Adrian Rogers

The older the artist gets, the fussier about anatomy. An extra arm joint, an oversize human head, a wing too big for its bird – the grotesque bothers him more than it used to. And the older he gets, the less he thinks of his painting, Mel McCuddin says with a little laugh: “Every time I do a show, when it’s time for the show, I think, ‘This is not good enough.’ ”

A free seminar on dyslexia Thursday will address the causes and warning signs of dyslexia and ways to help children with the learning disorder learn. Susan Barton, a frequent speaker on dyslexia, reading instruction and literacy issues, will present the three-hour seminar at Central Valley High School. Barton created a tutoring system to improve the reading and writing skills of people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, although organizers say the seminar is not a sales event.

The dried marijuana buds packed in jars, the marijuana-infused vitamin water, the Chewy Choo chocolate cannabis candies, the Canna Bull drinkable energy shots – they’re all sold at the Pacific Northwest Medical marijuana cooperative to people with prescriptions for marijuana to treat what ails them. Soon – likely by next June – marijuana grown at the North Side business will be available for sale to those without prescriptions, too, under the voter-approved initiative legalizing the production and sale of recreational pot.

Eunice Moe Brock was an American woman who carried her passion for helping people across oceans, continents and decades. In a recent visit to Spokane, a group of people from a city in China carried it on. A delegation from China intent on creating a palliative care program at a hospital renamed for Brock in Liaocheng, on China’s western edge, toured the palliative program at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in hopes of learning about end-of-life care options.

Steve Atlas came late to the art of hand-to-hand balancing. He was almost 36 when he did his first handstand, only a first step to learning a performance art in which a “base” and a “flyer” work together to perform feats of strength and balance.

It’s far too late for Harold Balazs to be an outsider. As an artist, he knows what he’s doing. Other people – lots of them – know what he’s done.

At 2 years old, Manito Tap House is throwing itself a beer party. The South Hill gastropub is marking its special day with a parking-lot Beerthday Bash from noon to 10 p.m. Saturday. Those of legal drinking age and willing to pay $5 to get in are invited.

Got just the three bucks? You, too, can pig out. A little. For the first time, vendors at Pig Out in the Park are offering $3 “bites” from their menus, during special hours.

Her right eye forced wide open with a metal speculum, Shelly Buckholz sat still in her chair, hands folded over the orange stuffed reptile provided by a technician as a laser emitted pulses of energy into her eye – essentially cutting a flap in her cornea. Buckholz’s surgeon used a thin, wet sponge to push the flap aside so he could use more laser energy to reshape an inner layer of her cornea, changing her eye’s ability to focus and improving her vision.

As he tells it, the story of Tim Savatieff’s survival starts on New Year’s Day in 2010, when he, his wife and a friend, on a 10-mile hike in the mountains during a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, engaged in a hypothetical discussion: If any one of them suffered a cardiac arrest or some other life-threatening problem, would they want “heroic measures” performed to save their life? They all agreed they would not.

The sound was tiny and muffled as it came through a vent in JJ Dunn’s bedroom and he teetered on the edge of sleep. He was dog tired, only awake an hour later than usual to adjust his fantasy football teams. Maybe the sound was a little moan.

Her days as a race car driver serve Mary Clarke well as a home health nurse in North Idaho. She travels daily, taking dirt roads to remote locations throughout the five counties to find some patients. She has at least once unbuckled her seat belt and readied herself, shaking with adrenalin, to leap from her car if it slid much farther down the narrow switchbacks cut into a snow-covered mountain.

As a survivor of cancer, Mary Phillips is ineligible to participate in a national study that will search for ways to prevent it. But she can tell you how cancer can surprise you. It surprised her nearly five years ago, a few days before Christmas.

The team of Spokane technicians who collect corneas from the newly dead respond as needed, 24 hours a day, traveling their expansive territory – from the Cascades to the Idaho-Montana border, from the Canada border to the Oregon border – to recover tissue from unseeing eyes. Their mission: to help restore sight in the living.

Katie Fitzgerald’s yoga students, instructed to close their eyes and notice their surroundings at the start of a class last week, had much to be mindful of. The gentle breeze. The warm sun. The calling birds.

Here’s a group Americans don’t hear about much about during immigration reform debates, according to physician and anthropologist Seth Holmes: immigrants – especially the migrant workers who toil in U.S. fields. “It’s usually statements like, from one side, ‘These people are draining our economy.’ And from the other side you might hear, ‘These people are important to our economy,’ ” Holmes said. “But you don’t actually hear much about individual people. So I think it’s easy for us to forget that they’re mothers and daughters and sisters and brothers.”