KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Kelseyville is home to hundreds of seniors and that number is growing quickly.

The need for services and activities is great and in response the Kelseyville Senior Center is launching many new programs to serve its community starting May 2.

The community is invited to join the grand opening festivities and luncheon starting at 11 a.m. at the center, located at the old Post Office building at 5245 Third St. 

Many volunteers – including members who helped start the senior center – are involved in making this launch a success for the center and community.

“My husband and I helped create and open the center originally, and I am excited about being a part of this new beginning. So many worked hard to establish this center and it is great to see it being put to a greater use for our seniors,” said senior center volunteer Marilyn Westfall.

New office hours for the center starting in May will be Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Daily lunches will be served from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and will include a full salad bar, soup, entrée and choice of beverage. Seniors pay as they can with a suggestion of $5; non-seniors pay $6.  The option for only soup and salad bar is pay as you can for seniors with a suggestion of $3 and non-seniors pay $4. 

The lunches are not the only exciting thing the Kelseyville volunteers are proud to launch in May. 

Ani Soto will be leading Zumba Gold classes geared for seniors with low impact exercise from 9 to 10 a.m. on Wednesday and Friday with a suggested donation of $5.

Free Tai Chi classes will be offered by Linda Burton from 9 to 10 a.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, with donation gladly accepted. Tai Chi has proven to be one of the most effective forms of exercise to promote better balance in seniors who participate, leading to a longer, safer and more independent life.

For card enthusiasts who like to play or want to learn “Hand and Foot,” the group meets Mondays from 1 to 4 p.m.

On Wednesdays an art group meets with artists doing painting, crochet, needlepoint and knitting from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

On the first and third Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Jack Ballance teaches intermediate artists at a cost of $12 per class and students bring their own supplies.

Along with the growing activities calendar and services the center is in need of volunteers who can help.

Opportunities include serving lunches, clerical work, phone calls to homebound seniors, cleaning, and providing information and assistance to those who stop in.

To volunteer, or for more information, call the center at 707-279-2175.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Friday's rain topped expectations in most parts of the the county.

The National Weather Service had predicted up to half an inch of rain during the day and about another tenth of an inch Friday evening, as Lake County News has reported.

As of 1:30 a.m. Saturday, the agency's weather stations reported the following 24-hour totals, in inches:

– Bear Canyon (Cobb area): 1.20;
– Boggs Mountain: 1.0;
– High Glade Lookout (above Upper Lake): 1.22;
– Indian Valley Reservoir: 0.44;
– Kelseyville: 0.69;
– Lower Lake: 0.27;
– Lyons Valley (near Lakeport): 0.86;
– Putah Creek (near Middletown): 0.77;
– Upper Lake: 0.50.

The rains have helped keep Clear Lake just above the “full” level of 7.56 feet Rumsey. It was at 7.57 feet Rumsey early Saturday, according to US Geological Survey records.

Forecasters said there could be more rain on Sunday night – when there is a 20-percent chance – with conditions then clearing until Tuesday night, when there will be a slight chance of showers continuing through Wednesday night.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

The California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, or CACEO, has launched an election costs Web site, produced as a result of a generous grant from the James Irvine Foundation, and created in partnership with Q2 Consulting.

The newly launched Web site is located at http://results.caceoelectioncosts.org .

“Election costs vary from county to county and this new website is designed to assist the public in understanding election costs throughout California,” said Orange County Registrar of Voters and CACEO President Neal Kelley.

From polling places to poll workers – ballot production to multi-lingual support – you will be able to explore and compare costs dating back to 2004.

CACEO will continue to collect costs from counties for the 2016 Primary and General elections – updates will be posted in 2017.

“We are very happy to share the results of many months of work collecting and analyzing the costs data from California counties,” added Shasta County Clerk/Registrar of Voters Cathy Darling Allen. “Our hope is that, with Irvine's support, as this project grows over time, this information helps to illuminate the larger discussions about election reform both within California, and nationally.”

The site shows that information is unavailable for several counties, including Lake. Why Lake's wasn't available was not clear on Friday.

“We have 47 counties participating and we are hoping for more in 2017,” Kelley told Lake County News.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Lake County Sheriff’s Office will be escorting Deputy Jake Steely and his family home to Lake County from Chico on Sunday, April 24.

Steely was rescued from the ocean in Mendocino County on Monday and was declared brain dead on Thursday afternoon at Enloe Hospital in Chico, as Lake County News has reported.

Lt. Steve Brooks said the procession is scheduled to arrive at the intersection of Highway 20 and Highway 53 in Clearlake Oaks at approximately 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

The procession will proceed south on Highway 53 and is scheduled to arrive at the intersection of Highway 53 and Highway 29 in Lower Lake at approximately 2:45 p.m., according to Brooks.

Brooks said the procession will continue northbound on Highway 29, arriving at the intersection of Highway 29 and Live Oak Drive in Kelseyville at approximately 3:05 pm.

The procession will continue north on Highway 29 to the intersection of Highway 175 in Lakeport, arriving at approximately 3:15 p.m., before turning onto South Main Street and continue northbound through downtown Lakeport, Brooks said.

The procession will turn left onto Clearlake Avenue and then right onto North High Street, and will end at Chapel of the Lakes Mortuary, which is located at 1625 N High St. in Lakeport.

The times may vary, depending upon traffic conditions. Brooks said any support by the public would be greatly appreciated by the family.

Brooks said the Lake County Sheriff’s Office will be joined by officers from the California Highway Patrol, Lakeport Police Department, Clearlake Police Department and several other public safety agencies.

On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth.

The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.

This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.

Less than half a second later, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope picked up a brief, weak burst of high-energy light consistent with the same part of the sky. Analysis of this burst suggests just a 0.2-percent chance of simply being random coincidence.

Gamma-rays arising from a black hole merger would be a landmark finding because black holes are expected to merge “cleanly,” without producing any sort of light.

“This is a tantalizing discovery with a low chance of being a false alarm, but before we can start rewriting the textbooks we'll need to see more bursts associated with gravitational waves from black hole mergers,” said Valerie Connaughton, a GBM team member at the National Space, Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and lead author of a paper on the burst now under review by The Astrophysical Journal.

Detecting light from a gravitational wave source will enable a much deeper understanding of the event. Fermi's GBM sees the entire sky not blocked by Earth and is sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays with energies between 8,000 and 40 million electron volts (eV). For comparison, the energy of visible light ranges between about 2 and 3 eV.

With its wide energy range and large field of view, the GBM is the premier instrument for detecting light from short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which last less than two seconds.

They are widely thought to occur when orbiting compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes, spiral inward and crash together. These same systems also are suspected to be prime producers of gravitational waves.

“With just one joint event, gamma rays and gravitational waves together will tell us exactly what causes a short GRB,” said Lindy Blackburn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “There is an incredible synergy between the two observations, with gamma rays revealing details about the source's energetics and local environment and gravitational waves providing a unique probe of the dynamics leading up to the event.”

Currently, gravitational wave observatories possess relatively blurry vision. This will improve in time as more facilities begin operation, but for the September event, dubbed GW150914 after the date, LIGO scientists could only trace the source to an arc of sky spanning an area of about 600 square degrees, comparable to the angular area on Earth occupied by the United States.

“That's a pretty big haystack to search when your needle is a short GRB, which can be fast and faint, but that's what our instrument is designed to do,” said Eric Burns, a GBM team member at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “A GBM detection allows us to whittle down the LIGO area and substantially shrinks the haystack.”

Less than half a second after LIGO detected gravitational waves, the GBM picked up a faint pulse of high-energy X-rays lasting only about a second. The burst effectively occurred beneath Fermi and at a high angle to the GBM detectors, a situation that limited their ability to establish a precise position. Fortunately, Earth blocked a large swath of the burst's likely location as seen by Fermi at the time, allowing scientists to further narrow down the burst's position.

The GBM team calculates less than a 0.2-percent chance random fluctuations would have occurred in such close proximity to the merger. Assuming the events are connected, the GBM localization and Fermi's view of Earth combine to reduce the LIGO search area by about two-thirds, to 200 square degrees.

With a burst better placed for the GBM's detectors, or one bright enough to be seen by Fermi's Large Area Telescope, even greater improvements are possible.

The LIGO event was produced by the merger of two relatively large black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun. Binary systems with black holes this big were not expected to be common, and many questions remain about the nature and origin of the system.

Black hole mergers were not expected to emit significant X-ray or gamma-ray signals because orbiting gas is needed to generate light. Theorists expected any gas around binary black holes would have been swept up long before their final plunge.

For this reason, some astronomers view the GBM burst as most likely a coincidence and unrelated to GW150914. Others have developed alternative scenarios where merging black holes could create observable gamma-ray emission. It will take further detections to clarify what really happens when black holes collide.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity a century ago, and scientists have been attempting to detect them for 50 years. Einstein pictured these waves as ripples in the fabric of space-time produced by massive, accelerating bodies, such as black holes orbiting each other.

Scientists are interested in observing and characterizing these waves to learn more about the sources producing them and about gravity itself.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

For more information about NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, visit http://www.nasa.gov/fermi .