Santa Cruz

I know there aren’t many of you looking for non-alcoholic drinks to sip on when your friends go out for cocktails but this is a great NA drink featured at the Paradox Hotel (Solaire Poolside Bar) in Santa Cruz.  I am not exactly sure of the name of this drink but twice now I’ve just asked the bartender to make me a good NA drink and the photograph above shows off what they make! For your drinking friends, they do offer some local beers on draft (Santa Cruz Ale Works i.p.a. and amber ale) and wine too of course.  At the moment they only have Soju cocktails but they are inline for a liquor license beyond beer and wine.  We like munch on their Marcona almonds. You can order drinks and sit outside by their pool and sip away! Cocktail Bar Menu The Solaire does have a happy hour too: Solaire Happy Hour $5 Apps & Drinks Sunday – Thursday 4:00PM – 7:00PM Restaurant Hours- Open Daily Breakfast 7:00AM-11:30AM Lunch 11:30AM-5:00PM Dinner 5:00PM -10:00PM Happy Hour- 4:00PM- 7:00PM, SUN-THURS For reservations, please call (831) 600-4545. Linked Photos of the Pool

Tesla' loan-repayment claim challenged by Chysler, Elon Musk defends statement

Santa Cruz just dropped its Summer 2013 catalog. Click on in and see what's new! Related posts:Santa Cruz 2013 CatalogSkate & Create 2013, Santa Cruz ‘A Skateboarder’s Paradise’ PhotosPay Day: Santa Cruz Skate & Create

Report: Dwight Howard would consider joining Warriors

Waiting for Mama, Berkeley, CA Mama went on a phenomenally unusual (for her) week-long meditation retreat last week.  Since the birth of these kids, she had never taken that much time for just her, and she returned a remade woman. We all made it through the week intact (a feat made nearly inevitable by my current status as work-at-home, self-employed Baba), but lordy did we miss her, and lordy were we happy for her to arrive. After a long drive from the Santa Cruz mountains, she texted us to say that she was at the local market picking up provisions. From that point onward, I couldn’t pry the kids off the porch.  And when mama finally arrived, I couldn’t pry them off of her.

A solid south swell lights up Santa Cruz; locals rip the bag out of it

Health Net Selected to Participate in Covered California Health Insurance Exchange Individuals will be able to enroll in Health Net's health plans when the new exchange opens for business LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Health Net of California, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Health Net, Inc. (NYS: HNT) , today announced that it has been selected as a Covered California health plan in the Covered California individual health insurance exchange. The selection means Health Net health plans for individuals and their family members will be offered in many areas of the state when Covered California enrollment begins. Covered California is expected to begin enrolling beneficiaries on Oct. 1, 2013, and benefits are expected to become effective Jan. 1, 2014. "California consumers will be able to choose Health Net health plans that are cost-effective and provide access to medical groups, physicians, specialists and hospitals that we believe share our commitment to integrated, coordinated, high-quality care and service," said Steve Sell, president of Health Net's Western Region Health Plan. In Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, San Diego and Riverside counties, Health Net expects to offer its new tailored-network HMO exchange product, CommunityCare, which will be built around local health care providers that have formed the backbone of its tailored-network strategy. "Health Net helped to pioneer tailored-network HMO products and has developed Latino outreach programs in California for both small and large employer groups," Sell said. "With our CommunityCare network, we are bringing similar levels of affordability, quality coverage and cultural competency to individuals." Sell said that Health Net will work to ensure that the medical groups, individual physicians and hospitals that make up the CommunityCare network are committed to comprehensive care coordination in their local communities and offer Health Net members freedom of choice in selecting their eligible in-network primary care physicians. "We believe these medical groups, individual physicians and hospitals share our commitment to providing products and services that are affordable, simple, dependable and local," said Sell. In the Northern California counties of Contra Costa, Kern, Marin, Mariposa, Merced, Monterey, Napa, San Benito, San Joaquin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus and Tulare, Health Net of California's wholly owned subsidiary, Health Net Life Insurance Company, expects to offer individuals PPO exchange products. Collectively, Health Net and Health Net Life bid to be Covered California health plans in 13 of Covered California's 19 regions, and were accepted in all 13. About Health Net Health Net, Inc. is a publicly traded managed care organization that delivers managed health care services through health plans and government-sponsored managed care plans. Its mission is to help people be healthy, secure and comfortable. Health Net provides and administers health benefits to approximately 5.4 million individuals across the country through group, individual, Medicare (including the Medicare prescription drug benefit commonly referred to as "Part D"), Medicaid, U.S. Department of Defense, including TRICARE, and Veterans Affairs programs. Through its subsidiaries, Health Net also offers behavioral health, substance abuse and employee assistance programs, managed health care products related to prescription drugs, managed health care product coordination for multi-region employers, and administrative services for medical groups and self-funded benefits programs. For more information on Health Net, Inc., please visit Health Net's website at www.healthnet.com. Cautionary Statements Health Net, Inc. and its representatives may from time to time make written and oral

A selection of Bay Area transit service notes for Memorial Day on May 27, 2013. I’ve sampled the Google Transit schedules for Monday for a handful of these agencies and it appears Google correctly chooses the Memorial Day holiday schedule for VTA, AC Transit, BART, Capitol Corridor and Caltrain. If you test the other services I’m sure somebody would appreciate a note. VTA: Sunday / Holiday schedule. AC Transit – all local and transbay service: Sunday schedule. Caltran: Sunday schedule. BART: Sunday schedule. SF Muni: Mostly a Sunday schedule with some exceptions. Golden Gate ferries and buses operate on a weekend / holiday schedule. Blue & Gold Fleet ferries run on a weekend / holiday schedule. The San Francisco Bay Ferry (operated by the Water Emergency Transportation Authority) makes mention of Memorial Day operation on only a couple of their individual individual ferry route pages, so I don’t know if their ferries will run on a weekend or weekday schedule on Memorial Day. SamTrans: Sunday Schedule. Contra Costa County Connection : No service. Marin Transit: Holiday schedule for West Marin Stagecoach and local buses operated by Golden Gate Transit; no service for community shuttles. Altamont Commuter Express (ACE) train: No service. Amtrak Capitol Corridor: Weekend / holiday service. Memorial Day service for transit agencies in the Monterey Bay Area: Monterey Salinas Transit (MST): Sunday schedule with limited lines in operation. The 55 to San Jose will run on a Sunday schedule. Route 78 to Santa Cruz isn’t on the list of buses running on Memorial Day. Santa Cruz Metro: No service on Memorial Day, with the exception of the Highway 17 service to San Jose which operates on a weekend schedule. San Benito County Express: No service. Have a good weekend! Related posts: Bay Area transit and Martin Luther King Junior Day 2013 SF Bay Area free transit New Year’s Eve Bicycling tourists in San Francisco

After nearly three years in Ohio, I was able to take my academic books out of storage yesterday and move them into my new fourth-floor green-apple-green office on campus. The office is as narrow as an elephant’s coffin, but there is room in it for eight bookcases. Unlike Walter Benjamin, who was jerked into reflection before his books were even on his shelves, I started in immediately to release my books from their boxed confinement and arrange them in a rough semblance of an alphabet—the A’s just inside the office door, the middle of the alphabet having to wait until I’d removed enough boxes to reach the shelves over by the window. Before leaving Texas, I had packed the books in “the mild boredom of order” and carefully noted the contents in Sharpie on all four sides of each cardboard box. I asked the movers to leave the boxes marked Aar–Aris and Aris–Barz in the hallway outside, and I attacked those boxes with a utility knife right away.Before long, though, I was reduced to guessing where Henry James and Dr. Johnson would end up when, days from now, I would finally be done. I had gone without these books for almost three years, and though I had missed very few of them, I was warmed by their familiarity. My library is like an intellectual autobiography. As I lifted books out of their boxes, blowing the dust off the top edge, I was able to retrace my steps. There were the books from my undergraduate years, when I was an American studies major (just like Tom Wolfe!). There was John Kouwenhoven’s Made in America, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Seymour Martin Lipset’s First New Nation. There were the poets I read to keep up with my friends at Santa Cruz, all of whom seemed to be would-be poets—John Haines, William Stafford, W. S. Merwin. There were the books from graduate school—D. W. Robertson’s Preface to Chaucer, L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, William Empson’s Milton’s God. There were the philosophers on whom I broke my teeth when I first arrived to teach at Texas A&M, because the younger colleagues whose company I preferred were in philosophy—Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice. None of these would I buy again, or even reread, but I have no inclination to dispose of them (even if I knew how), and to own them—to stand them in the light on my office shelves—makes me happy.The reason did not strike me until I had unpacked several volumes of essays by now-forgotten critics who were not prominent even in their own day—William Troy, Theodore Spencer, D. G. James, Benjamin DeMott (his Supergrow was badly damaged by mildew), W. C. Brownell, Maxwell Geismar, Mark Krupnick, John Fraser, Arnold Isenberg, F. W. Dupee, Eliseo Vivas. I who dislike story collections am a sucker for Selected and Collected Essays, and have been since long before I began to identify with their authors. Theirs are the books that give personal character to my library like drapes and wall colors in a room. What they suggest is that my library is also a geniza, where I keep and store (in Hillel Halkin’s words) “books of which no one had known; known books of which no copies had survived; the lost works of . . . poets and philosophers.” My library is a monument (or tomb) for a way of literary life that is quickly passing (and perhaps has already passed away).Its motto is something I tweeted earlier this morning: If you are committed to good writing, then everything you write is in its defense. Substitute good scholarship or good thought for “good writing,” first here and then there, and you can account for the commitment that produced every book in my library. Can the same principle account for every book in the public libraries, which are furious to buy up multiple copies of current bestsellers for readers unwilling to invest their own money in things that cannot last? I may be the last man alive who recognizes some of the authors in my library, but there is something strangely consoling in that. My library is organized upon the p

Check out all of the new products from Santa Cruz in their summer '13 catalog here.