing with their organic waste. After chatting with the onsite manager about the inevitable waste stream of the newly converted…