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- Written by: Lake County News reports
UPPER LAKE, Calif. – The Tallman Hotel and Blue Wing Saloon Restaurant will close from Jan. 2 through Jan. 25 to completely redo their kitchen facilities and upgrade other aspects of the property.
“We apologize to our loyal customers for the downtime, but the quality of our food and service should be that much better as a result of these upgrades,” said owner Bernie Butcher.
Butcher said a grand reopening of the Blue Wing is planned on Saturday, Jan. 26, culminating with a Concert with Conversation in the Meeting House featuring the reed instrument virtuoso Paul McCandless and the Spanish guitarist Antonio Calogaro.
In addition to new plumbing, flooring and kitchen equipment, the hotel will use the downtime to service its state of the art geo-exchange heating and cooling system and to do a deep cleaning of the entire property.
“The hotel will be fully staffed at all time during the closure to handle questions, future bookings and group reservations,” said hotel manager Susan Mesick.
Mitchell Construction of Lakeport has been chosen as general contractor for the project.
Blue Wing Chef Brian Rebitzke has worked closely with the contractor to come up with the ideal kitchen design and equipment configuration.
“Although most of this won’t be visible to our customers, I think the proof of the pudding will be in better eating,” Rebitzke said.
The Blue Wing Saloon Restaurant in Upper Lake opened for business in 2005 and the adjacent Tallman Hotel a year later.
Through their unique facilities as well as musical and other events, they have become popular locally and helped to attract tourists to Lake County.
Follow Lake County News on Twitter, @LakeCoNews.
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- Written by: Dr. Tony Phillips
A pair of NASA spacecraft that have been studying the Moon’s gravitational field are being prepared for a controlled descent into a mountain near the Moon’s north pole. Impact is expected at about 2:28 p.m. PST on Monday, Dec. 17.
“It is going to be difficult to say goodbye to our little robotic twins,” said MIT professor Maria Zuber, principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. “Planetary science has advanced in a major way because of their contributions.”
The two probes, named Ebb and Flow, are being sent purposely into the lunar surface because their low orbit and low fuel levels preclude further scientific operations.
Ebb and Flow’s successful mission to the Moon has yielded the highest-resolution gravity field map of any celestial body. The map will provide a better understanding not only of the Moon, but also of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved.
The spacecraft have been flying in formation around the Moon since Jan. 1, 2012. They were named by elementary school students in Bozeman, Mont., who won a contest.
The first probe to reach the Moon, Ebb, also will be the first to go down, at 2:28:40 p.m. PST. Flow will follow Ebb about 20 seconds later.
Both spacecraft will hit the surface at 3,760 mph (1.7 kilometers per second). No imagery of the impact is expected because the region will be in shadow at the time. The impact site is located near a crater named Goldschmidt.
Ebb and Flow will conduct one final experiment before their mission ends. They will fire their main engines until their propellant tanks are empty to determine precisely the amount of fuel remaining in their tanks. This will help NASA engineers validate fuel consumption computer models to improve predictions of fuel needs for future missions.
“Our lunar twins may be in the twilight of their operational lives, but one thing is for sure, they are going down swinging,” said GRAIL project manager David Lehman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Even during the last half of their last orbit, we are going to do an engineering experiment that could help future missions operate more efficiently.”
Because the exact amount of fuel remaining aboard each spacecraft is unknown, mission navigators and engineers designed the depletion burn to allow the probes to descend gradually for several hours and skim the surface of the moon until the elevated terrain of the target mountain gets in their way.
The burn that will change the spacecrafts’ orbit is scheduled to take place Friday morning, Dec. 14.
“Such a unique end-of-mission scenario requires extensive and detailed mission planning and navigation,” said Lehman. “We’ve had our share of challenges during this mission and always come through in flying colors, but nobody I know around here has ever flown into a Moon mountain before. It’ll be a first for us, that’s for sure.”
During their prime mission, from March through May 2012, Ebb and Flow collected data while orbiting at an average altitude of 34 miles (55 kilometers).
Their altitude was lowered to 14 miles (23 kilometers) for their extended mission, which began Aug. 30 and sometimes placed them within a few miles of the moon’s tallest surface features.
For more information about GRAIL, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grail .
Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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- Written by: Dennis Fordham
When an individual or a couple, as settlors, establishes a revocable living trust they are usually the initial trustees and beneficiaries. This gives them complete control to do as they please with their trust assets.
Does this freedom change, however, if someone other than the settlor is trustee while the settlor is alive? Let us examine.
If the settlor’s trust appoints someone other than a settlor as the initial trustee then that trustee may obey the settlor so long as the settlor has the power to revoke the trust.
The trust usually requires the trustee to obey certain instructions by the settlor, such as distribution instructions.
The settlor’s power to revoke the trust is the power to amend and/or to end the trust and return the trust assets to the settlors. Thus, provided the settlors retains the power to revoke the trust, the settlor can do entirely as she pleases with the trust assets the same as if they were not held in trust.
For example, consider a father who appoints his daughter as initial sole trustee while he is still alive. He has not been adjudicated incompetent, but this fact does not mean that he is actually competent.
Father appoints daughter in order to let her direct his investments of trust assets on his behalf. Father tells daughter to invest in certain stocks which his other children – who are named in the trust as future beneficiaries to inherit upon father’s death – consider for good reason to be high risk.
They object and request the trustee/daughter not to follow father’s instructions. May the trustee/daughter nonetheless follow father’s instructions?
More than likely the answer is “yes.”
While father retains his ability as settlor to revoke his living trust, the trust assets are his to do with as he pleases.
The trustee owes no duty to the future death beneficiaries (the children) while the settlor is alive and can revoke the trust.
Furthermore, after father dies, the death beneficiaries (the children) cannot sue the trustee for following these instructions.
Notwithstanding the major strains on their relationship, the trustee/daughter may try to protect the settlor/father by establishing his incompetence.
The trust may say that the settlor is incompetent if an examining physician provides a certificate of incapacity. In other cases, it may be necessary to petition a court to adjudicate the settlor’s incompetence.
Once it is determined that the settlor is incompetent to revoke the trust, then the trustee/daughter may no longer follow his instructions.
This begs the question, “does the trustee owe the settlor a duty to determine whether he is still competent to revoke the trust?”
In Estate of Giraldin, the California Court of Appeals held that the trustee owed no duty to the settlor to inquire whether or not the settlor was competent.
The court said that the determining mental capacity was too complex and uncertain an inquiry to require of the trustee.
Thus, unless and until the settlor was ever determined to be incompetent by a court, the trustee could follow the lawful instructions of the settlor.
This decision is on appeal with the California Supreme Court. A decision is expected next year.
Dennis A. Fordham, attorney (LL.M. tax studies), is a State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law. His office is at 55 First St., Lakeport, California. Dennis can be reached by e-mail at
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County officials on Friday directed flags on all county buildings to be lowered to half-staff through Tuesday, Dec. 18, in honor of the victims of Friday’s deadly school shooting in Connecticut.
The incident at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown has claimed the lives of 27 people, including 20 elementary school students, according to police.
The seven adults killed included the school’s principal Dawn Hocksprung and the shooter himself, identified as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, law enforcement reported. Lanza had fatally shot his mother before going to the school.
President Barack Obama addressed the nation on Friday.
“The majority of those who died today were children – beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old,” he said. “They had their entire lives ahead of them – birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. Among the fallen were also teachers – men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.”
The president added, “So our hearts are broken today – for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost. Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.”
The Connecticut shooting has been reported as the second-worst in the nation’s history, surpassed only by the Virginia Tech shooting of April 2007, which claimed 32 lives. The 1999 Columbine shooting resulted in the deaths of 12 students, one teacher and the two suspects.
Newtown is located in southwestern Connecticut, about sixty miles from New York City, with a population of nearly 28,000 people.
Follow Lake County News on Twitter, @LakeCoNews.