On Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the advent of what was to be four long years of war, my family was living in Los Angeles. Just four months later we would pick up stakes and move to Napa.

Good morning, everyone. Well, here we are enjoying another beautiful day in Napa Valley. Life just doesn’t get much better than this.

Like a zillion other people, my first visits to Napa Valley were as a Bay Area resident seeking an easy getaway. We’d buzz north from the city after a hectic week, and the troubles of the day would melt away as the landscape changed from the crowded Highway 101 corridor through San Rafael to the two-lane roads, vineyards and open vistas up here.

Having been an observer of the Internet from near the beginning, I’ve been able to watch most of its evolution. I know I missed some things — I didn’t work for the DOD or do research at a major university in the pre-Web days — but by and large I have a certain scope when it comes to the online world.

 The ripple effect of the subprime mortgage meltdown has resulted in a decline in the availability of money for home purchase and a tightening of lender requirements on the loans that are being made.

A year ago, a scientific report showed that global warming may create conditions that will be too warm for the traditional great wine regions of France and the United States to make great wine. 

Seven years ago, on another Labor Day weekend, we Napans woke up to a roaring sound out of hell, a shaking and the sound of glass seemingly breaking everywhere in the house. And our outlook on life in a safe haven would never again be the same.

As the Labor Day weekend of the year 2001 approached, we Napans may not have spoken about the same weekend one year before when the Mount Veeder 5.2 quake shook old Napa town to its roots, but I for one did have that shaker in mind. What's more, I figured that if we dodged the bullet this time, the rest of September 2001, would be smooth sailing. As it turned out, I figured wrong.

Aug. 31 marked not only the end of another Chefs Market season, but the last time a Chefs Market will be held on a Friday. Next year, the market moves to Thursdays. 

Judy Ahmann of Napa is headed to Chicago in Sept. where she’ll attend the the 27th National Beef Cook-Off. Ahman, who is president of California CattleWomen, Inc., will be a contestant hostess — “hopefully, for a California contestant,” she noted, “California has four of the 20 entrants.”

The lake is dropping a little, and the weeds are everywhere. That provides good cover for all sizes of fish, but makes it difficult to motor around to catch them.

A Greek farmer who made his own wine a couple years ago used the wine to save his life, his home and possibly his neighborhood during the recent fires that ravaged Greece.

The script is supposed to go like this: You raise your children. They leave the nest. After a pause, grandchildren show up. It’s cootchie coo all over again.

Dear Len & Rosie, My mother passed away this May without a will. Her husband, my stepfather, is in the hospital right now with only days left to live, again without a will. I do not have a power of attorney. My step-father’s physician at the hospital wrote a letter stating that my step-father is unable to make decisions and has a terminal disease. How do I get conservatorship or anything related so that I can handle his affairs? There isn’t much but what there is I would like to take care of.

Mahoney Vineyards is no longer pouring wine at its old Carneros Creek winery on Dealy Lane.

With all the market volatility we have been experiencing, I was reviewing some of my old columns to see what I had said about it before. Here are a few excerpts of a column I wrote in April 2001, in the middle of the last major stock market decline.

Last week I mentioned that the Chinese symbol for the word "crisis" is the combination of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity.