5) Have you been noticing a suspicious amount of daffodils popping up around downtown Santa Rosa this season? The Press Democrat has answers. “The guerrilla gardener” responsible for this cheery scene is a local attorney who has been quietly burying bulbs under cover of darkness, after work and on weekends, the paper reports — driven by the delightful thought of “a February surprise.” Annnd it’s kind of hard to imagine anything sweeter than that. “Armed with only an orange vest and a cordless drill with an auger for digging, attorney Paul Miller has planted 10,000 daffodil bulbs in medians and under freeways near his downtown Santa Rosa office” over the past three years, the story goes. “He does it in the slivers of dirt between parking lots and sidewalks, in weedy medians that divide busy streets, and in the barren roadsides beneath highway overpasses. In the places no one anticipates experiencing beauty, or color even, Miller quietly leaves his mark.” Gahhhh. It’s almost too much to take. More from the PD: “About five years ago, Miller was outed as the guy behind the sunflowers that bloomed on the edges of the parking lot bordered by South E and Second and Third streets. His handiwork in those parts also included a bed of cosmos, tomatoes and basil just outside the door of his law offices. A city worker recognized him as the guy tending the plot on public property, and Miller was certain the jig was up. But alas, instead of shutting down what Miller called his ‘guerrilla garden,’ the city ran a bit of regular water to it, added some top soil and otherwise legitimized the effort. So Miller kept going.” The local flower hero himself explains his motives to the paper: “It’s just an unexpected burst of beauty in an unexpected place. No one expects to see a curtain of sunflowers or a sea of daffodils in a big parking lot full of concrete.” Also: “People have asked me, ‘Your backyard must look amazing.’ Nope, it doesn’t. I put my efforts out here.” 😭😭😭 (Source: Press Democrat; paywall)

4) Friends and family members of Sky Daniel O’Banion, a well-known and loved local blues musician and father of two from the Lower Russian River area, say he’s been missing for nearly a month now. His sister Valerie posted a “MISSING” poster on Facebook last week, and says she’s been handing out physical flyers around town as well. “He has graying blonde hair and blue eyes, is 6’2″, 225 lbs,” the flyer says. “He was last seen in Guerneville 1/21/24.” And the mother of Sky’s children, Rhiannon Guerrero, said in her own post: “He has not been seen or heard from in over three weeks. He is… a hard person to miss. He was last seen in Guerneville but is known to frequent many spots in Sonoma County. Please keep a look out for him.” (Rhiannon tells me that a missing person’s report has been filed, but I haven’t seen anything official from police yet.) One of Sonoma County’s most famous blues musicians, Charlie Musselwhite, commented on Facebook: “We used to communicate regularly and then he just disappeared and I’ve been wondering what happened and haven’t heard a thing.” Sky’s sister Valerie is asking anyone with information about his possible whereabouts to call her at (707) 703-0084. For decades, Sky has been a regular gigger at music venues across the county, oftentimes playing blues harmonica and singing alongside guitarist Derek Irving. But friends say online that he’s been “struggling” for a while. For what it’s worth, a few years ago, Sky set up a GoFundMe to help make ends meet. “I’ve got the blues because I done went n’ injured my harmonica holdin’ hand!” he wrote on the fundraising page. “The Doc told me it’ll probably be around 6-8 weeks of squeellin’ and healin’ until I can put it back to work again. That also means that now I’m outa work until then too. See it aint just my harmonica holdin’ hand that I done messed up, but it’s my nail holdin’ while I hammer-it-in hand, my ladder holdin’ while I’m climbin’ it hand, my bolt holdin’ while I’m wrenchin’ it hand.. You get the idea. So I’m pretty much outa work and outa luck until my hand gets aaall healed up. And I guess that also means I’m pretty much outa dough ’till then too. Now if it weren’t for me  tearin’ up my mic & harmonica holdin’ hand, I’d probly be workin’ on settin’ up a live gig right this very minute.  But I can’t even play my way outa the blues this time. If you’re the kinda person who’d buy me a cuppa joe when I was feelin’ down and out, well, here’s your chance..” (Source: Facebook Groups & Nic Alberico & Valerie Bird via Facebook & Sonny Lowe via Facebook & Rhiannon Guerrero via Facebook & North Bay Live Music & GoFundMe)

3) Another popular summer festival in the wine country has been canceled for 2024. (The first being the three-decade-old Bodega Seafood, Art & Wine Festival.) This time, the organizers of Napa Porchfest — a music festival that takes place on the porches of historic buildings across the City of Napa, beloved by locals and tourists alike — are reportedly calling off the event because they want to focus on other priorities, and the festival is a huge suck of bandwidth. Unlike the Bodega festival, though, there are pretty solid plans to bring Porchfest back in 2025. Here’s the whole deal, courtesy of the Napa Valley Register: “Napa County Landmarks said the group is looking to hand over the work to some of its longtime organizers, giving the festival new life in 2025. Architect Juliana Inman, a then board-member of the nonprofit, was the driving force behind its 2011 debut. The group has been the main sponsor of the event every year since, except for a pandemic-related pause in 2020. The 2023 event, held on the last Sunday in July, drew more than 10,000 people to downtown Napa and areas surrounding Fuller Park. Hundreds of musicians performed outside 73 homes that year, the largest grouping in its history, Micah Malan, the festival’s music director, said at the time. The cost of admission is zero, similar to dozens of similar ones that happen across the country — each taking its inspiration from the one that started in Ithaca, New York in 2007. Putting it on, though, is not free. Napa County Landmarks Executive Director Christine Madrid French said the group decided to move away from the event to better focus on its core mission of ‘historic preservation advocacy, policy and education.’ She said she was tasked with focusing and reinvigorating the group’s mission when she took over in August of last year — and moving away from Porchfest was necessary to do just that.” So now, the Landmarks group is trying to set up a separate nonprofit to run Porchfest in the future. Anyone with interest in donating or sponsoring “can send a note to in**@***********st.org,” the Register reports. “And, for those who don’t want to wait for 2025, San Rafael is having its Porchfest in September.” (Source: North Bay Bohemian & Napa Porchfest & San Rafael Porchfest & Napa Valley Register; paywall)

2) And then, over in the City of Napa, we have the mysterious case of the sick kids in the choir room at Vintage High School. Investigators still don’t know why this happened, but during first period on Thursday, around 25 choir students found themselves struck by a sudden nausea, all at once. One Vintage High kid, the town crier of the situation, told TV news reporters: “A couple students had passed out and one was throwing up and everyone just came inside and started getting people out and putting them into a different room to test everyone.” Five of the students reportedly had to be taken to the hospital — they’re all OK now, reports say — and the rest of the student body had to shelter in place for a spell. The remainder of the school day at Vintage High was obviously shot. “We heard that there was like a SWAT team, police and firefighters were there and so everyone was just kind of chaotic really,” that same town-crier student tells ABC7, “and people were calling their parents wanting to go home because we didn’t know what was going on.” Originally the leading theory was a possible gas or carbon monoxide leak, but local fire officials and PG&E inspectors have ruled that out. “The fire department, police department and PG&E have deemed not only the choir room but the band room that is adjacent to it and the entire building as safe for use,” Julie Bordes, a spokesperson for the Napa Valley Unified School District told reporters Friday. So the coast is clear, but the case of the mass mystery illness at Vintage High goes unsolved for now… (Source: ABC7)

1) The community saga of the fishing boat stuck in the shallows at South Salmon Creek Beach off the Sonoma County coast has taken a tragic turn. A full week after the 57-foot boat from San Francisco, named Aleutian Storm, ran aground on the way to the Bodega Bay harbor during a crabbing mission — despite repeated attempts to pull it back out to sea, and glimmers of hope along the way — our local Coast Guard station called off the operation Friday, ahead of the incoming storm. And last night, “the boat was torn apart” in the wild waves, says Bodega-based photographer Jerry Dodrill, who’s been hanging around and helping for days — meanwhile documenting the whole ordeal. The Press Democrat reported Friday: “Listing toward the ocean and battered so repeatedly by waves that a large gash has appeared on its starboard side, in the wheelhouse and through the deck, the 57-ton fishing vessel is now so weighted down with water and sand, and its structural integrity so compromised, that federal officials determined it no longer could be moved. The incident now shifts out of federal jurisdiction and becomes the responsibility of vessel Capt. Chris Fox, his insurers and their contractors to arrange for salvage operations under the oversight of California State Parks, which owns the beach.” To facilitate that, state park officials decided to close the beach to the public. “The operation will require the use of heavy equipment and will require a large safety buffer for the operators,” park officials said. “The closure will include all State Park lands from Salmon Creek extending south to Mussel Point.” The mission to save the boat over the past week became a real community affair, involving dozens of local volunteers — including photographers drawn by the spectacle, crews sent by response agencies, environmentalists concerned about the 1,500 pounds of diesel fuel reported to be on board, and local fishermen whose hearts went out to this San Francisco fishing crew watching their livelihood viscerally beaten down by ocean waves. In the words of Dick Ogg, a “veteran fisherman who is president of the Bodega Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association” and spoke to the PD: “If you lost your house, if you lost your means of making a living, all of that is similar to what’s happening. Chris works so hard. He’s such a good person and it’s just devastating to see something like this happen.” And photographer Jerry Dodrill wrote on Facebook last Wednesday: “There are so many moving parts to this story, beyond the simple circumstances how the boat ended up on the beach, or that it is in a marine protected area that is also a much loved state park, in a spot that is critical habitat for endangered Snowy Plover that is currently in nesting season. There are politics, agencies, fishing communities, loss of property, livelihoods, and the human tragedy of watching a beautiful dream come unraveled.” As for the environmental aspect: Crews and volunteers have reportedly been combing the beach for debris, and the government agencies involved say they’ve been monitoring the potential hazmat situation throughout. According to the PD, a small amount of the boat’s fuel “leaked from a compromised tank” at one point, and crews were able to extract another small amount. “A biologist with State Parks monitored the beach throughout the week and checked several birds but found none fouled by oil,” the paper reported. But it seems like it’s been an ongoing struggle — and I’m not sure what happened to the fuel when the boat tore apart last night. I’ll keep you posted. (Source: Cal Spill Watch & KRON4 & Jerry Dodrill Photography & Jerry Dodrill Photography via Facebook & Sonoma Sheriff via Facebook & North Bay Bohemian & Press Democrat; paywall)