If you saw me on the street, you would think of me as just another middle school aged girl enjoying summer vacation.

...nor any drop to drink. That’s the famous old lament from Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

I just returned from a trip to Lake Berryessa with my wife, brother- and sister-in-law. We drove from Steele Park Resort, along to Spanish Flats, to Berryessa Marina Resort, then to Rancho Monticello Resort, and finally to Putah Creek Resort. I want to tell you that if we didn’t know it was California, we would have thought we were in Iraq.

In a recent “Your Turn” editorial column, Mike Thompson responded to an appeal by Kevin Eggers, who had requested Thompson, our United States Representative in Congress, to uphold the “sovereignty” of our nation (“Concerns over a ‘hostile takeover’ of U.S.,” July 21). By responding to Eggers, he, Mike Thompson, vowed he would never vote to “abandon” U.S. sovereignty. Oops!

When Iraq’s Olympic team paraded at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, the head of the country’s Olympic Committee was Uday Hussein, the notoriously sadistic son of dictator Saddam Hussein. Uday made Baghdad’s Olympic facilities the headquarters for his own epic feats of rape, torture and murder; among those he brutalized were athletes on the national team who failed to live up to his expectations. His may have been the foulest abuse of a national Olympic movement in history. Yet the International Olympic Committee found a way to live with Uday, just as it has tolerated the manipulations of sports teams by totalitarian governments around the world — including this year’s host, China.

Dear editor,

Dear editor,

This week I read the agreement between the county and American Canyon concerning American Canyon’s borders and other related issues. I advise anyone who is going to vote on it in American Canyon, and anyone in the county who is concerned about growth issues to take a close look at it. There are some issues that trouble me about it, and I can certainly say that it is a pro growth document.

The world is changing along the lines of a liberal vision, with conservatives pulling hard to stop it but unable to do so, merely providing a braking action as the coming liberal vision of the world keeps skidding forward.

Proposition 8, the "Limit on Marriage, Constitutional Amendment," on the November ballot, calls for an amendment to the state constitution, declaring that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.