The e-mail subject this morning read "Sad News." The words it contained were worse.

Wendy Masonek, a fellow high school student who inadvertently catapulted me into journalism, had died.

People my age, in their mid-20s, aren't supposed to die.

The obituary in my hometown newspaper didn't say what she died from, though I'm fairly sure it was related to a disease she had that kept her liver from working right, leaving her skin slightly jaundiced and her body weak. She was a cheerleader with my sister in a Pop Warner league, and went to the same high school as I did. She played drums, and one time we got together in her living room and rocked out.

‘My name is Crabby Appleton,
I’m rotten to the core
I do a bad deed every day,
and sometimes three or four.
I can’t stand fun for anyone,
I think good deeds are sappy,
I laugh with glee, it pleases me,
when everyone’s unhappy!’

Everyone knows someone that fits this description. The song is from the old “Captain Kangaroo Show,” sung by the villain on the Tom Terrific cartoons.

Though Home Depot has been in the news for deciding not to build dozens of new stores, spokeswoman Kathryn Gallagher assured me that the store set for Atwater is still on the books.

It'll be built later this year and will open early 2009, she said. That's later than initially planned.

The store is the other main tenant of the Atwater Ranch shopping center that will be anchored by a SuperTarget, set to open July 31.

Two Stanislaus State students from Merced County will receive cash awards on Friday for reports they authored on their favorite series of books.

English major Maria Gasaway of Atwater will take home $200 for her paper on the Swiss Family Robinson collection. History major Abby Peretz of Merced will receive $100 for an essay about a fantasy literature collection.

Here's the CSU Stanislaus press release, issued today.

In the story I wrote last week about the American Lung Association’s "State of the Air" report, quite a few California cities -- including Merced -- measured high levels of ozone. Ozone or smog is a summertime air pollution problem, extending from May through September.

Spokespeople from the lung association said those numbers would have been portrayed even higher if the Environmental Protection Agency's new, more stringent ozone scoring system had been taken into account. Now, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District has adopted that more "health-protective" scoring standard.

This may have set some sort of record.

I wrote April 25 about how fast and efficient the Merced DMV office had been that day when I went in to replace a lost license. Twenty minutes in and out.

The Lovely Sarah (she has now become a local icon) told me, pro forma, that it could be three to four weeks before the new one landed.

I got it sometime last week (while I was out of town).

In other words, from time of application to my mailbox was A WEEK OR LESS.