THE PAGE TURNS

March 31, 2026March 31, 2026

You Are Here (Castro Valley)

Fast Facts

Castro Valley, California
Long/Lat: 37.41 N/ 122.05 W
Population: ~66,000
Size: 17 sq mi
Avg temp in April: 66 F / 18.9 C
Median income: $145,000
Ethnicity: 33% White/33% Asian/20% Latino
Main industries: Healthcare (big hospital) / Bedroom community

If we’re going to learn about small countries in our A to Z Challenge which starts tomorrow, April 1st, then we need some context. I know we need to know Where, but we need a little bit more. There’s no value in learning names, dates and places by themselves, no Who, When, or Where without learning Why and What? Geography is useful in comparison. I thought that one logical way to provide that context was to start with my home town. Then, I can tell you how many Castro Valleys there are in … well, you’ll see.

Alameda County is the middle of the Bay, Castro Valley is kinda middle of Alameda county. Drawing by Arkyan.

Castro Valley is a small enclave nestled in the East Bay Hills of Northern California, not the coastal range, but the second range of rounded, golden hills. It’s halfway between Berkeley and Fremont, partway between the Bay and the Tri-Valley region, about equidistant from San Francisco and from San Jose. We’re that little town people pass on their way to somewhere else. However, it’s the 4th largest unincorporated town in California and in the Top 30 across the U.S. We don’t want to be incorporated. We’ve voted on it twice; we don’t want a mayor or a police force, thanks, very much, just a really good library.

March 16, 2026March 16, 2026

Everyone is Green (Not Necessarily Irish)

Celtic knots in the Book of Kells. Photo at Wikipedia.

Author’s Note: An oldie but a goodie–perfect for the month of March.

Ninety percent of Americans are not Irish. Thus, it has always confused me that everyone wants to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. If your heritage is Irish, more power to you, please feel free to immerse yourself in your culture. If you are in Ireland, I have no doubt it was a gay old time. But why in the sam heck is March 17 entrenched as an annual holiday? Every U.S. calendar in the month of March has a giant shamrock symbol on it. Yet, the vast majority of us aren’t Irish, and we don’t all get our own cultural holidays, do we?

Is Everyone Really Irish in America on St. Patrick’s Day?

It particularly never ceases to amaze me when my diverse Bay Area colleagues, whose English is heavily tinged with accents from the Philippines, Ecuador, Hong Kong, and Mumbai, remind me that we will all need to wear green. What color do I get to wear on Polish heritage day? When is Diwali again? What’s that traditional German dish that we all eat on …. really, there’s no German-American day? That’s particularly surprising when Germans comprise nearly 17% of our ancestry.

Map of U.S. ancestry by county. Photo from Vivid Maps.

February 21, 2026March 2, 2026

Olympic Redemption & the Four-Year Interval, Milano-Cortina Version

Shiffrin wins a second slalom gold, four Games later. AP Photo/Marco Trovati.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. They’d been here before. I’ve written about this before. More than once. These Games have happened before. This Olympic thing, this redemption thing, is like a video on a loop playing a story on repeat. It’s built into the competitions. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s why the Olympics is a gift that keeps on giving.

The Greeks created the four-year interval, back when lifespans were shorter. They had a Games every year, but only one Olympiad to honor Zeus. It must have been the same, with veteran athletes returning after a loss to win. If they survived the wars, disease, injuries, and other calamities of 750 B.C.E.

The Winter Games are a particularly brutal place for athletes to perform. Landing on the wrong part of a blade, tipping your ski into the wrong side of the pole, or twisting a curling rock just a little too much can crush medal hopes faster than a boot on an ant. What makes them even harsher is that you may have waited four years to glide away from center ice or launch down that hill, only to see all that work erased in a second. Then, it’s time to make hard choices; can you go back to training and wait out that four years for one more chance?