Local businesses are rolling out the pink carpet Saturday for area women during the fourth annual Girls Day Out event. Antique stores, specialty shops, book stores, coffee shops and other businesses in three neighborhoods are participating in the daylong event.

Muppy surveyed the room, shook his fur and marched inside to graciously accept hugs, squeezes and strokes from the seniors eager to visit with him last week at East Central Community Center’s senior center. “You’ve got white hair and so do I,” Fran Ellis said as she gave Muppy a pat.

Spokane’s neighborhood organizers are now calling on a new city liaison for help with traffic-safety projects, neighborhood cleanups, crime prevention and other activities. The Spokane City Council last week confirmed Mayor Mary Verner’s appointment of Jonathan Mallahan to the post of Neighborhood Services director.

A Lakeside High School freshman will lead a Saturday cleanup of the Minnehaha Rocks as his Eagle Scout project, organizing volunteers to pick up trash and clean graffiti at the popular rock climbing and mountain biking area. The project coincides with another group’s efforts to plan for an improved trail system on Beacon Hill by soliciting conceptual designs from landscape architects.

Steve Osmonson is winning his own private war, and to mark the victory he’s dedicating himself to world peace. Or at least to maintaining a homemade Hatch Road sign dedicated to the cause on Spokane’s South Hill.

Don Beaty instantly recognized the house as one his mother worked at as a young cook in the early 1920s. The Nuzum House, on the South Hill’s storied Sumner Avenue, was featured in a September Spokesman-Review article about a historic homes tour to benefit the Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens.

Roman nymphs danced among columns Saturday as a gladiator and two goddesses served as drum majors, directing the music and movement of the A.C. Davis High School band from Yakima. Later, the Richland High School marching band performed selections from “Les Miserables.” Other bands played pieces from Cirque du Soleil, Christian-inspired music, contemporary rock hits and original compositions.

Two years after the Manito-Cannon Hill neighborhood and Spokane City Hall battled it out over Bernard Street trees, the two groups are working together to develop an innovative way to preserve trees, slow traffic and filter stormwater on Lincoln Street. “I think we’ve changed the culture of City Hall,” said John Covert, who chairs the Lincoln Street subcommittee of the Manito-Cannon Hill Neighborhood Council.

The high-energy teams of Mead High School cross country runners spend a lot of training time on the trails near Waikiki Springs, running repeatedly up its hillsides and cruising its flats. Last week they instead filled plastic bags with trash and recyclables and rolled abandoned tires up the trails as part of the second annual cleanup of the undeveloped property between Mill Road and the Little Spokane River, just blocks from their school.

The reclaimed steel sculpture looks such a part of the West Central Neighborhood that one onlooker told artist Steffan Wachholtz she couldn’t believe she’d never noticed it before. Wachholtz was recently in the process of installing his Nettleton’s Addition Historic District marker near A.M. Cannon Park.

In a tight economy, Spokane Transit Authority shuttle buses are a bargain that more and more Spokane residents are taking advantage of to get around their neighborhoods, filling up buses and park-and-ride lots across the city. The South Side Medical Shuttle was designed to get people to and from hospitals and doctors’ offices on Spokane’s South Hill, running every 20 minutes from the downtown bus plaza to Sacred Heart Medical Center, Deaconess Medical Center and other medical buildings. Still, more than a quarter of the people using it are not bound for those locations, but rather nearby apartment buildings, houses or other nonmedial businesses, said STA spokeswoman Peggy Robideaux.

Reading, writing and arithmetic still form the basis of education at Jefferson Elementary, but students attending the school a century ago would be hard-pressed to figure out what to do with computers, calculators and a climbing wall. Even so, the same building constructed at 37th Avenue and Grand Boulevard in 1908 continues to serve students today, albeit with an addition and several detached classrooms out back.

A llama, geckos, chickens and ducks were the featured guests last week at Rockwood at Hawthorne’s fall fair. Residents also played country fair-inspired games at the event, one of many entertainments offered at the north Spokane senior living center.

Reading, writing and arithmetic still form the basis of education at Jefferson Elementary, but students attending the school a century ago would be hard-pressed to figure out what to do with computers, calculators and a climbing wall. Even so, the same building constructed at 37th Avenue and Grand Boulevard in 1908 continues to serve students today, albeit with an addition and several detached classrooms out back.

The pile of bicycles climbed row after row, 15 bikes high in the back of the moving truck. Stacks of mountain bikes, 10-speeds and three-speeds melded together last week in a rainbow of blue, purple, black, yellow and green.