Phil Dirkx

Paso Robles City Councilmember Fred Strong sent an email to several people last Saturday about the vacant youth prison in Paso Robles. He suggested the state sell it to the city for $1.

This year, Paso Robles, my hometown, was supposed to get a new, 1,000-bed prison. What we have now is a vacant youth prison. About a year ago, state prison officials said they were going to transform that empty youth prison into an adult prison. But now they’ve changed their minds.

People who sell stuff to me have got my number, and that number is two.

I doubt most embezzlers start out to steal. I bet most just begin “borrowing” a little. That thought crept into my mind Wednesday as I read The Tribune’s story about Morgan Rafferty of Arroyo Grande, whose sentence for embezzlement was six months in jail and three years’ probation.

On the first Christmas after our wedding, I gave Mamie a globe. Not a golden globe, not a crystal globe, but a basketball sized, rotund, spherical map of the Earth.

Most of us think of ourselves as members of the middle class, but we may have to think again. California’s middle class is shrinking. I read that in last Friday’s Tribune.

Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of Paso Robles’ first wartime blackout. The blackout siren wailed at 7:45 p.m., Dec. 10, 1941. That was three days after Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor and forced America into World War II.

Back in 2005 when people asked me, “Where in heck is Paso Robles?” I’d say, “Sixty miles north of the Michael Jackson trial.”

My hometown, Paso Robles, is like an unlucky Monopoly player. It wants to buy the Water Works, but it keeps getting “Chance” cards that say, “Go back three spaces.”

I wish officials wouldn’t say “wastewater.” I prefer the word “sewage.” When we hear or read “sewage” we can visualize it, we can smell it. But the word “wastewater” doesn’t instantly sink in, we have to translate it.