MediterraneanGrocery Wholesalers in Sacramento, CA

The state of California is hiring in the new year.

Whether you’re looking for a job with the Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Lands Commission, Department of Water Resources, Department of Transportation, Department of Education or Folsom State Prison — there’s a job for you.

Remember, the California Department of Human Resources implemented COVID-19 testing of all unvaccinated state employees working on site as an additional health and safety standard. Those who seek exemption of testing and facial covering must provide proof of vaccination.

State jobs are known for offering great benefits and enrollment in the nation’s largest state public pension plan. Many of the following jobs have specific requirements, which are linked. Sift through the new Sacramento County-based jobs available on the CalCareers website, posted this week, as of Jan. 20:

Department: Fish and Wildlife

Salary: $15.68 to $18.60 per hour

The scientific aid assists with the administration, facilitation and development of human-wildlife interaction studies.

The job posting closes Jan. 30.

Associate boundary determination officer | permanent full-time

Department: State Lands Commission

Salary: $8,756 to $10,956 per month

Under the direction of the boundary determination officer supervisor, the associate boundary determination officer performs the more difficult or complex boundary assignments. The worker will also prepare maps and boundary descriptions and investigate tidal, lake and river characteristics.

The job posting closes Feb. 18.

Accounting officer (specialist) | permanent full-time

Department: Transportation

Salary: $4,701 to $5,885 per month

Under the direct supervision of an accounting administrator, the worker is responsible for independently completing duties required for providing lead function over processing statewide travel expenses and other employee claims.

The job posting closes Feb. 3.

Clinical social worker - Folsom State Prison | limited term part-time

Department: California Correctional Health Services

Salary: $3,364.50 to $4,603.50 per month

The clinical social worker conducts assessments and summarizes case information to use in diagnosis, treatment and dispositional release.

The job posting closes Feb. 3.

Custodian | permanent full-time

Department: General services

Salary: $2,885 to $3,574 per month

Under supervision of the custodian supervisor, the custodian is responsible for the daily cleaning of their assigned building.

The job posting closes Feb. 3.

Department: Education

Salary: $7,354.00 - $9,205.00 per month

The education programs consultant works independently providing technical assistance and monitoring special education compliance in assigned areas.

The job posting closes Jan. 31.

Engineer | permanent full-time

Department: Water Resources

Salary: $5,849 to $10,956 per month

The incumbent will join a dynamic team to award and manage local agency grant funding to execute flood risk reduction projects statewide. The incumbent will also support the management and implementation of multiple programs from the concept to the completion stage through solicitation, review, evaluation, and selection of new project proposals.

The job posting closes Jan. 31.

Winter storms are so last year — at least for right now. With sunnier days and warmer weather in store, it’s time to get outside and enjoy the outdoors.

Whether you want to be one with nature by having long walks outside or by building your own succulent garden, Sacramento has some fun, COVID-19 safe activities for you.

From the Folsom Lake State Recreation Area to Consumnes River Preserve, nature lovers can get their steps in and take in beautiful views while doing it. According to forecasts, the weekend will be mostly sunny with temperatures around 60 degrees — perfect to keep cool and breath in what mother nature has to offer.

If you plan on hiking this weekend, make sure to do your research and find a trail that fits your experience level and bring water, sunscreen, snacks and friends.

1103 North B St., Sacramento

The Sacramento Tree Foundation is planting trees in front of a business in the River District on Saturday. You can join the organization and help make the community more welcoming, energy-efficient and livable.

Tools, supplies and hands-on training will be provided. Attendees are encouraged to be fully vaccinated, and must wear face coverings at all times and maintain social distancing.

7485 Rush River Dr., Ste 650, Sacramento

On Sunday, you can learn about succulents and build your own terrarium garden at Device Brewing Company. You don’t need a green thumb and supplies will be provided with your ticket.

Masks are required for this event and social distancing guidelines will be in place.

As you might already know, it’s the season of crows in Sacramento. If you’re tired of seeing these jet-black creatures and prefer seeing some wild turkey, black-neck stilt or maybe a western kingbird, go birding at the American River Parkway.

The Sacramento Audubon Society has a map of top birdwatching spots on the parkway. If you’re lucky, you might find other wildlife on your trip too.

The Sacramento City Council Tuesday again rejected a special permit for a controversial Curtis Park gas station — potentially putting an end to the seven-year saga.

The item went to the council Tuesday, the result of a court-ordered appeal from Crocker Village developer Paul Petrovich’s lawsuit.

But despite a recommendation from city staff to approve the gas station, just south of the Crocker Village Safeway near Sutterville Road, the council again voted it down. The vote was 7-0, with Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela and Councilman Jay Schenirer recusing themselves.

Valenzuela recused herself because she was active in organizing against the project before she was a council member, she said. Schenirer, who represented Curtis Park until recently, recused himself due to a court order, he said.

“I’ve been waiting six years for this,” Petrovich said on video during the virtual council meeting. “This has been an emotional journey for me ... I’ve been to hell and back.”

The saga began in 2015 when the council denied a special permit to allow Petrovich to build the gas station within the new housing and retail development. Petrovich sued the city claiming that vote was due to prejudice against him. In 2020, a state appeals court ruled the council did not give Petrovich a fair hearing, prompting Tuesday’s redo.

The council heard more than two hours of presentations and public comments on both sides. But despite the years that had passed, and the addition of new council members, the result was essentially the same.

Rick Jennings, who now represents Curtis Park due to redistricting, said the gas station was too close to the Sacramento City College light rail station and was inconsistent with the city’s long-term planning document called the general plan.

“An auto-oriented use around the transit station would draw additional traffic,” Jennings said. “And this is inconsistent with the city’s policy of discouraging auto-oriented uses.”

The other council members echoed similar issues, as well as concerns about the gas station’s impact on the environment. Some callers expressed concerns it would cause long lines and congestion, similar to the Costco in North Sacramento.

Petrovich said the Safeway gas station would be much smaller than the one at Costco. He said without the gas station, the Safeway store might need to close. While the store had increased sales during the start of the coronavirus pandemic, now that people are getting groceries delivered from non-unionized grocery stores, the store’s sales are down, Petrovich said.

After several members had spoken out against the gas station, Petrovich threatened additional litigation.

“The council’s purview here is to address the four points of appeal,” Petrovich said during the meeting. “Those four points of appeal did not include general plan inconsistency. It would be another writ of mandate (lawsuit) if the decision to deny this fuel center is based on general plan noncompliance.”

Petrovich did not respond directly to a question Wednesday about any additional planned litigation.

This story was originally published January 19, 2022 10:41 AM.

ORANGEVALE, Calif. —

A prominent venue in the Sacramento music scene is closing its doors after 35 years, a decision that its owner said she made with a heavy heart.

The Boardwalk in Orangevale announced the decision on its Facebook page, blaming a number of factors, including the pandemic, “dwindling crowds and mounting financial pressure.”

The venue will go up for sale and also look for buyers for its collection of more than 300 signed guitars that line The Boardwalk’s walls and ceilings.

The Boardwalk has been a mainstay for many top local and national touring acts over the years.

“You can literally stand feet from your favorite musician,” owner Sandy Silk told KCRA 3’s Melanie Wingo about the venue.

“The Boardwalk is loud and in your face,” she said, though Megadeth once did an acoustic set there, she noted.

Musician Larissa Bryski said, “it was mind-blowing to be able to walk into a club like that and see live music up close and personal in such a raw rock and roll atmosphere."

She first attended shows there as a college student before setting her sights on performing at the venue.

“The Boardwalk was where everybody wanted to play,” she said. “It was a local, mom-and-pop place where you could go hear live music and really, really, really good live rock and roll.”

The venue’s co-owner, Silk’s husband Mark Earl, died a little over a year ago.

“It’s the end of our song,” Silk said. “It was Mark and Sandy. If you look at the guitars they’re all signed Mark and Sandy. We were always together.”

Facing her own health challenges and trying to stay open during the pandemic without Mark by her side has been hard, she said.

“I want to leave it on a high note,” she said of putting the business up for sale. “ I don’t want to leave when The Boardwalk is in dirt and it’s not doing good. I want it to be in a good enough place where it can be someone else’s place and they can continue the music.”

She said that she hoped to come to another show one day at the place, though for now she’s grateful for all those who have supported her business over the years.

“I don’t know how to say thank you enough,” she said.

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SACRAMENTO —

The tennis shoes, dirty and worn to their foam core around the ankles, appeared on the front lawn of Joan Didion’s childhood home a few months ago — a talisman of grief to an author who knew it intimately.

On top was a note quoting “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in cursive script written by a hand that seemed shaky.

“I kept his shoes. He would need them, if he was to come back,” it read.

Danielle Anderson, who moved into Didion’s elegant mansion in Sacramento earlier this year, took it as “an indicator to us that this house is something special to Sacramento.”

Thursday, as a cold rain gave way to glowering gray skies, more offerings appeared on Anderson’s steps: a white poinsettia in a red pot, three bouquets of the supermarket variety, and later, a vase of yellow roses.

All were left to honor the acclaimed writer who passed away, a daughter of the Capitol City whose relationship with it was knotty. She was at times nostalgic of Sacramento, and at times homesick for a tight-knit community. But her dreams didn’t fit on her wraparound porch, or even in the fields and ranches that defined this agricultural valley in her youth, or under the dome of the state building a few blocks away.

“She had a complicated relationship with Sacramento. She also had a real love for it,” said Rob Turner, co-editor of Sactown Magazine, who interviewed Didion in 2011. “It perhaps was constraining while she was here, she had her eyes set on bigger things.”

It is a place Didion outgrew, but that never outgrew her. At least once a week, said Anderson, someone knocks on the front door or stops her husband’s yardwork to ask if this was Didion’s old house.

For many, Didion herself was evidence there is more to this always-trying town than meets the eye.

“For the longest time, I was one of those kids that always wanted to leave Sacramento,” said Harrison Daly, 23, standing at the cash register of the Avid Reader, a local bookshop where Didion‘s books were doing brisk business Thursday. Daly began changing his mind about the city after he found a copy of “Democracy,” Didion’s fourth novel, at a library book sale.

Her ability to capture grief touched him and gave him a sense of pride that Sacramento turned out such talent, an indicator of an underground “cultural boom even though it appears to be quiet,” he said.

Didion was born in Sacramento on Dec. 5, 1934, and if she had grown up in San Francisco or Los Angeles, she would have formed a much different take on California than she did in the Central Valley. Her ancestors had arrived in Sacramento in the mid-1800s. Stories of the pioneer experience shaped her childhood and were a focus of “Run River,” her first novel. She later lamented that book as contributing to the California myth, but it provided a glimpse of how Sacramento was transforming from a farm hub and sleepy state capital into the sprawling region of 2.3 million people it is now.

Didion spent the last two years of high school in a wealthy corner known as Poverty Ridge, so named because of the city’s early history of devastating floods. Before big levees were built along the American River and muddy Sacramento River, the two waterways would overtop their banks, forcing poverty-stricken Sacramentans to escape inundation by converging on one of the town’s few hills.

Wealthy families such as the McClatchys — owners of the Sacramento Bee — would soon learn that Poverty Ridge was a safe spot to build their mansions. Didion’s father, Frank Didion, purchased one of these houses in the 1940s — a nearly 5,000-square-foot blend of Colonial Revival and Prairie School styles — at the corner of 22nd and T Streets, moving the family from a smaller home a few blocks away.

For Didion, the city’s rivers were her constant companion, an escape rather than a fear. She’d raft them and swim in them and later dissect hydrologic reports to better understand how humans had replumbed them. These studies shaped her later writings — such as the 2003 book “Where I Was From” — that debunked myths about Californians being self-reliant. As she noted, California was dependent on the federal government for flood control, irrigation and so many other services.

She lived in the grand “Didion House” for just two years, before she graduated from C. K. McClatchy High School in 1952 and departed for UC Berkeley. While at McClatchy, she wrote for the Bee’s rival, the Sacramento Union, filling a role typically relegated to women during that era. It gave her more of a window into the region’s upper crust, which she portrayed in “Run River.”

“I was working at the society desk. I did weddings. I didn’t cover weddings, I just wrote about them,” she told Turner in his Sactown Magazine interview. “I wouldn’t call that reporting.... They would send you accounts of what the bridesmaids were going to wear and stuff like that, and you would write it up.”

For many current McClatchy students, Didion is a footnote among other illustrious graduates, including retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and California Supreme Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

But for former student Annabelle Long, who like Didion left Sacramento for UC Berkeley and aspires to be a writer, there is pride and kinship in sharing a hometown, and leaving it. She didn’t read Didion until she took a course on the 1970s in college, where “The White Album” was required reading. It began her a “crash course” on other Didion works and an understanding of a Sacramento that sometimes can’t shake the chip on its shoulder, compared with several of California’s other major cities.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about her Sacramento versus my Sacramento,” said Long, who just finished an essay about her own youth in the same neighborhoods Didion frequented. “I don’t think Sacramento is all that successful in being the cultural place it tries to be. Sacramento tries very hard and I think that’s the same Sacramento that she wrote about as well.”

After departing for UC Berkeley, Didion occasionally returned to Sacramento — to see her parents or take her late daughter Quintana to see rivers and levees and other quirks of her old stomping grounds. She was distantly involved in some local real estate dealings. But in her 2011 interview, she said she hadn’t been back to Sacramento since the 1990s, and there is no record of her embracing local attempts to honor her literary career and celebrity, including being inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2014.

It is not entirely clear why, past her teens, Didion so detached herself from Sacramento unlike, say, Greta Gerwig, who produced a love letter to her hometown in the 2017 film “Lady Bird.” But the city was a key character in several of her books.

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she wrote of its significance not just to her but to California.

“That is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento,” she wrote. “If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California.”

As darkness fell on the flowers, Anderson, who lives where Didion once dreamed, contemplated what she would do with the living tributes. She wanted to leave them out where others could see them, share in their meaning and grief. But it was too sad to think of them dying there in the cold. She decided she would bring them in on Christmas, arrange them in a vase, and give them a place of honor.

And, she says, she will then do a toast — to Didion, her life, and the beauty of strong women.

Chabria reported from Sacramento, Leavenworth from Berkeley.