Washington Voices

In the world of high school cross country in the Greater Spokane area, being good simply isn’t good enough. Good teams – teams good enough to win championships in most leagues in other parts of the state – may collect as many as two or three wins during the Greater Spokane League season.

Many artists believe that making art and being creative is therapeutic, that it calms the mind and relieves stress. Expressing oneself in such a universal manner allows artists to connect to others on a deeper level; colors, textures and form become language, a “soap box,” if you will, sharing beliefs, visions of beauty, worldly concerns and memories.

For the first couple of days of 2010, all Megan Stewart could do was sit at her husband’s hospital bed and repeat a simple prayer: please breathe, please breathe. From the hospital windows she could see the towers of her church – First Presbyterian downtown – and she often wondered what God’s plan for her could possibly be. Her husband, Mark Stewart, a strong and healthy 36-year-old, had a stroke on Dec. 30 and was lying motionless in bed. A prognosis was sketchy.

When it comes to child-rearing there are lots of hot button issues. Should the baby always sleep alone or is the family bed a better choice? When is it OK to feed what kind of solid foods? Which toys are the most educational? Is it ever OK to bottle feed; the list goes on and on. And there’s now one more decision to make: disposable diapers or cloth diapers? Cloth diaper services that pick up soiled diapers and drop off clean ones on a subscription plan have been around for decades, but now some parents are tackling the whole deal themselves, including washing the dirty diapers.

There was quite a house full of people recently when the Sonora Smart Dodd House was added to the National Historic Register. And that was no doubt just the way Dodd – the founder of Father’s Day – would have liked it. “Thank you all so much for coming this morning, and for being part of helping us with this process,” said Jerry Numbers, who owns the house together with his wife, Beverly.

Calling J.J. energetic does not do the word justice. The Liberty Lake Police Department’s new drug dog is constantly in motion, whether he’s chewing on a tennis ball, greeting people or sniffing for drugs. The only time he is still is when he locates hidden drugs, points his nose at them and then abruptly sits down, gazing expectantly at handler Officer Mark Van Hyning and waiting for his tennis ball and a nice game of tug-of-war.