Pia Hallenberg

It all began when Roxie was a puppy. The now-4-year-old Chihuahua mix was rescued by Cathleen Powell from a puppy mill. Roxie had a broken tail, many health problems and not much fur. “It was winter, and she was so cold she shivered,” Powell said. “So I went shopping to get her a sweater, and I failed. She’s just built funny. Nothing fit.”

East Central Community Center has qualified for a $114,000 annual USDA food program grant allowing the center to expand its senior meal program, as well as the meal program offered for youth in the summer. “This grant has allowed us to feed significantly more people at the same out-of-pocket cost to the center,” said Landon Carrell, East Central Community Center’s business manager.

When Gonzaga University President Thayne McCulloh unveiled the school’s new tartan Friday, Jen Garrison Stuber was on hand weaving one. Stuber, who owns the weaving business Angry Spinner in Newman Lake, saw the story about Gonzaga’s tartan in the paper and called to volunteer her weaving skills. She set up her loom on Herak Field in the middle of the unveiling event. A group of GU public relations and marketing students came up with and ran the Lines of Legacy campaign, which put three tartans online for a public vote. The winner is Gonzaga True Blue and White, a classic white pattern on a dark blue background.

When Katherine Merck became the 2014 Miss Spokane Interstate Rodeo, she had some explaining to do. The 24-year-old Spokanite is a first-year law student at Gonzaga University and some of her professors were a little puzzled. “They looked at me like they didn’t understand what I just told them,” said Merck, sitting in the tack room at Spokane Equestrian Center just south of town. “I guess they didn’t expect that from one of their students.”

The sign above the construction site for the new McDonald’s drive-through restaurant in the Logan neighborhood reads: Come see us in June. It’s being built on the corner of Augusta Avenue and North Hamilton Street, immediately across the street from Safeway. Neighborhood residents, and especially Karen Byrd, are furious the city issued the building permits.

It’s the little cemetery that refuses to die. Hillyard Evergreen Cemetery has been put up for sale as prime industrial land, abandoned by its owners and caretakers, and altogether led a rough-and-tumble life for the last part of the more than 100 years it’s been around.

It’s not unusual to see students hunkered down among computers, cardboard models and huge blueprints in a classroom. But the projects this group at Riverside High School is working on don’t appear on most high school schedules: The students are building an eco-friendly house and six electric cars.

Some people retire and leave work friends behind, but that’s not the case with staff and doctors who worked together at the Hillyard Dental Clinic until the early 1990s. Instead of avoiding each other, they have had regular reunions over the years. The last one came Friday, when more than a dozen former employees got together for lunch at the Atrium at the Red Lion Inn at the Park.

COPS celebrated the opening of a new shop at Newtech Skill Center in Hillyard on Tuesday. Newtech’s is the only COPS shop operated out of a school.

It’s time for Willy Water to retire. For the past 45 years he’s been standing proudly in the middle of a fountain on top of the drinking water reservoir at Ninth Avenue and Pine Court just east of Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.

Sharaf Siddig was scarred by the long and bloody civil war in his home country of Sudan. A bullet drew a deep line across the left side of his slim torso. Other scars are not visible but still very painful. It’s a long story and he doesn’t want to talk about it, he said, covering his face with his hands.

Mario DeLeon, 24, had bounced around quite a bit by the time he hit his last year of high school. He moved from Texas to Spokane, where his family owns DeLeon Foods on East Francis Avenue, at age 19 and enrolled at Mt. Spokane High School. After a four-year stint at The Art Institute of New York City, he’s now back in Spokane and doing what he loves: painting.

A group of marketing students at Gonzaga University has created three tartans and is asking the public for help picking the right one to represent Gonzaga. The project, Lines of Legacy, features tartan patterns in blue, green, red and white, selected to reflect Gonzaga’s Italian and Irish heritage as well as its school colors.

It was two of the longest days in Autumn Bergman’s life. For 48 hours she had to keep a big secret from her 13-year-old daughter, Ayesha Bergman. Ayesha was one of the winners of the People to People Ambassador Programs international travel video contest. Her prize: a 21-day trip overseas with the program this summer.