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Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of border collie, border terrier, German shepherd, hound, husky, Labrador retriever, mastiff, pit bull, Schipperke, shepherd and terrier.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
Lab-pit bull mix puppy
This female Labrador retriever-pit bull mix puppy has a short black coat with white markings.
She is in kennel No. 2, ID No. LCAC-A-4451.
Male Schipperke
This 3 and a half year old male Schipperke has a long black coat.
He is in kennel No. 3, ID No. LCAC-A-4453.
Female pit bull
This 1-year-old female pit bull terrier has a short black coat with white markings.
She is in kennel No. 19, ID No. LCAC-A-4461.
Female border terrier
This one and a half year old female border terrier has a tricolor coat.
She is in kennel No. 22, ID No. LCAC-A-4450.
Male pit bull
This 3-year-old male pit bull has a short brown coat.
He is in kennel No. 4, ID No. LCAC-A-4428.
Male pit bull
This 3-year-old male pit bull has a short white coat with gray markings.
He is in kennel No. 7, ID No. LCAC-A-4425.
Female hound
This 8-month-old female hound has a fawn coat.
She is in kennel No. 17, ID No. LCAC-A-4386.
Female pit bull terrier
This 1-year-old female pit bull terrier has a short black coat with white markings.
She is in kennel No. 19, ID No. LCAC-A-4461.
Female terrier
This 7-month-old female terrier has a short brown coat.
She is in kennel No. 23, ID No. LCAC-A-4436.
'Hank'
“Hank” is a 5-year-old male mastiff-shepherd mix with a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 24, ID No. LCAC-A-4249.
Female German shepherd
This 10-month-old female German shepherd has a short light-colored coat.
She is in kennel No. 28, ID No. LCAC-A-4297.
Male shepherd
This 3-year-old male shepherd has a short black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 31, ID No. LCAC-A-4312.
Male border collie-shepherd
This 2-year-old male border collie-shepherd has a short black coat with white markings.
He is in kennel No. 32, ID No. LCAC-A-4437.
Male American pit bull terrier
This 3-year-old male American pit bull terrier has a short brindle coat.
He is in kennel No. 34, ID No. LCAC-A-4402.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The holidays are a time for family, connection and love. Family traditions are an important component of the holiday season. They are constant and reliable. They allow us to slow down and be in the moment, appreciate each other and express gratitude.
The holidays are happy times where generations and families come together to share time with and show generosity to one another. These are particularly important experiences in childhood, when we are starting to understand relationships and how the world works.
These special times together — laughing, squabbling, playing — allow us to be part of something larger than ourselves. To love and feel loved. They create memories we can take with us and provide children with a sense of security.
It also allows us to look forward to something enjoyable. Family traditions allow an opportunity to share the love we have for each other and recognize the importance of being together.
Love is important
Love is the greatest gift we can give our children. The opportunity to be seen, heard and understood and to feel valued, worthy and special is invaluable to their holistic development.
Childhood experiences impact who we become and how we understand relationships and the world. They live under our skin for our whole lives, creating patterns which can be difficult (but not impossible) to change.
Children are constantly evolving, forming ideas, making connections and developing relationships with the most important people in their lives. These relationships impact their development, neurology, the way they interpret and understand themselves and their experiences throughout their lives.
Knowing who your child is and what they love allows you to see their future self and build experiences to support their development. These opportunities to feel seen and known are important for your child’s sense of belonging in the family, within themselves and in the world. They will learn who they truly are, what makes them unique and perhaps share their beautiful sparkle as part of the family tradition.
Holiday struggles
There can be a lot of pressure and stress during the holidays.
Parents can feel overwhelmed by holiday preparations and expectations — especially if they are back in their childhood home or with their parents and siblings. These experiences may bring back old patterns of behaviours from their own childhoods.
Parents might unintentionally be less sensitive toward their children and respond more impulsively based on their own unconscious experiences, resulting in unanticipated expectations or responses from the child’s perspective.
Family gatherings and events can also cause us to feel like we need to be perfect or provide perfect experiences. This added pressure is often externalized to children because parents feel judged based on their children’s behaviour and engagement. This is not fair to children, who do not understand the nuances of complex social situations, patterns and family history.
For the child, it might feel like dad or mom is less available or responds sharply and quickly, in a way that is not typical of them. Creating time and space to share feelings will help your child to understand the environment, while reinforcing that the love you share is secure, stable and constant.
Setting expectations
Parenting is difficult. We are often consumed by shame and guilt when things go wrong, believing we should know how to do it naturally.
We tend to parent the way we were parented because parenting is intergenerational and lives under our skin the same way our childhood experiences do. If we grew up in a family that felt emotionally secure, safe and loving, we will likely create secure, trusted relationships. Early experiences impact who we become and how we understand the world.
Creating safe, secure, loving environments and being present with your children is the greatest gift you can give. Creating boundaries and setting expectations is important for helping children feel in control of themselves and their environment.
Addressing an upset
If there is an upset, have an age-appropriate conversation with your child to talk about what happened and why you were upset. It’s important for children to understand what occurred and what they have done.
Without clarity, the child is left to interpret the situation from their own limited perspective. They may create an unintended association, such as associating getting in trouble with expressing their feelings, when the consequence was to teach them about how to use their words and not throw things in the house when upset.
The parent privately sharing their feelings and experiences helps the child understand their upset feelings and provide healthy and safe alternatives for expressing and sharing their feelings.
The parent may also find balance in this reflection by spending time together, cuddling, talking, drawing and playing. The child can process their emotions and experiences while connecting and reconciling, which will make everyone feel cozy in a space of security, trust and love.
Creating secure relationships
Moments of reconciliation create secure loving connections and become a child’s internal model. This model becomes ingrained within them, affecting their holistic development, positively impacting who they become and how they understand themselves, relationships and the world.
Forming secure connections positively affects a child’s self-esteem, confidence, organizational skills, emotional and social skills and school performance. It affects everything in a child’s life because they learn to self-regulate, develop empathy, deal with emotions and conflict and take care of themselves. They learn they can manage the unknown by learning perseverance and resilience. They learn they matter, are valued, worthwhile and loved.
Family traditions and being present provide children with trusted, safe, secure, loving experiences and relationships that are important for their healthy development and future self. They are the greatest gift you can give your child.
This is love in action — the ripple effect that will last a lifetime.
Nikki Martyn, Program Head of Early Childhood Studies, University of Guelph-Humber
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A titanium tube containing a rock sample is resting on the Red Planet’s surface after being placed there on Dec. 21 by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
Over the next two months, the rover will deposit a total of 10 tubes at the location, called “Three Forks,” building humanity’s first sample depot on another planet. The depot marks a historic early step in the Mars Sample Return campaign.
Perseverance has been taking duplicate samples from rock targets the mission selects. The rover currently has the other 17 samples (including one atmospheric sample) taken so far in its belly.
Based on the architecture of the Mars Sample Return campaign, the rover would deliver samples to a future robotic lander. The lander would, in turn, use a robotic arm to place the samples in a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that would blast off to Mars orbit, where another spacecraft would capture the sample container and return it safely to Earth.
The depot will serve as a backup if Perseverance can’t deliver its samples. In that case, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters would be called upon to finish the job.
The first sample to drop was a chalk-size core of igneous rock informally named “Malay,” which was collected on Jan. 31, 2022, in a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater called “South Séítah.”
Perseverance’s complex Sampling and Caching System took almost an hour to retrieve the metal tube from inside the rover’s belly, view it one last time with its internal CacheCam, and drop the sample roughly 3 feet (89 centimeters) onto a carefully selected patch of Martian surface.
But the job wasn’t done for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and leads the mission. Once they confirmed the tube had dropped, the team positioned the WATSON camera located at the end of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to peer beneath the rover, checking to be sure that the tube hadn’t rolled into the path of the rover’s wheels.
They also wanted to ensure the tube hadn’t landed in such a way that it was standing on its end (each tube has a flat end piece called a “glove” to make it easier to be picked up by future missions).
That occurred less than 5% of the time during testing with Perseverance’s Earthly twin in JPL’s Mars Yard. In case it does happen on Mars, the mission has written a series of commands for Perseverance to carefully knock the tube over with part of the turret at the end of its robotic arm.
In coming weeks, they’ll have other opportunities to see whether Perseverance needs to use the technique as the rover deposits more samples at the Three Forks cache.
“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on Jan. 6,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL. “It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission.”
More about the mission
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.
Just in time for Christmas, on Friday Thompson (CA-05) announced that $3,738,600 for three projects in Lake County is included in the final 2023 appropriations government funding bill.
“Working with local leaders to identify projects that will help our community is one of my top priorities every year,” Thompson said Friday. “I am proud that three vital projects in Lake County were included in the government funding bill passed today. These projects will boost local revenue, create jobs, provide state-of-the-art first responder facilities, improve water quality, reduce flood risk, and restore wetlands.
He said he is proud to have secured this funding and he looks forward to seeing President Joe Biden sign this bill into law.
This funding includes:
• $2,000,000 for the Clearlake Burns Valley Sports Complex and Recreation Center Project, which will support the construction of a large sports and recreation center complete with baseball fields, soccer fields, a 20,000 square foot rec center, a small amount of retail space, a public works corporation yard and an 80-unit affordable housing project.
• $988,600 for the Lakeport Armory Facility Repurposing Project, which will rehabilitate and repurpose a decommissioned National Guard Armory facility in Lakeport for the Lake County Sheriff’s Office headquarters and the county’s Emergency Operations Center.
• $750,000 for the Middle Creek Flood Damage Reduction and Ecosystem Restoration Project which will restart an authorized Corps of Engineers project in the Middle Creek area near Upper Lake to reduce flood and catastrophic loss, improve water quality, and restore vital wetlands habitat with cultural significance for the surrounding tribal communities.
“The Burns Valley Sports Complex is one of the most transformative projects we are working on for our community,” said Clearlake City Councilman Dirk Slooten, who served as mayor this past year. “We are so appreciative of Congressman Thompson’s support and that he is back representing the city of Clearlake! The $2 million contribution is the last piece of the funding puzzle that we expect will allow us to break ground in 2023.”
Supervisor EJ Crandell said the projects are vital to Lake County’s growth, and he thanked Thompson for his advocacy and representation.
“The Middle Creek restoration project has been ongoing for at least 30 years,” Crandell said. “We know Congressman Thompson is very familiar with the amount of impact this project will have on the health and revitalization of the Lake. The funding for this project will assist in another foundational reserve that gives the Army Corps more indication that Lake County is serious about bringing this project to the finish line for the people of Lake County.
In addition to those projects, Thompson also secured $3.7 billion for the Emergency Relief Program — or ERP, formerly known as WHIP+ — for agricultural losses sustained in 2022 due to wildfires, drought, freeze and other natural disasters.
Growers have been facing an unprecedented drought, and this program will help producers to rebuild and recover by providing financial assistance to cover a portion of their losses.
Thompson’s office said this program is important because it helps to ensure that farmers and ranchers have the resources they need to continue operating their businesses, even in the face of natural disasters.
It also helps to stabilize rural communities and keep the agricultural sector strong, which is vital for maintaining a secure and reliable food supply for the country.
Thompson also secured $1,205,966 for UC Davis to acquire two pieces of equipment which are essential for grape smoke exposure research in our district.
Research on smoke taint is vital to help winemakers and grape growers better understand the effects of smoke taint, as well as develop strategies for mitigating its impact.
This is important because smoke taint can significantly reduce the value and marketability of affected wines, which can have serious economic consequences for the wine community.
This bill passed the Senate by vote of 68-29. The bill passed the House by a vote of 225-201-1.
It will now go to President Biden’s desk for his signature.
The City of Clearlake Animal Association also is seeking fosters for the animals waiting to be adopted.
Call the Clearlake Animal Control shelter at 707-273-9440, or email
Visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
The following dogs are available for adoption. The newest dogs are at the top.
‘Bella’
“Bella” is a female American pit bull with a short black and tan coat.
She has been spayed.
She’s dog No. 51462856.
‘Chogi’
“Chogi” is a male American pit bull mix with a short tan and white coat.
He has been spayed.
He is dog No. 51373225.
‘Dennis’
“Dennis” is a male Labrador retriever mix with a short black coat.
He is neutered.
Dennis is dog No. 51682977.
‘Tanner’
“Tanner” is an American Staffordshire mix with a short tan coat.
He has been neutered.
Tanner is dog No. 51150982.
‘Aoki’
“Aoki” is a male Siberian husky mix with a white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50905477.
‘Athena’
“Athena” is a female American pit bull mix terrier with a short brindle coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49934476.
‘Atlas’
“Atlas” is a male German shepherd with a black and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51331471.
‘Babs’
“Babs” is a female Labrador retriever mix with a short black coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49505856.
‘Bruce’
“Bruce” is a 2-year-old American pit bull mix with a short gray coat with white markings.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50684304.
‘Buster’
“Buster” is a male pit bull mix with a short tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50762164.
‘Domino’
“Domino” is a male terrier mix with a short white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50815541.
‘Eros’
“Eros” is a male Rottweiler mix with a short black and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50754504.
‘Foxie’
“Foxie” is a female German shepherd with a red, black and white coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 49702845.
‘Goliath’
“Goliath” is a male Rottweiler mix with a short black and tan coat.
He is dog No. 50754509.
‘Hakuna’
“Hakuna” is a male shepherd mix with a tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50176912.
‘Herman’
“Herman” is a 7-year-old male American pit bull terrier mix with a brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51236411.
‘Hondo’
“Hondo” is a male Alaskan husky mix with a buff coat.
He has been neutered.
He’s dog No. 50227693.
‘Jack’
“Jack” is a 9-month-old male terrier mix with a short black and brindle coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50992658.
‘Kubota’
“Kubota” is a 4-year-old male German shepherd with a short brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50184421.
‘Little Boy’
“Little Boy” is a male American pit bull terrier mix with a short tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50075256.
‘Mamba’
“Mamba” is a male Siberian husky mix with a gray and cream-colored coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 49520569.
‘Matata’
“Matata” is male shepherd mix with a tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50176912.
‘Maverick’
“Maverick” is a male pit bull-border collie mix with a short black and white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51027806.
‘Maya’
“Maya” is a female German shepherd with a black and tan coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 50428151.
‘Mikey’
“Mikey” is a male German shepherd mix with a short brown and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51012855.
‘Molly’
“Molly” is a female Samoyed mix with a long white coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 50933031.
‘Noah’
“Noah” is a male pit bull terrier mix with a short white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51286102.
‘Paige’
“Paige” is a female American pit bull mix with a short brown coat.
She has been spayed.
She is dog No. 51194668.
‘Rascal’
“Rascal” is a male shepherd mix with a black and brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50806384.
‘Snowball’
“Snowball is a 1 and a half year old male American Staffordshire terrier mix with a short white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 49159168.
‘Terry’
“Terry” is a handsome male shepherd mix with a short brindle coat.
He gets along with other dogs, including small ones, and enjoys toys. He also likes water, playing fetch and keep away.
Staff said he is now getting some training to help him build confidence.
He is dog No. 48443693.
‘Trike’
“Trike” is a male border collie-Australian shepherd mix with a black and white coat and blue eyes.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 51029972.
‘Willie’
“Willie” is a male German shepherd mix with a black and tan coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50596003.
‘Zeus’
“Zeus” is a male Samoyed mix with a long white coat.
He has been neutered.
He is dog No. 50933068.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
The pardons are for individuals who were convicted of crimes involving drug possession and sale, burglary, robbery and taking a vehicle without consent.
The earliest of the convictions went back to 1973, while the most recent was from 2008.
The California Constitution gives the governor the authority to grant pardons.
The governor regards clemency as an important part of the criminal justice system that can incentivize accountability and rehabilitation and increase public safety by removing counterproductive barriers to successful reentry.
A pardon may also remove unjust collateral consequences of conviction, such as deportation and permanent family separation.
Pardons do not forgive or minimize the harm caused by crime. Instead, these pardons recognize the pardon grantees’ self-development and rehabilitation since then.
Gov. Newsom weighs numerous factors in his review of clemency applications, including an applicant’s conduct since the offense, whether the grant is consistent with public safety and in the interest of justice, and the impact of a grant on the community, including crime victims and survivors.
While in office, Gov. Newsom has granted a total of 140 pardons, 123 commutations and 35 reprieves.
The Governor’s Office encourages victims, survivors and witnesses to register with CDCR’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and Services to receive information about an incarcerated person’s status.
For general Information about victim services, to learn about victim-offender dialogues, or to register or update a registration confidentially, please visit www.cdcr.ca.gov/Victim_Services/ or call 1-877-256-6877 (toll free).
Additional information on executive clemency can be found here.
The full list of pardons can be seen below.
12.23.22 Pardon Certificates by LakeCoNews on Scribd