Yoga Bites appears every four weeks.

Everything everywhere moves in waves. Wave motion is the movement of life. Everything in the universe vibrates in wave-like patterns: sound waves, light waves, radio waves, ocean waves, seismic waves, heat waves, brain waves, peristaltic waves — even our breath, blood and heartbeats move in waves.

Here on the coast summer equals Lake Pacific, and deprived surfers tend to go a bit bonkers.  (Thank goodness this is also the Wild Rivers Coast where summer also equals river season!)  In perfect surfing paradise, head-high waves would peel for miles, one glassy peak after another. But in surfing, as in life, you’ve got to have the flat spells and micro swells to appreciate the excitement of the crazy, epic times.

Life is like a wave.  All waves come with crests and troughs, ups and downs, highs and lows. These ups and downs are the constant play of the polarities of life. Day follows night, fortune follows misfortune, and rain follows sunshine.  It is our attachment to having the “good” and our aversion to the “bad” that creates suffering.

House Calls runs every other Saturday. Today’s column is written by Kristine Vargas, a physical therapy student at Sutter Coast Hospital.

Summer is here, and school is out. This may be the perfect time to address some of those aches and pains you have.

Most of us don’t realize how our posture could be causing us pain whether we’re fishing, running, swimming, window shopping, working at our desk or just sitting in front of the television.

Your spine has three natural curves, a cervical curve (your neck), a thoracic curve (your mid-back), and a lumbar curve (your low-back). Proper posture helps maintain these curves. Poor posture can cause extra stress on joints, leading to fatigue and pain in your neck, shoulders, back, and hips. This can also contribute to headaches, numbness and tingling in arms, wrists, and hands in people of all ages. 

While there are still stone fruits available at the farmer’s market, get yourself some and make some small batch jam.

I made up some apricot vanilla bean jam and it’s heavenly on homemade bread toasted with some fresh butter. I also used strawberries and added just a spoonful of edible lavender to flavor a batch of jam last month.

What I love about apricot and also peach jams is the tangy flavor. But other fruits are coming into season now, so the varieties will include blackberries and plums.

Del Norte Gardening runs monthly. Paul Madeira and Julie Jo Ayer Williams own Ocean Air Farms in Fort Dick.

By this time of the year things on the farm are really buzzing.  We’ve made it into our “harvest” season, along with all the weeding, watering and maintenance a seven-acre garden requires.

One thing that we seem to hear a lot of this time of year from folks, is how abnormal of a growing season it is, and how it just hasn’t gotten sunny and warm yet.

We usually do our best to agree and smile. However, the last three years at least have been, in our eyes, pretty “normal.”  We have made it through the blasting north winds of spring and we’ve clearly moved on to foggy summer mornings, giving way to afternoons with sun and light breeze.

Editor’s note: The Del Norte 4-H column appears every four weeks. Today’s column is written by Kelly Lynch.

As our youth are busy gearing up for showing their animals, crafts, and food at the Del Norte County Fair, I wanted to bring community service to light.

Within 4-H, our youth not only focus on learning about their animals and different crafts, but a major focus of 4-H is also community service. Del Norte 4-H and our community both benefit from the services our local members perform.

4-H youth range in age from 5 to 19. Our project leaders have the task of guiding the youths toward becoming well rounded citizens. Each project group has the ability to take on a community service project, and often several project groups will come together to do a large project.

House Calls runs every other Saturday. Today’s column is written by Doron Andrews, a respiratory therapist at Sutter Ctoast Community Clinic.

Can snoring ruin a marriage? Some of you reading this are already nodding your head. This is a frequent problem within many marriages that nobody is paying enough attention to.

The scenario usually happens like this: The husband snores. The wife nudges him to flip over. Both wake up feeling grouchy the next morning. The lack of sleep for both partners puts a strain on the marriage and creates a hostile and tense situation.

But the issues concerned with snoring are far more severe than marital issues, and in some cases can be life-threatening. Snoring can be strongly associated with a medical disorder called Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), a serious health problem in men and women of any age that should be treated.

Yoga Bites appears every four weeks.

Yogis say that we are only as young as our spine is supple, and there’s a lot of truth to that.

I need not tell you about the rigors of life and the toll they take on your body, especially the spine. Yogis practice poses that decompress and lubricate the spine to create and maintain elasticity and durability, which is the pathway to a more youthful and energetic body.

A common warm-up and cool-down move in yoga practice is Cat’s Breath. This simple flowing sequence, or vinyasa, consists of two complimentary poses alternating fluidly back and forth.

Don’t pick blackberries until they’re completely ripe (above). For tips on making a picker’s pail, below, go to www.nps.gov/redw/forkids. Del Norte Triplicate file/Bryant Anderson

Regardless of the fruits, be they full-size candy bars or the dreaded candy corn, it was your own labors that made them so sweet.

Summer marks the start of berry season in Del Norte County — a chance for kids of all ages to resurrect that trick-or-treat spirit.

My son Walter and I are playing chess on a Saturday night. As often happens, I’ve let my competitive instincts get the better of my parental ones, and pieces are flying off his side of the board like grasshoppers off a meadow.

At some point in most of our games — even those he’s won, and he’s won a couple — he reaches a point of frustration, and that junction in the road appears to be under our wheels after I dispatch his second knight.

This passionate, fair-haired boy’s face turns red, and he convulses in fits of frustration and woe, ranting about how he’s never going to win.

Suddenly I feel a heat wave of my own, wondering if I’ve been selfishly ruthless.

In Hollywood, where we lived before we moved to Del Norte County in January 2010, this would be called a “fish out of water” story. Two Jewish gay men, married in the wedding frenzy that overtook West Hollywood for a few months in 2008, move to a rural county where there are not more than 20 Jews and where there is no organized gay community.

Maybe it was an act of faith. After all, the younger of the two was a rabbi, newly minted from rabbi school at 52 from the Reform movement, the most liberal of the mainstream Jewish groups. I am the older of the two. I had stopped working and was living off a small teacher’s pension and a bit of inherited money. I had been here a few years earlier. I remembered seeing a movie theater, a Safeway and a synagogue, so when Joe asked “Can we live there?,” I said “Why not?”

Joe had done an internship while at school at Los Angeles County Jail. He was not freaked out by the prisoners or the surroundings in the jail, and so, when the school suggested to him and his classmates to apply to the state to work in prisons, he did. The first full-time position for which he was interviewed was at Pelican Bay. They correctly didn’t ask his marital status, and he became Pelican Bay’s first rabbi.