Sonoma County’s ground-breaking website to monitor and guide the overall health of the local population is winning appreciative national attention, including recognition from US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sibelius (left).

The impressive county health website was a prototype for the county’s partners in the project, and Supervisor Brown says Sonoma County benefited as they shouldered most of the considerable costs involved in its design and development.

  It isn’t getting any easier to build affordable housing in California. But the need for it is continuing to grow all the same.

Cities across Sonoma County have done an admirable job of meeting their goals for creating affordable housing, as specified in the Housing Elements of their respective General Plans, Diane Spaulding (left)  told the Sonoma County Housing Coalition on Monday.  But a close examination of those housing numbers reveals that, even with good intentions and political will, building units for low and very low income families remains difficult.

Finding funding for affordable housing in the California budget will be especially challenging this year, but the demand for it is continuing to grow. In a “new normal” world, Spaulding suggests, the solution may lie in creating ways to mesh the housing need with other social goals.

Diane Spaulding is the Executive Director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California. She spoke at the kickoff breakfast Monday for the Sonoma County Housing Coalition's annual Affordable Housing Week.  See the full list of Affordable Housing Week activities here.  You can read the Coalition's  annual Housing Progress Report for 2009 here.

Work is quietly continuing toward the scheduled 2014 rollout of the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit commuter train, including a series of meetings this week about the designs of the train stations along the route.

 The self-propelled rail cars will each be 85 feet long, and may look something like this prototype, but SMART spokesman Chris Coursey says their interior configuration will be variable.

SMARThas issued a draft of its technical specification for rail vehicles for initial industry review. The document can be viewed on the SMART web site here. Registration with the site is required to access this page; the process is simple, free and open to the public.

The full schedule of station design meetings along the central and southern part of the rail route is detailed below.

Alzheimer’s disease, a severe form of progressive dementia, casts a long and fearful shadow on the baby boom generation, but lifestyle changes and advance planning can delay and even diminish its impacts.

A certified Occupational Therapist, Teepa Snow  is a dementia expert who trains and consults for healthcare professionals and families privately. She explains that  while Alzheimer’s is the most widely recognized form of dementia, it is just one of the many forms that condition may take. Here, Snow  (left) describes a few of the others.

Simple forgetfulness is a common trait for most adults, but the early signs of Alzheimer’s are significantly more acute. Here, Teepa Snow breaks down the difference.

The diagram below illustrates the physiological changes that characterize Alzherimer's disease.