Tag: Jeff Roubal
At Home With Jeff: Soup’s on
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist While Vivian and I were camping in Kings Canyon a couple weeks ago, we made beef stew for dinner. It was the most delicious stew that I’ve had in a long time. (I suspect part of the secret seasoning may have been kerosene fumes from the camp stove.) As […]
At Home With Jeff: Things You Never Expect
By JEFF ROUBAL Things sometimes turn out as you never expected — usually to the better! In 1983, Vivian and I were living in Hayward. We were a young couple, married five years with three children all under the age of four. We rented a small, three-bedroom house on Sunset Boulevard. Sunset was a main […]
At Home With Vivian: We’re so lucky
Ola! Cheerio! Bonjour! Ciao! Yassou! Salve! Hello! Jeff and I just returned from a Mediterranean cruise. Wow. Totally awesome. Wow. What else do you say after actually seeing and doing things you only dreamed about? As my husband likes to say “We’re so lucky!” Cruising has changed dramatically during my lifetime. I remember going with […]
At Home With Jeff: Best of plans
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist I have finished enough home improvement projects to understand that the final product is never one hundred percent what was initially envisioned. Colors look different after you get them home from the store. Dimensions must be compressed or stretched slightly to fit in with existing conditions that are almost […]
At Home With Jeff: Interesting Times
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Contributor “May you live in interesting times.” – A traditional Chinese curse One of my current projects is to build a fence between our neighbor’s house and ours. Our neighbor does not live in his house. Nobody does. The house is uninhabitable. There are holes in the roof. The gas […]
At Home With Vivian: How I Met Your Father
My mother believed in fate. She’d often say, “It will happen when it’s supposed to happen but it wouldn’t hurt to help it along.” When something happened, good or bad, she’d say, “It was meant to be.” On one fateful day in 1973…. My college roommate, Katie, knew that a young man from the sixth […]
Bike to work day
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez Gazette Contributor Tomorrow will be our 24th annual Bike to Work Day – a day for everyone to ride a bicycle to work, to school, to run errands, and to play. More than one million Bay Area residents live within five miles of their workplaces, an ideal distance for bicycling. Tens […]
Saint Catherine of Siena celebrates 145th anniversary
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez Gazette Contributor More than 200 worshippers from Saint Catherine of Siena Catholic church processed through the streets of downtown Martinez on Saturday morning to celebrate the 145th anniversary of the Martinez church and the feast day of Saint Catherine of Siena. Parishioners walked and sang with images of Saint Catherine, celebrated […]
At Home With Jeff: You’ve Got Mail!
By JEFF ROUBAL Special to the Gazette Everyone loves getting letters and packages in the mail. Mail is one way that Vivian and kept our family close over the years. Several of my assignments with the Air Force required extensive travel away from the family. One time, I was sent to Somalia for six months. […]
At Home With Jeff: Bring home the bacon
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Guest Columnist Vivian and I were grocery shopping recently when I started grumbling about the price of bacon. “Stop complaining,” Vivian chided me, “Bacon does not grow on trees. It takes a lot of hard work.” Hearing her words, I was immediately transported back to my grandparents’ farm. My mother […]
