While flipping through cable news shows a couple months ago, I came across an interview with a Sacramento resident named Elizabeth Novak. She made national news by posting a desperate—but heartfelt—video message to Gov. Gavin Newsom on social media.

Novak, who owned and operated a hair salon on Broadway in Land Park, posted a video on Twitter describing how difficult it was to run her business during the homeless crisis. She asked how the governor was going to help. I was intrigued because I’ve had small-business owners reach out to me with similar problems.

Mark Friedman was showing a visitor around The Foundry, his latest apartment project in West Sacramento, when he paused to check something that had been bugging him.

An outer hallway connecting different wings of the three-story building were painted orange, which seemed like a good idea at the outset. But now Friedman was having second thoughts: too much orange. He was pleased to see workers already covering it up with a less garish coat of gray paint.

A few years ago, Gregory Berger’s interest in cooking and baking was purely part of the household routine. But then, one sourdough loaf changed everything.

Berger is a stay-at-home dad who spends his days caring for his son, Rowan, while running his own graphic design company in Sacramento. He became inspired to delve into the world of breadmaking after reading “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation” by Michael Pollan.

Jose Silva has a thing for burgers. “If we can put it on a bun, we’ll serve it,” says Silva, owner of Flaming Grill Café. Whether it’s sirloin, chuck, bison, ostrich, elk, alligator, carnitas or ahi tuna, you’ll find it on the menu at one of Silva’s three locations.

Chef and owner, Silva has spent the majority of his life, almost 35 years, in the kitchen. Starting out washing dishes at age 13, he steadily worked his way through a variety of Sacramento restaurants, finally giving up the game a dozen years ago. But like a professional athlete who just can’t hang up the cleats, Silva found himself back on the field when he stumbled upon an opportunity to buy up an awkward little food stand on El Camino Avenue. Less than one year into his sabbatical and he was back at the grill, the only difference this time was that it was his grill.

Like many of us, Jeff Durston was quite troubled by the rhetoric coming out of the Republican primary in 2016. So what did he do? He wrote a children’s book.

“I wasn’t consciously thinking, ‘How can we resist this?’” Durston says. “I started thinking about how we could push back against the values we don’t support. My daughter was 3 at the time and we would read books to her every night. I realized that a lot of children’s books are passing down core, fundamental values like friendship, acceptance—human themes.”

Since 1911, the I Street Bridge has faithfully carried trains and cars and people and bicycles on its slender, double-deck span 400 feet across the muddy Sacramento River.

The bridge is an old-timey mechanical marvel. Giant gears pivot the decks sideways, like a sword on a spindle, when tall boats approach. Mark Twain would have loved it, but he died in 1910 and missed the grand opening by a year.