Mike Prager

Arthur was as nervous as a college student before a final exam. Only for Arthur – he's a stray dog turned in to SpokAnimal CARE – passing this test was a life-or-death matter.

Sunday may be April Fools' Day, but if you waited until today to change your studded snow tires, you might be feeling a little foolish already. Today is the last day drivers can legally use studded tires in Washington state, and if you plan on going to a shop to have them taken off today, prepare for a wait.

Wooden decking on three large pedestrian bridges in Riverfront Park have been loosening with age, and park maintenance workers say there is little they can do to stop the planks from shimmying and shaking. Left over from Expo '74, the three bridges were never intended for years of use.

As more and more people find their way to downtown Spokane, the city is going to have to consider ways to accommodate larger numbers of pedestrians. Ron Wells, a downtown business leader, says there are plenty of wide arterial streets but not enough pedestrian amenities: benches, green spaces, improved sidewalks, planters, drinking fountains, extended sidewalks at some intersections.

Helleborus orientalis may sound like a botanical mouthful, but this diminutive plant should be cultivated in every Inland Northwest garden. Also known as the Lenten rose, hellebores provide the earliest blooms of the spring and their leathery evergreen foliage keeps landscape beds alive with color year-around.

When the Fox Theater was threatened with demolition seven years ago, the volunteer Spokane Preservation Advocates put up $2,500 to save it. It was a small amount compared with the $31 million cost of bringing back the theater, but the money came early and set a tone of generosity.

Myrtle Woldson, the daughter of a Spokane pioneer railroad builder, confirmed Wednesday that she is the previously anonymous donor who gave $3 million toward restoration of the Fox Theater, and that as a result, the theater is going to be named in honor of her father, Martin Woldson. "He loved music," she said in a telephone interview, adding that having his name on the Fox would be an appropriate tribute to him.

The city of Spokane is about to pull the plug on 47 years of swimming history. Shadle Park's indoor pool – where generations of swimmers learned their strokes and raced back and forth – is to be torn down starting in April.

Thousands of graceful, but noisy, tundra swans are on the move through the Inland Northwest, part of a dramatic spring migration that often goes unnoticed because of the birds' preference for isolation. At Calispell Lake near Usk in Pend Oreille County, large flocks of swans arrived Sunday and are expected to remain about two weeks. Every March, they return to the marshy waterway northeast of Spokane, and from a distance their white bodies form masses of snowy color against a darker backdrop.

Spokane city officials have extended a deadline for submitting proposals on the redevelopment of the Joe E. Mann Army Reserve Center in Hillyard into a community facility after the military vacates the property in a few years. Dale Strom of the city's Community Development Department said that the initial request for proposals did not include a 7,500-square-foot triangle of land southwest of Haven Street. A review of the title to the property uncovered the additional land in military ownership, he said.

The neighborhood around the House of Charity at Pacific Avenue and Browne Street downtown is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for homeless people who use the nonprofit shelter as their overnight refuge from the street. A police analysis done two years ago and updated this month shows that police are called to the neighborhood hundreds of times a month, including more than 300 times last December.

Heavy mountain rainfall and unseasonably high temperatures Sunday and Monday triggered rapid rises on several Inland Northwest rivers, but the runoff was expected to subside today before flooding occurs. Forecasters are calling for springlike conditions this last full week of winter, with sunny days and cooler nights. The drier weather should prevent rivers from overrunning their banks.

The National Weather Service has some good news for the Inland Northwest: Streams and lakes will be full this summer thanks to a deep snowpack in the mountains. A water supply outlook issued this week calls for stream flows to be near 100 percent of normal from April through September.