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The winter prep sports season gets underway just as the “atmospheric rivers” hit Northern California, forcing most athletes indoors—unless their chosen sport is soccer.

There’s probably no more room in the kitchen for these hands-on workshops on how to make fresh croissants with a few simple tools. The reason is not the cost but the bakery. It’s the same Quail & Condor that lately survived a whirlwind of attention following its NY Times selection as one of the 22 best bakeries in the country. ..

As of Jan. 13, the DistrictR tool was live and functional, and anyone can draw up a city map of four, five or six districts, with the five-district model the only option for a rotating mayor, as Healdsburg has at present. Various tools are located in the upper right corner, as is common in such applications—a hand tool to move the map, a pen tool to select a district and color it, an eraser tool to fall back on. Residents have another three weeks to work with the mapping tool....

Not everyone is glued to the NFL playoffs this year, for obvious reasons. The NBA has its disappointments, too, and that college football season was even longer than usual. What’s a sports fan to do? The answer is obvious: watch the Greyhounds play.

I don’t know a single person here in Sonoma County who doesn’t already have the Watch Duty app downloaded and poised to start spewing notifications, in case of wildfire. But most of my Los Angeles friends had never heard of it before Jan. 7,...

When asked about how the idea for a rock ’n’ roll orchestra for all came about, Jason Eckl dove in on the feeling that orchestral performances can be a bit stiff. “My wife is cellist Rebecca Roudman, who is a member of a number of Bay Area orchestras [including both the Oakland East-Bay Symphony and the Santa Rosa Symphony], and this means I’ve been to a lot of orchestra concerts,” he said.

The great French filmmaker Jacques Tati only made a handful of movies: 'Playtime' is one of his best. Virtually wordless (while a bouillabaisse of European languages is spoken, the gags are visual), the film follows Monsieur Hulot as he navigates the modern world with his self-confidence and composure unaffected.

Weight classes have a meaning, and a strategy, although judges today are pretty strict in their weight calls. The technology of measuring weights is so sophisticated these days, there are few if any ways to “nudge” the scale. “So if you go to a competition and you step on a scale, and you are a 10th of a pound over, you are disqualified” in the weight class, Scott Weidemier said. “There’s no leeway. They’re all digital scales these days, that are certified every year.”