By Dom Cioffi A little over a year ago, I overheard my niece and her friend talking about their desire to get tattoos when they turned 18. They were boasting about the different designs they were considering and how each body emblem would have a unique, deeply personal meaning. I listened intently to their teenage…

By Susan Shea To enter the cave, we donned hard hats and descended a vertical drop with the aid of a rope. We crawled on our knees and bellies through a wet, narrow passageway, emerging into a large underground chamber that contained a small lake. By the light of our headlamps, we could make out…

Submitted Experts caution against purchasing cute baby animals as gifts, unless you are committed to their life-long care. By M. Kathleen Shaw, DVM, Vermont Veterinary Medical Association Easter comes early this year, and it is important to know that while it provides a host of fun treats and activities for our kids, some of these…

A “skeuomorph” is a design feature transferred from a traditional object to a newer iteration of the same device for the purpose of continuity of appearance rather than utility. Technically obsolete details once intrinsic to the construction of the object in question will often carry over as stylistic elements intended to create an experience of…

For the last few weeks I have been driving all over hell and back for work, skiing in the mornings, getting myself into shape, and singing with the choir. All in all—break-up aside— things should be going well. I am busy, I am active, I am fit, I am paying my bills. But things haven’t…

They say that everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day! But I can truly claim that nationality. Two of my grandparents were born in Ireland. Online genealogies can provide us with the names of our ancestors but only our relatives can tell us stories about their lives. Like most young people I had no interest…

By Dom Cioffi I watched him drop an easy pop fly; I watched him muff a very field-able ground ball; I even watched him half-heartedly try to steal second base only to get thrown out by 10 feet. I watched all of this occur to my son this past Saturday as our Little League team…

Courtesy of Dave Hoffenberg KICKING SUNRISE A new band is making its Killington debut this weekend: Kicking Sunrise will play the Wobbly Barn on March 18 and 19. They are very excited to share their music with everyone here. The band is: Joe Murphy, lead vocals/rhythm guitar; Ryan Hornibrook, bass/backing vocals/rapper; Matthew Bosco, lead guitar/backing…

By Elise Tillinghast My friend Gordon Russell sent me a letter recently describing a wildlife encounter. He had been following deer tracks along a stone wall when a movement caught his attention. “Almost before its image could travel to my brain,” he wrote, “the white head of a weasel vanished in between the stones.” The…

Do you know someone who goes around claiming that, if Donald Trump is elected president, he’ll move to Canada in protest? This will never happen—first, because Donald Trump will never be the president; and second, because even if Trump did win the general election, your friend wouldn’t actually follow through on his threat to leave…

The novelty of having done things well in my recent relationship foray has worn off . . . and I’ve started to chafe against the fact that my plunge into “Mutual Nurture” was so easily aborted. This is the time when I would normally slide into what my sainted Irish mother would call the “Slough…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Gemini Moon, with Mars and Venus creating complications, and a bevy of aspects that will have us wondering why we always wind up dealing with the same old thing. To put it in a nutshell, whatever…

By Dom Cioffi I lay there looking up into the sky, only the clouds visible within my range of sight. I could move my fingers and toes (something my father always told me to do to make sure I wasn’t seriously injured), but I still felt like I was paralyzed. Only seconds earlier, all the…

This has been a strange winter for me, weather notwithstanding. This is the winter where, maybe for the first time ever, and certainly for the first time since my divorce, I let someone in. More than let her in, I saw her, met her, liked her, got to know her, let her know I was…

Has there ever been a time more plagued by pop-culture nostalgia than the present moment? Our new TV shows, increasingly, are old TV shows: not remakes or “reimaginings,” which typically carry the challenging novelty of all-new casts and new characters responding in contemporary style to the older premise (as in the short-lived, high-tech modernizations of…