What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
New York Times, June 25, 2006...
As I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.
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Art: Wear This Book (But Bring it Back By Friday)
A Maine library's unwanted volumes get a second life, and remain available for loan.
Some aren't returned.
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Joining the marines
How close do you get to the sea creatures in the special trainer-for-an afternoon program at New England Aquarium? Pucker up.
By Amy Sutherland
Boston Globe, February 6, 2006
Guthrie the sea lion is so close I can feel his gusty exhalations on the back of my hand, so close I can see that one of his blond whiskers corkscrews crazily…
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Maine's got the Blues
Cooking Light, cover story, July 2004
Come late summer, down east Maine is awash in a sea of tiny, dusky blueberries. They spill from square green baskets sold at makeshift roadside stands with handwritten signs. The berries puddle atop pies and peek from muffins at county fairs and diners. They carpet acres of barrens in Washington County, tinting the green earth a deeper blue than the nearby bone-chilling cold Atlantic…
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A no-bake bake-off takes the cake
July 2, 2004 (This op-ed was first run in the Los Angeles Times)
Cultural decline is in the details. That is why the 100 finalist recipes in this year's Pillsbury Bake-Off contest were so worrisome. Looking over the recipes, it's all too plain to miss. There was next to no baking at the 2004 bake-off.
In fact, the title has nearly become a misnomer. The bake-off, for decades the premier showcase of Americans' prowess with a home oven, has become, at best, a cook-off, at worst, a heat-off…
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Remote beauty along the Rio Grande
There's no easy way to get to Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, which is why only a mere 300,000 souls find their way each year to this 800,000-acre parcel of high desert. Yellowstone and Yosemite each break 3 million tourists annually, as does little Acadia National Park in Maine. Big Bend's comparatively paltry numbers make it the least visited of the national parks.…
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Saving grace
Stephen Foote, dean of St. Luke's Cathedral in Portland, noticed the
discoloring on Jesus's stomach two years ago. The dean likes to wait for
appointed visitors in the cathedral's chapel, where John La Farge's painting
of a robust Christ child and his monumental, robed mother hangs. Sitting in
the chapel's dark hush, he would gaze at the painting, which, he says, has a
mysterious way of transporting your meditations.
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