Adrian Rogers

Durga and Manju Ghalley speak limited English after moving to Spokane from Bhutan two years ago. But it was easy to explain why the couple picked up a dozen free diapers at Mission Community Outreach Center last week for their daughter, Suprena, who’ll turn 2 this summer: “To protect her,” Durga Ghalley said.

An exhibition of hand-painted bird prints by John James Audubon opening Friday was 25 years in the making, the collector’s interest sparked in childhood. Tom Colgrove, now a senior vice president at Clearwater Paper in Spokane, grew up in a part of Pennsylvania rich with historical significance, within walking distance of the farm where the famous naturalist lived. Colgrove attended Audubon Elementary School in the town of Audubon, and during his childhood visited Audubon’s home – a museum by then – and the surrounding property, which had become a bird sanctuary.

The new ballet “Adalia,” to be performed Saturday by the students at Ballet Coeur d’Alene, has a fairy godmother and a palace in the clouds. But it strays from the princess stories told and retold on stage and screen.

An exhibit at the Museum of Art at Washington State University brings the “back of house” to front, putting its staff on display as they do the work involved in running a museum and mounting a show. The public is invited to observe and ask questions as museum workers do curatorial tasks, such as preservation work, documentation and inventory in the gallery space. Visitors will see how artwork is acquired, photographed and framed and learn about the guidelines museum staffers live by when handling the work.

It’s DIY pest control.    Key to preventing infestations of the disease-carrying mosquitoes, ticks and mice in yards and homes: creating an inhospitable environment by draining water that accumulates in surprising places, cleaning up plant life and debris, and keeping bird feeders, compost bins and other pest-food sources away from the house. As residents embark on cleaning and landscaping and open up summer cabins, the Spokane Regional Health District is offering those and other tips for curbing pests. In particular, deer mice, mosquitoes and ticks can carry hantavirus, West Nile virus and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, among other illnesses.

Karen Ertler’s job is to turn a bad situation in a better direction. But when it comes to getting kids who’ve landed in the emergency room into treatment for drug or alcohol use, a lecture is rarely a selling point.

For many parents, the moments when a child reaches another milestone of development are notable but inevitable. For Michelle and Tim Nagle, those moments were massive. And until they happened – until their daughter Eden finally crawled at 2, walked on her own at 4 1/2 – the Coeur d’Alene parents weren’t sure they would. Whether Eden, now 6, would walk was just one unknown in a world of them after they learned she had a rare genetic condition. To share their joy in their daughter’s progress was one reason Michelle made a video documenting Eden’s milestones. Another was to offer encouragement to other people facing their own hurdles.

Chris Gardner, whose best-selling autobiography was the basis of the 2006 movie “The Pursuit of Happyness,” will speak Monday in Spokane at a luncheon to benefit the Women Helping Women Fund. Born in 1954 in Milwaukee, Gardner lived with his mother, Bettye Jean Triplett, and in foster homes. He never knew his father.

To emphasize the nonglamour of her life on the road, Paula Poundstone posts pictures of chairs on her Facebook page. Skuffed-up metal folding chairs, hard plastic ones, grungy sunk-in easy ones – backstage is not what people think it is, the comic said in an interview before her stop in Spokane tonight. And if the chairs look lonely, posing solo in the corners of bare-walled rooms, there’s truth in that, too. Traveling alone is lonely, Poundstone said.

As potentially fatal illnesses that spread easily, meningitis and whooping cough are diseases that make the news when infections spread. Behind the headlines, a Shadle Park High School graduate is leading efforts to identify and stem the illnesses’ outbreaks.

Bill and Kathy Kostelec are old-school photographers. Really old school. To make their black-and-white photographs, the Kostelecs – a married couple whose work will be featured at a show opening Friday – load single sheets of film into big, bulky, wood and metal cameras dating as far back as the early 1900s.

He remembers his escape from the Nazis in glimpses and extended scenes, some parts faded or vibrant or gone altogether. Steve Adler, now 83, was 8 when his parents loaded him on a train in Berlin, its child passengers headed for Great Britain. The rescue mission known as Kindertransport removed an estimated 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland in the months before the start of World War II.

Judy Brender does a lot of math in her head, the kind of never-ending tally probably familiar to anyone on a tight budget. Brender, president of the Spokane Children’s Theatre, knows the price of soap in the restrooms. She knows how much the theater’s new firewall cost, and its heating and cooling equipment, and how much the theater pays monthly for its lease and insurance.

People just don’t die like they used to. Few of us get cholera or succumb during childbirth. Instead, we live well enough and long enough to see our bodies fall apart, plagued by diseases caused or worsened by stress, said Robert Sapolsky, a scientist and author who’ll speak Thursday in Spokane.

A library exhibit about the Great Depression aims to draw connections between the people who made do then and the people making do now. That’s why, along with exhibits of Depression-era artifacts and oral histories of people who lived through it, the Spokane County Library District is offering free classes on thrift-store treasure hunting, preserving produce, and repurposing old furniture or décor. The latter sessions, led by Kelly Lynch-Chevalier, aka “the Retro Vixen,” are called “Is That New? Make Cheap Stuff Good.”

It was like many beginning yoga classes in most ways. Students gathered in a studio at the downtown YMCA raised and stretched their limbs in wobbly formation, their instructor at the front talking them through poses. It was unlike many yoga classes in a few ways. One student’s oxygen machine purred at regular intervals; cancer had cost him part of a lung. In the center of the room, the waning sunlight lit another student’s face and her colorful hat, her hair sparse after treatment for lymphoma.

Before he arrived in Iraq, David Abrams expected to be shaking sand out of his underwear and taking showers maybe once a week. Then his plane delivered him in Baghdad, and he saw his new office, a forward operating base. A FOB is a secured position where soldiers support the military’s tactical operations, doing the paperwork, fixing the vehicles, cooking the food and sorting the mail of war.

Chitra Divakaruni can laugh now about the people who shouted at her in public after 9/11. “Go back to Iraq!” they’d holler, or some similar jeer. But the aggression was scary when it happened, said Divakaruni, who moved to the U.S. from India at 19 and was living in the San Francisco Bay Area when the terrorist attacks occurred.

There’s not a lot of leverage in the middle, not at first glance. As a man in the middle – of life, of the country, of the socioeconomic spectrum – poet George Bilgere has noticed this holds true in the literary world.

Radio waves figure prominently in Anthony Doerr’s new novel, wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to the eye but powerful enough to compel hearts and minds. But the title, “All the Light We Cannot See,” also refers to stories that remain unseen and unheard, decades after World War II. Because they’re children’s stories, they’re hidden stories.

Kevin Taylor has a theory: Everybody in Spokane has a story about living here, one of those “only in Spokane” tales that, OK, could happen elsewhere but that seem so … “Spokane-ish.” When you have a story like that, he believes, you feel a need to tell it.

The narrow art space at Ink is mostly empty for now, old brick walls and wood floors illuminated by strings of shop lights. Mismatched chairs line the walls, and a heavy bench, rescued from the trash, anchors the north end. But the group of writers, artists and teachers behind the soon-to-be-officially nonprofit organization sees a collapsible stage in there, a screen-printing press, big communal tables for writing and visual-art classes. Maybe they’ll show movies on the new drywall.