Not having any relatives west of the Mississippi, my family often traveled up to Portland to spend Thanksgiving with old friends. We'd usually pick up a couple books on tape from the Contra Costa library before heading out on road trips like these, but pianist George Winston's albums Autumn and December always traveled with us. Because of these albums' bonding themes – holidays, family, journeys – the music grew into an important memory from childhood. In some ways, it ceased being art for me, in that I couldn't evaluate it with a critical eye as I developed musically. This isn't to say that I think George Winston is a bad composer or pianist. In the same way I occasionally eat at a child

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files). We also added a few new cap

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months. Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying  email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for u

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream This is a live feed from our office window, which is the epicenter of the hazardous materials threat ongoing at the Sacramento Valley Station Light Rail stop. The feed captures a small fraction of the law enforcement officers involved, but shows the ones at the center of the problem UPDATE: Live feed was discontinued at approximately 12:45p.m. as all the law enforcement had left the scene.

Shake off those winter blues with a sport that's fun, fast, and family-friendly. Play inline hockey at DISC, a sports facility owned by members of the Davis community that's right off highway 80 in East Davis. There are leagues year-round that are suitable for all skill levels. Even if you've never skated before you can pick up the sport quickly by enrolling in a class that will get you up to speed in no time. I just recently learned to play inline hockey and started my first season in the beginner's league last summer. The players and facility owners were welcoming, friendly, and fun to play with. It's been great learning and playing a sport with people of all ages and backgrounds. The e

How are The Sacramnto Press, Sacramento Bee, and other outlets participating in the project?

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Hi MitaJoAnn, The article is currently in the culture section, but because it was written a few weeks ago, you'll have to go back a few pages to find it. It's currently on page 5: http://www.sacramentopress.com/taglist/culture/page5 We don't classify articles in a traditional sense, it's up to each author to pick a few categories when writing an article. If you think an article could use another category, you can "tag" it yourself in the "Your Tags" section above. I just tagged this article "Poet Laureate". The more people tag, the more we all benefit. Also, here's a tip: scroll to the top of this article, and click "poetry" under "Community Tags". Now you'll see all articles that have been "tagged" as poetry-related by authors and readers like you!

Thanks everyone! I just want to add that tonight we released another fix that addresses some outstanding Internet Explorer 8 issues. The writer's dashboard and article creation pages now look like they're supposed to, and images can be uploaded without those annoying popup errors.

It's come to our attention that people are having trouble writing and uploading pictures in Internet Explorer 8 (both before and after the change described here). We're working on it and will get it fixed as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, we've verified that the writing tools currently work well with Firefox and Safari if you want to use a temporary solution.