Stefanie Pettit

This is Bing Crosby’s time of year. You can hardly walk through a mall or listen to the radio without hearing Spokane’s own world-famous crooner singing “White Christmas” or any of the other holiday songs he made famous.

When giving thanks this time of year, the big things come to mind – good health, the safety of loved ones, a happy marriage. But sometimes, it can be for something smaller – in this case, a spotted puppy.

I’m in the process of replacing and redoing my address book, and I’m finding it a more work and more emotional than I expected.

Along with pretty much everybody else in the region, I am putting my garden to bed for the winter.

Thank you, gods and goddesses of grammar, for making yourselves known to me. I cannot express how warming it is to know that I’m not shivering alone out in the wilderness as I cringe when hearing those often-spoken, god-awful words (and all their variations) – “Me and Fred went to the mall.”

Earlier this month I began doing tai chi.

Airway Heights woman gets wheels rolling to have monument built and dedicated to a Spokane Valley pioneer, her great-grandfather Seth Woodard.

Today – Sept. 13 – is National Uncle Sam Day, and I feel the need to recognize it and feel good about it.

I saw a nicety-for-the-day posting on Facebook recently: “Me and God have this little arrangement. If He wakes me up to see another day, I promise to try and be better than I was yesterday.”

Anyone who has spent much time trying to locate ancestors in any of the hundreds of cemeteries of Eastern Washington and North Idaho – and elsewhere – have likely utilized research done by Maggie Rail, whether they know it or not.

As I write these words, it’s 9 a.m. on one of those about-to-be broiling hot days of summer. My husband has been out of the house since 8 a.m., and I probably won’t see him until dinner. He’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing – he’s working.

A new monument was dedicated last week at Greenwood Memorial Terrace honoring a woman who was breaking glass ceilings early in the 1900s – back way before there even was such a concept.

My youngest son is getting married.

The Sinto Senior Activity Center in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood is the oldest senior center in the city – having celebrated its 60th anniversary with a gala open house in May – and it has the distinction of being the second oldest senior center in the state of Washington.

Ever since we moved into our house in the late 1980s, there has been a steady stream of urban wildlife – mostly deer – moving through our backyard on the way toward Browne’s Mountain.

A tale of King Corn and Queen Alfalfa who were married nearly 105 years ago.

Miss Chicken is still alive … and thriving.

Boris has his airplane.

Feeling in her nose, freedom to

The big, red, Gothic-style barn on a hill near the Idaho border has attracted high school students to use it as a background for their senior class pictures, and it even showed up in a painting commissioned by some neighbors living farther down the valley, which captured it in the artwork depicting the view from their property.

I have noticed that Old English Sheepdog appeal is pretty universal.

When he was born somewhere in China – he doesn’t know where – the newborn with a serious vision issue and a cleft palate spent the first five years of his life in an orphanage in Beijing.

It was always going to be difficult for Chandler Roberts. Raised in what he describes as a dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents, Roberts said he just wasn’t going to give up on himself. Dawn Mackesy, principal at New Vision Alternative High School in Post Falls, said, “I remember the first time I met Chandler. It was at his 8th grade graduation. He walked right up to me, shook my hand and told me he wanted to come to my school. That fall we made it happen.”

Koa Hester knows all about jams – not the sweet kind that goes on toast, but rather those short matchups that are part of roller derby. Hester joined the Pixies, a junior league roller derby team in Spokane, when she was 10. She fell in love with the sport when she was 8 and watched her mother participate. “I wanted to be just like her,” said the 18-year-old daughter of Clara Hester, a seamstress, and Kaleb Hester, a truck driver. The family lives in Spirit Lake, Idaho, where she is about to graduate from Timberlake High School.