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Joe Wywrot’s weekday morning essentials—crayons and coloring books—might seem unconventional for a civil engineer. But they sure come in handy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays: Wywrot is also a husband and father of...

Last fall, the sidewalk in front of Fire Station No. 1 on Fifth Ave. sprouted a row of seven fire hydrants. Though set in concrete instead of being hooked up to water mains, the exhibit is otherwise typical of the nearly 3,600...

My house is getting lighter. Any day now it may lift from its foundations and float away.For a couple of years I have been working on what I call “Project Attic.” My goal is to get rid of everything that I...

Jan Emmons was laid off in December of 2008. “I’d worked ten years as office assistant at a trucking company,” remembers the fifty-something Emmons, “and gone through school part-time–first...

“We’re very aggressive about collecting taxes during bankruptcy,” says county treasurer Catherine McClary. “We get virtually 100 percent of the money owed–and we work closely with cities and the...

Members of Joan Zald’s family tend to live long lives, but not happy ones. After watching a favorite aunt begin to “socially withdraw” in her late sixties and become obsessed with her health, Zald worried that...

Jack Spack’s Septic Services on Carpenter Road is in farm country, with chickens clucking noisily in a nearby pen and peacocks out back. But neither the business nor the setting prepares a visitor for the work going on...

“Your contest is so clever,” wrote Amy Saalberg. “It effectively gets us to look closely at every single ad each month! This [Fake Ad] grabbed our attention by its extreme vagueness!”True, the ad was...

When Katherine Willson recently told her husband she’d taken a job working for the military, he joked, “I better call the Department of Defense and tell them they’ve been infiltrated!”Willson,...

Commuters, downtown residents, and bus riders have been seeing more of downtown since August, when construction of the library lot parking structure shut down Fifth Avenue, the city’s main southbound artery. Drivers...

Local developer Alex de Parry has been seeking permission to build a big new apartment complex on Fifth Avenue south of the library for five years. First he proposed tearing down the seven houses there now, all more than a...

“That’s the I Spy, that’s the I Spy!” exclaimed Matthew DeBona, pointing out the car window at the Simpson Memorial Institute on Observatory at East Ann. Matthew is “our resident Mr. I Spy,”...

Students at Bates Elementary School in Dexter aren’t sitting still in their classrooms–and that’s just fine with their teachers and principal. The K-2 school is using Brain Gym–a program funded through a...