Indio

EDMONTON, Canada - With a daughter to feed, no job and $200 in the bank, Detroit pipe fitter Scott Zarembski boarded a plane on a one-way ticket to this industrial capital city. He'd heard there was work in western Canada. Turns out he'd heard right. Within days he was wearing a hard hat at a Shell oil refinery 15 miles away in Fort Saskatchewan. Within six months he had earned almost $50,000. That was 2009. And he's still there. "If you want to work, you can work," said Zarembski, 45. "And it's just getting started.

Any uncertainty over the long-term home for Goldenvoice's Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and its country cousin Stagecoach has come to an end. Indio on Wednesday granted approval of Goldenvoice's proposal to stage and expand its festival offerings in the desert city, clearing the way for an agreement that will keep Coachella and Stagecoach in Indio through at least 2030. Goldenvoice, a subsidary of AEG Live, has in turn agreed to increase the amount of per-ticket revenue it shares with the city begining in 2014.

Dates can keep in refrigeration for years and are available year-round, but the freshly harvested fruits, which started showing up last week, are far superior in texture and flavor, and are one of the great seasonal treats available at Southern California farmers markets. Most distinctive is the Barhi variety, picked at what is known in Arabic as the khalal stage of maturity, when it is yellow, firm and crunchy, with a flavor of coconut, sugarcane and cinnamon. Most of the leading date varieties, such as Medjool and Deglet Noor, are high in tannins at this stage and thus too astringent to eat with pleasure.

Bill Monroe, the man widely acknowledged as the father of bluegrass music, was in search of a new banjo player for his famed Blue Grass Boys when a young musician turned up backstage at Nashville's celebrated Ryman Auditorium during a 1945 Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast, hoping to audition. Once Monroe and his guitarist, Lester Flatt, heard the sparks fly from 21-year-old Earl Scruggs' instrument, the bandleader asked Flatt what he thought. "If you can, hire him," Flatt told Monroe, "whatever the cost.

San Bernardino-based Highland Soils Engineering Inc. and Highland Testing Laboratory Inc., subsidiaries of the Irvine Consulting Group, have opened a branch office and laboratory in Indio at 80-975 Indio Blvd.

The Indio City Council has approved a comprehensive plan for a $2-million, 900-acre redevelopment project in the central city that the Indio Center Redevelopment Agency has likened to creating a new city. "It won't actually be a new city," William Northrup, director of planning and development, said, "but rather an existing one with a complete new look, including a new logo, freeway signs, and a general redesign of the center of the city and surrounding areas."

An area near the potentially deadly San Andreas Fault was rattled by 117 small earthquakes last weekend, scientists said Wednesday. The quakes raised some concern among scientists because they were centered only six miles northeast of a section of the San Andreas Fault that the U.S. Geological Survey believes is most likely to produce the much-feared "Big One"--a catastrophic quake measuring magnitude 7.5 to 8.0 Seven of the 117 quakes measured magnitude 3.

Let's start with the date shake. By all accounts, the Coachella Valley's most famous refreshment was invented by one Russ Nichol, proprietor of the Valerie Jean Date Shop. This was back in the '40s and Nichol, in a small stroke of genius, decided he would take advantage of two essential facts of life in Indio. First, summers here were very hot. Indio is stuck at the tail end of the Coachella Valley just down the road from Thermal, and Thermal didn't get its name for nothing.

No, Gabriel Ruelas kept telling himself, it was all wrong. Jimmy Garcia wasn't supposed to die. He, Ruelas, was the one who was supposed to die young. That's the way it had always been in the dreams. Night after night they would come to him in his restless sleep. The circumstances were different, but the result was always the same. Gabe Ruelas dead before his time. Although he has been a boxer since age 12, he never died in the ring in the dreams. Often it would be in a car accident.

Polo, that ancient sport for man and horse first played in Persia more than 2,500 years ago, is undergoing a renaissance among the date palms and tumbleweeds of the Coachella Valley. The United States Polo Assn. has been celebrating its 100th anniversary this year and as a climax, an all-star match of Hall of Fame caliber players--the Polo Master of the Masters--will field two teams of all 10-goal players on Sunday at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.