Smart Train is a red herring. If approved, it will have a negligible effect on reducing the number of commuters, but it will eat up transportation funds that would otherwise be spent on adding lanes to 101, which - given the trends - will result in increased congestion.

It's a full ballot. My mailbox has been bursting with campaign literature. Stuff's hanging from the front door knob. The newspaper is full of ads. Editorials are opining for this or that. Telephone calling banks are working overtime with "get out the vote" messages. Pollsters have been calling too. Fundraisers are knocking on the door. None of the candidates have sent me "personal" e-mails but there's still almost two weeks to go so who knows...

I commuted to San Francisco from Petaluma for five years. I'd hit the road at 6AM to beat the pack and tried to leave the City by 3:30 PM Monday through Thursday if I wanted to get home and have some evening left to spend with my family. If I didn't get out town by 2:30 on Friday I would be trapped in the molasses stream of cars slowly oozing north. Of course, if there was an accident...forget it. I would be lucky if I got home before my (then young) children were in bed. When I relocated my business in 1999 to Santa Rosa - a mere 20 minute commute from Petaluma...on a bad day - I calculated that each week I picked up an extra work day from the time I spent commuting to San Francisco. Today when I hear folks lamenting the terrible commutes along the 101 corridor in Sonoma, I remember back to the 250 days I spent driving to and from San Francisco and count the local traffic as a blessing.

Personally, I liked the idea of a local baseball team. I thought it would burnish Petaluma's reputation, and add to our city's appeal as a place to visit. What I didn't like was the mad rush to approve the deal. Normally, the city fathers and mothers treat any proposed development with a level of suspicion verging on paranoia, and subject it to stultifying gauntlet of scrutiny, debate and criticism...all of which was lacking when it came to the proposed ballpark.

With the elections just four weeks away, and the smell of victory in the air, our friends on the left are more bi-polar than usual. Perhaps wresting control of the levers of power can be accomplished by being all things to all victims...I mean...people.

My paternal grandmother proved out a home stead in South Dakota over a century ago. I have a copy of photo of a sod house that stood on the property...a green building if I ever saw one. So when Chris Samson asked me to vamp on the subject of Green Building that's the first thing that came to mind. I momentarily considered doing something on Green Music Center at SSU, but that structure's long delay is due to a scarcity of an entirely different kind of green building resource...long green.