Wading In

Thursday, June 27, 2013 Bye, Kmart. Hello, fun? By Kelvin Wade From page A7 | June 27, 2013 | Leave Comment I have to admit I was a little sad to hear that Fairfield’s Kmart will close its doors in September. It’s obviously a blow to the employees and longtime customers, as well as residents who fear the shopping center will sit vacant and blighted for years like the former Mission Village shopping center did before Walmart moved in. Kmart was one of my hangouts when I was a kid. My friend Dan, a.k.a. Chumley, and I used to ride our bikes down Air Base Parkway to Kmart. We’d buy toys like Star Wars action figures or Atari cartridges and have lunch in the snack bar. For a time, my brother Orvis worked security there so they didn’t mind us hanging out. It was where we chilled before the mall opened in 1981 and became the default teen hangout. From there we might go down and thumb through the catalog in Consumers Distributing and then stop by Thrifty for one of their famous cylindrical-sc...

Sleep problems? Do what I did By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 20, 2013 | I recently had a sleep study to confirm that I have obstructive sleep apnea. Cathi’s elbows to my ribs should’ve been confirmation enough. Sleep apnea, which affects 18 million Americans, is a disorder in which breathing is interrupted briefly but repeatedly during sleep, causing a person to awaken. This fragmented sleeping interrupts the sleep cycle, lowers the oxygen in the blood and leaves the person drowsy during the day. One of the hallmarks of sleep apnea is loud snoring. It is corrected by the use of a machine called a CPAP that forces air through your nose and/or mouth to keep your airway open so you get restful sleep. Two of my brothers have had sleep studies for the condition. We used to live on Davis Drive with the railroad tracks behind our house. At night with the walls shaking, one almost couldn’t tell if it was a freight train passing by or Tony’s snoring. My brother Orvis’ drowsiness from not...

Thursday, June 13, 2013 Guns, not NSA spying, the real scandal By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 13, 2013 | 2 Comments It’s been six months since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, where 20 first-graders and six adults were killed. You wouldn’t know it because all the talk in the news is about former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations about the NSA’s domestic telephone spying program and its Internet counterpart, PRISM. But the telephone-spying program is something we’ve known about for seven years. None of it is shocking, because after 9/11 it seems we’ll do anything to fight terrorism:     We gave the president unprecedented war-making power by an obscene vote of 420-1 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.     The U.S. began a war in Afghanistan that still goes on, the longest war in American history.     We passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act, expanding law-enforcement powers and encro...

Thursday, June 6, 2013 Let’s all enforce our own driving laws By Kelvin Wade From page A11 | June 06, 2013 | Leave Comment Vallejo resident Anthony Cardenas, 52, became a local hero after painting his own crosswalk near his home on Sonoma Boulevard at Illinois Street. Cardenas claims the busy street is dangerous for pedestrians, so he painted the crosswalk and earned himself an arrest for felony vandalism and trip to jail for his trouble. Mr. Cardenas makes me want to place my tongue firmly in cheek and take matters into my own hands to make things safer. Have you ever had idiots zoom down your street in complete disregard for kids in the neighborhood? I’d love to creep outside at 3 a.m. with some cement and make my own speed bumps. The next time the speedsters come flying down my street, they’d make a sunroof with their own heads when they hit my new speed bump. BAM! Problem solved. Last week, my friend Nedra Polk asked me to write about the condition of Clay Bank Road between Air B...