A cafe au lait-colored Singer sewing machine sits on the far side of Lynn Dee Humphrey’s kitchen table.

The machine has been in her family for four generations, passed down along the female line, and it is with that sewing machine that Humphrey has built her homegrown business, Aprons 2 Die 4.
 

The Sonora Pub, a new restaurant debuting Friday at 177 S. Washington St., has been confusing people.   

“Is it an English pub? No. Irish? No. Brew pub? No, although we get our beer from a local brewer and it’s really good,” said owner Steven Korn.
   

Last year was one of the toughest in decades for those looking to sell a home, but 2010, if current foreclosure rates hold, is shaping up to be even tougher.

For buyers, though, the news of weaker home prices may be easier to swallow. Case in point: A manufactured home on 2.6 acres in Jamestown sold this year for $20,000. Such a deal would have been unheard of during the peak of the recent housing bubble, which burst nationwide in 2008.

Sonora Regional Medical Center will expand its range of services in Calaveras County to include a Prompt Care facility, which is expected to open this fall.
   

The clinic will provide drop-in family practice services and possibly some specialty services. It will be located at 23 N. Main St. at the corner of Highway 4 in Angels Camp.
 

The Tuolumne County Chamber of Commerce and other agencies will host the Mother Lode Business Services Summit in May.
   

The summit is a series of workshops on different aspects of building and promoting business, said George Segarini, president and chief executive officer of the Tuolumne County Chamber of Commerce.
   

The release of Apple’s iPad this weekend added one more competitor for already beleaguered independent bookstores.

There’s Amazon’s Kindle. There are Borders and Barnes and Noble. And most prominently, there’s the Internet.

A Sonora native’s design for a swiveling garden cart turned heads at a recent national design competition.
   

Francis, a junior at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, took third in the student design competition sponsored by the International Housewares Association.
   

Kinematic Automation Inc. — which deals in manufacturing technology for the medical field — seems like it would be more at home in the Bay Area than Tuolumne County.
 

After all, the multi-million-dollar company has clients in faraway places like Ireland, Australia and Japan — but none in Tuolumne County.
   

No publisher? No problem.

A Calaveras County writing group has banded together to form a nonprofit publishing agency to empower local artists to get their work from concept to final product.

Jenny Martin has been talking about her Murphys-based design studio and the games it develops for Facebook and the iPhone for at least half an hour when the admission comes.

“I’m actually playing one as we’re speaking,” said Martin, 48.