You could go to the Marin Art and Garden Center, which is in Ross, which is about 10 minutes away. Their web site is at: "www.magc.org". It is on land that used to be a huge old estate. The main house burned down, but there are still a lot of heritage trees, & landscaped paths, etc. as well as a museum. The Marin Rose Society has a rose garden there which is very nice, although I do not know if anything is blooming in Jan. There is also a great antique shop, if you like that sort of thing. Jackie

I rejoiced to hear some of your stories about happy childhoods ... and was sad to hear of people who were disappointed that their former homes or/and neighbourhoods had deterioated. But especially sad to hear that a few of you had endured such unhappy childhoods that you felt that you couldn't stand going back. Memo to Country Sunshine (and some others): "You don't ask - you don't get!". Take courage in hand, put on a big smile ... and sashay up to the front door. If they say, "No" ... you're no worse off. Right? We had a big 36' x 40' old white brick farmhouse near London, Ontario, when I was a child, with six bedrooms upstairs , three of them with built-in closets, and a big old walnut clothes press in one of the ones lacking one - Dad's bedroom was downstairs, would be an office/den, now, off of the large kitchen/dining room. Brick summer kitchen and woodshed on the back. Mom became ill when I was just short of 6, Grandpa (Dad's) and Grandma had moved in with her sister a few years before when Dad took over the farm. Grandpa died not long after Mom got sick so Grandma moved in with us and the farmhand's wfe helped in the house. World War II started in '39 when I was 10, so my younger brothers and I were the only hep that Dad had on our large farm. I lived there till I was 17, visited later after finished college (fiends from church had bought the farm when we moved west [that was "friends" from church: dratted keyboads!]). We had a quite close family ...Grandma used to get after us, e.g. for running up the back stair and sliding down the banister of the front stair ... telling us that she'd give us the strap ... but we laughed at her, saying that she, who had a bt of a hard time getting around, having inward cuvature of the spine, couldn't catch us! I have happy memories of the place: Mom not being there was just a fact of life. It was torn down a number of years ago, when they put a freeway from Sarnia, across from Port Huron, to join the one between Windsor(Detroit) and Toronto that goes just south of London. ole joyful

One of the important turn-around indicators some analysts have been looking for, finally seems to have appeared. Will it continue? Who knows? September New-Home Sales Jumped 2.7%, Prices Fell October 27, 2008 WSJournal WASHINGTON -- New-home sales increased by 2.7% last month as inventories declined and builders slashed prices to their lowest level in four years, a government report said Monday. Sales of single-family homes increased by 2.7% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 464,000 from August's revised rate of 452,000, the Commerce Department said Monday. July sales rose 3.6% to 517,000; earlier, Commerce estimated July rose 4% to 520,000. Economists had forecast a September sales rate of 455,000. Year over year, new-home sales were 33.1% lower than the level in September 2007. Mortgage credit has tightened. High inventory of unsold homes are hurting the housing market -- and the rest of the economy. The surplus is driving prices down. Falling prices, in turn, are keeping would-be buyers from signing on the dotted line as they wait for a better deal. Builders are breaking new ground at a declining rate, discouraged by excess supply and declining sales. The housing slump has detracted from economic growth as measured by gross domestic product for two-and-a-half years. The median price of a new home decreased by 9.1% to $218,400 in September from $240,300 in September 2007. The average price tumbled 5.7% from $292,200 in September 2007 to $275,500 last month. In August, the median price was $220,400 and the average was $264,100. The median sales price was the lowest since the $211,600 level reached in September 2004. Inventories fell 7.3% to an estimated 394,000 homes for sale at the end of September from August's 425,000. Regionally last month, new-home sales were up 22.7% in the West, down 21.4% in the Northeast, down 5.8% in the Midwest and up 0.7% in the South.

>>similar comments as to fire risk during drought years because the grass/weeds/underbrush had become tinder dry. I'm not sure which is right, is risk higher after dry winters or after wet ones? - Elmer F.>> As far as I know it's held that the risk is slightly higher after wet winters because it encourages new green growth in the hills that simply dies when summer comes and the rains stop. In a Mediterranean climate native plants go mostly dormant in summer. The other six Mediterranean regions of the world share our pattern of wet winters and dry, high fire danger summers. One of the comments my niece made when she visited us for the first time, in a July or August, was "Wow, I thought CA was green all the time! How come everything's brown and dried up?" Being from Chicago, everything IS green in the summer, LOL, so she was puzzled by endless hills with nothing but dead grass and a few scattered stands of evergreen bushes/trees. The danger in dry winters is not so much an occasional dry year, but when there's an entire succession of them as there has been during our last drought. It stresses the evergreens and makes them very vulnerable to bark borer beetles (there's a variety of different ones). Thus, photos of the Sierras around Tahoe and Hwy 80 show a terrifying number of dead trees after 7 yrs of drought. When a fire starts up there - which is inevitable, it's part of the ecosystem - it may well dwarf anything we've seen in the Wine Country. There is simply no way for CalFire to fight a major firestorm when it's inside impassible canyons and chasms. All they can do is pick defensible spots and try to hold them to minimize loss of life and structural damage. Getting back to the Wine Country fires, SF Chronicle had this photo on a slideshow today, by Paul Chan/Chronicle: