Your Monday Newspaper – 9/28/26 – Saying Goodbye to Lisa Walker-Roseman at Glass Beach + This email is a test to check how our site is working, its a TEST but NOT only a test + Stop succulent Poaching + Kelpfest – most important environmental story on the planet
I attended a wonderful memorial service for Lisa Walker Roseman on Saturday. I missed the ocean event at Big River to be there, but for me it was the right choice.
The ceremony, and the week I watched Davina Liberty and her brother Christopher Vargas and her family endure, made me want to listen and learn rather than speak. I’ve decided to greatly limit what I share here. It felt personal, and I also hope people don’t rush down to the site.
Davina used that incredibly difficult week of sorrow to find some closure through memories and lessons about the dangers of smoking and hoarding, and through the joys and wonders her mother brought to so many people through the natural world she loved so deeply.
Lisa and I enjoyed arguing for many years, in the way only two somewhat OCD people can. We often alarmed others with our spirited disagreements about red-legged frogs, snowy plovers and similar subjects. She knew far more than I did about birds, and I learned a great deal from being wrong, and occasionally from being right.
Lisa was an award-winning photographer and birdwatcher who occasionally admitted to going ocean walking with me and the dogs. She wasn’t particularly fond of dogs around birds, and out of respect for her, I left the dogs at home for the memorial.
She was pretty amazed when I showed her the respect and interactions Brutus has with birds. Caesar still tends to scare them and is a work in progress.
Lisa once shared with me what she considered the most difficult part of her life, along with her illness, which I somehow assumed she would beat. I expected to see her back out on the coast someday, binoculars in hand, watching birds again.
Many people participated in the return-to-the-ocean ceremony led by Davina, her brother and their spouses. It was a moving tribute, and a fitting farewell for someone who spent so much of her life immersed in the natural world she loved.
I plan to share most of the images with Davina, who provided a master class on closure that I hope she writes a book on. I obtained her other books at the yard sale of her moms stuff.
Now for something far more trivial- but please help us with this!
I had to send out some story at the request of the AI overloads, as explained below. I am fixing our site so it doesn’t send out news late and so that everybody can once again open their emails from the links provided.
If you have a little time and you can open this email, tell me if there any oddities. Do the videos play? Are there photos of an abalone and succulents? Knowing if people can open it helps and if any warnings about the email are issued. The warnings don’t indicate any sort of actual danger or problem, they come because of the WAY our site is integrated and are basically just my own learning curve.
Law enforcement has curbed succulent poaching on the Mendocino Coast, but residents should remain vigilant and report suspicious activity. Anyone who witnesses suspected succulent poaching should report it to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s CalTIP hotline at 888-334-2258, which accepts reports of poaching and environmental crimes. [wildlife.ca.gov]
For those who might be interested: Here’s what’s going on behind the scenes at Mendocinocoast.news – SNOOZE WARNING!
We have had a lot of problems since we took over running the website ourself. We had relied on someone who handled many of the technical aspects and provided good service along the way. Looking forward, the choice was either to run it ourself or find someone else. We’ve been doing it ourself.
Most of the problems people have been seeing aren’t directly from us. They come from the fact that we are on a new server. It’s still Namecheap.com, but in a new physical location, whatever that means.
We use two other companies, WordPress and SMTP.com, to make this all happen. We also had to come up with a new email system, which mostly works.
The problem is all this new activity on a site that isn’t new at all. Sending out 1,000 emails from a “new but not new” site sets off all sorts of triggers with the robots that control the internet, from Facebook to Google. They aren’t as diabolical as I feared. They have rules that can be followed, but all three companies have to work together to make it happen.
All three companies have given us endless AI robots to talk to. This is NOT the horrific experience of dealing with the nonfunctional Blue Shield or Comcast bots. These actually provide answers that are remarkably helpful at times. But like all robots, they are bullshit artists of the worst kind when it comes to questions they can’t answer. Then they tell you stuff that simply isn’t right.
The good news is that if you challenge them, the robots eventually throw up their hands and connect you with an actual person. And they have been very accomplished. Some are from foreign countries, some from Washington state, but nearly all of them actually know what they’re talking about.
That’s becoming a rare thing. In most corporations today, customer service is almost completely idiotic beyond reason.
The even better news is that we’re making progress. Every day the site gets a little more stable, the emails get a little smarter, and we learn a little more about the machinery that keeps a small community newsroom running.
Thank you for your readership, your patience and your support as we work through the bumps. If you notice something odd, a broken link, a warning message, missing photos, videos that won’t play, or anything else, we’d love to hear about it. Any feedback you can give us as we continue to improve is genuinely appreciated.
MendocinoCoast.news exists because readers care enough to keep showing up. Together, we’re learning our way through the technical challenges while keeping local news free, independent and flowing. Thanks for sticking with us while we figure out how to keep the robots happy, the stories moving and the community connected.
