Activists for walking and bicycling sometimes refer to drivers as “cagers” since automobilists are encased by a ton or more of metal and cut off from their environment.
In the age of COVID-19, instead of being a cage, a car seems more like a protective steel bubble in a world that’s turned hostile. When they aren’t staying home, people take advantage of that protection when they venture out, even taking pleasure rides when cabin fever becomes too much.
Unaware they are trespassing on land owned by the Sacramento Kings, hundreds of snowy egrets and black-crowned night herons have taken up residence in a deserted oasis on the north side of Sleep Train Arena.
From a chain-link fence surrounding the grassland, the birds can be seen gliding among cement slabs and rebar, the foundation for a baseball stadium project led by Greg Lukenbill in the late 1980s that never came to fruition.
Summer days in Sacramento, when air becomes insufferably hot and soil bakes to Death Valley beige, can test our gardening superpowers. The challenge of keeping plants happy and alive is compounded by watering mandates, courtesy of below normal rainfall and Sierra snowpack.
People and pets need protection and ample hydration when summer’s blast furnace goes triple digits. So do plants. Our leafy friends are not able to bolt for an air-conditioned kitchen and refreshing drink.
When school’s out for the summer, you might imagine that parents would breathe a sigh of relief—but you’d be wrong. Planning your child’s summer camp schedule can be even more stressful than keeping up with the regular school year, as Arden-Arcade resident DJ Waldow can attest.
“Three summers ago, I was trying to plan my kids’ summer camp schedule,” says Waldow, who has a 10-year-old, 8-year-old and 5-year-old twins with his wife, a high-risk OB doctor. “The process was so crazy—you’d build a schedule, then go to each individual site and cross your fingers that they still had openings. Camps filled up really quickly, which was stressful, plus trying to coordinate our kids going to the same camp as their friends was very, very complicated. There was no simple, easy way to find different camps in Sacramento.”
