Featured Blog Posts – March 2011 Archive (29)

My brother lives in Nashville and finds it more than amusing to send text messages of every little thing in bloom.  This past Friday I snapped back with, "Flowers? Big deal! The bay is still frozen up here.  I can see the boulders at the bottom it's so clear. That is what you call spring!" 

But do not despair my Northern Michigan friends.  We are getting closer to spring.  I know this because the sun is sticking around a little bit later than usual and I find…

Time and time again, the authorities in the international design realm, such as Architectural Digest, lead consumers on a journey through the ethereal interiors of masterful architecture that is intertwined with timeless and cutting-edge interior design. These statement-making rooms of course include the…

I’ve been feeling pretty full of myself about the way I’ve weathered

my first Up Nort h winter.

I rocked the Yankee Look, with the exception of a couple of lumberjack-style disasters. I didn’t bust my ass on the ice, except while walking across the frozen expanse of Glen Lake – which I’m just not…

Our little greenhouse, made with recycled materials, glowing under a bright sun last January.

Last Saturday—a sunny and spectacular last day of winter, when ideas of spring’s awakening were on every Northerner’s mind—I headed to a workshop sponsored by Grow Benzie that offered up tips…

It’s the middle of March and I’m itching to expose myself.

If not all of me, at least the long expanse of albino giraffe neck I’ve been hiding under turtlenecks for six months. Okay, four months – whatever. In October, I was all excited about it. Soooooo over it now.

Now, I’m all geared…

The tire looks so thin—like a pencil sketch arced across a page. Not a firm compass-drawn line; more the wobbly drawing of a small child wielding his first sharp point. This is what I think as I’m bent over the handlebars of my son’s black Tommaso, the clear, unobstructed March sunlight flooding around leafless trees and warming my forehead. It is my first day of bicycle training for the M-22 Challenge, and this sun and the white-blue disc that is Little Glen Lake sheathed in thin icy…

A new trend in current interior design styles is bringing back “retro” to dwellings everywhere. This iconic style – nostalgic, straightforward and individualistic – is winding its way back from the fringes of time.

Remember the avocado and gold paint colors from the kitchen of the…

For Buckley, this seemed kind of like a championship basketball game.

The parking lot to the Southside Hideout overflowed onto M-37 last night (Wednesday, March 16), while inside, Tammy Sundelius and Mike Youker of Buckley edged out runner-up Black & Wild to win the Battle at the Hideout acoustic music…

March 15, 2011: My first day of training for the 2011 M-22 Challenge

In a burst of mid-life crisis last week I signed up for the M-22 Challenge. It seemed so far away then ...But driving home from work with the sun glaring through the windshield at 5:30 p.m. (thank you Daylight Savings Time), I decided, why not…

    My girlfriend, speaking by phone from East Lansing, said, “But you’re so isolated up there.”

    If isolated means no traffic during the half-hour commute from Glen Arbor to Traverse City, she’s right. Otherwise it’s just perception. True, I’ve been lucky enough to stay at a condo my family owns in The Homestead, and that place in winter is sort of like where Jack Nicholson went homicidal…

Rising behind Eagle Harbor, on the Keweenaw Peninsula, there’s an ancient mountaintop that the locals call Mt. Baldy, but which is officially named Lookout Mountain. A guy at Downwind Sports in Houghton told me about it. I explained that I was meeting two friends for a long weekend on the Keweenaw, and we…

Last week, I shed my puffy vest and headed back to Texas for a little HenFest, which is a bunch of women getting together and clucking incessantly.

After…

One thing I've noticed at the cabin, I can't stop claiming ownership of everything.  That is MY pine tree, that is MY Downy Woodpecker and this is MY clean air.  So I guess it's no surprise as I discovered a little baby red squirrel that I became a "proud mama" who had to share photos with all her friends of MY baby.

Gary Wittig has married two morning staples in a way few people would have expected.

He's added coffee in with oatmeal for his product Bolajoe.

Coffee to get you going and whole grain oats to…

Release Your Inner Child

Sometimes the gods smile. Or god. And maybe it was more a wink, but Bacchus was definitely playing me yesterday evening. I’d arranged to meet friends at Burritts Fresh Markets on West Front in Traverse City for a lift home to Glen Arbor after work. Early, I figured to buy a half-pound…

I call this a 'Making It Work' story because it's about someone trying something new to make it in this strange, new economy. I'll be featuring other stories of every-day innovators under the same heading.

The Buckley Butcher Block is a local shop that wants to become…

So I’m not exactly new to the area, but I’m new to sticking around Northern Michigan for more than a week at a time, especially in February and March. To celebrate my third week in the Glen Arbor area I went for a hike on what I’d heard was one of the less populated trails of the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.…