The Santa Barbara City Council embraced a modest solar power project atop Fire Station No. 2, located at 819 Cacique Street, authorizing the expenditure of $161,000 to get the job done. If all goes according to plan, the solar panels should provide 65 percent of the station’s energy needs, saving City Hall $4,000 per year.
by Gail M. Rink, MSW, executive director of Hospice of Santa Barbara, Inc.
As I stood by her bedside in the intensive care unit, those familiar, curious contradictions came over me. How can Alice Heath be dying? Death ends a life forever. Her life was so vital. She seemed just fine to me when I visited her several weeks ago. What happened? Where did the time go? Why is she in the ICU? She needs to be in her room at Vista del Monte. I should’ve gone to see her more frequently. Death is never routine. Alice Heath taught me that well.
Turn on many Major League Baseball games these days and you can root, root, root for the home team – even if you live nowhere near the teams you’re watching. That’s because you can often also root for Santa Barbara’s own home team, the Foresters – or at least the many former players from that club now making their mark on the Big Leagues. In 2005, the Foresters boasted their first-ever Major League All-Star and first-ever former players in the World Series.
The annual Digital Days of Summer filmmaking summer camp for teens is still accepting students who want to learn from the Hollywood pros. The July 10-August 11 camp is offering a 30 percent discount for kids who sign up in June, so see digitaldaysfest.com and sign up before the June 16 deadline.
SILENCE IS GOLDEN: It’s all over, I suppose, but the shouting. The June primaries have officially ended, meaning our telephones, mailboxes, and TV screens can enjoy a few moments of respite from political solicitations. The big story, as always, is who didn’t vote. That’s most of us. Presumably the democracy we are so eager to export to Iraq is the democracy we see fit not to exercise right here at home. But who needs a lecture?
METH REVISITS BURTON: A magical moment occurred at last summer’s Montreal Jazz Festival when guitarist Pat Metheny walked onstage with vibist Gary Burton, the guitarist’s first major employer back in the early ’70s. It was old home week for a couple of hours, as the band covered material a ’70s audience would have heard, along with original bassist Steve Swallow and Metheny’s current drummer Antonio Sanchez. Metheny has briefly crossed paths with Burton before, as on the all-star album Like Minds in 1998, but this was something distinctive, a ripe homecoming.
Bud Bottoms loves to tell stories. Who wouldn’t when you’re full of gems like rolling down sand dunes with Liz Taylor, being summoned to the Biltmore by Gorbachev, or the time a Paiute medicine woman healed your back with a goose feather? Living in Santa Barbara since attending UCSB in the late 1940s, the sea-loving sculptor has left a legacy in bronze. Best known for the dolphin fountain at the entrance to the wharf, Bottoms has brought joy to the four corners of the earth with his heart-centered craftsmanship. A late bloomer to the sculpting world, which he entered in his early fifties, Bottoms is ecstatic to open yet another chapter of his life as an author of children’s books. What better place to talk about it than a cozy booth at Eladio’s with Bud’s dolphins smiling from across the street?
Thu., June 8
Surf to Pink Floyd: S.B. Maritime Museum screens Crystal Voyager, by local surf pioneer George Greenough. 7pm. 113 Harbor Wy., Ste. 190. Call 962-8404.
Sat., June 10
Ocean Advocates: Channelkeeper trains volunteers to help monitor local watersheds. 9-11am. Watershed Resource Center, Arroyo Burro Beach. RSVP Ben@sbck.org.
For the three-man (okay, two-man, one-woman) show that is Trinity Tropics, fashion is a family affair. The artistic vision comes via the genius of longtime local Rhett Headley, whose family owned Castagnola Seafood Restaurant and 19 other restaurants and whose father was the president of the World Plan Executive Council, which organized the activities of the transcendental meditation non-profit movement.
Greka Integrated, a Santa Maria-based oil and asphalt producer with a checkered enforcement history, was fined $127,500 by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for disposing of oil refinery wastewater by pumping it into its injection wells, a violation of the Clean Water Act.
