My e-bike/e-scooter envy really took hold last fall. It was gradual at first, and started in earnest one day when I was sitting in the passenger seat with my husband at the wheel, waiting in a long line of cars at a red light. A person’s shadow passed, momentarily shading my face. I was instantly aware and a little in awe…I thought, “What is that they’re riding? Is it safe? It sure looks fast. It’s beating the traffic!” Then I said to myself, “I could ride that.” So began the journey for me to find an e-vehicle of my own.

With personal safety being paramount, I wondered what I should, and could, ride.… Read More

My wife wants me to take yoga classes, but I don’t want to. Admittedly, yoga has been around for thousands of years and it has been perfected and validated as an excellent pathway to mental and physical health. But I have a resistance to physical exercise that is probably due to being involved with too many youthful sports run by coaches with too many personality disorders. Now I am happy to call sitting in a hot tub and then walking to a coffee shop an exercise routine, and will let the rest of the world sweat its way to nirvana. The problem with all this reluctance is that there are so many yoga teachers in St.… Read More

So many metaphors, so little space. Which one best describes Mirror Lake and its surrounding park? Is it the calm eye of the storm of our town’s rapid expansion? Or does the proximity of the old St. Pete High School, the Tomlinson Learning Center (with the wise owl statues guarding its front gates), the graceful Lyceum Theatre, and our classic Carnegie library make this area the brains of our town? Or perhaps it’s the spring fed lake itself that makes it the original life-giving heart for our town. However you look at it, this gem of a park played an important role in our city’s history, but it was the supply of fresh water that first made it so essential.… Read More

When we decided to move out of the ONE, we were hit with a barrage of questions. The hardest to answer were the permutations of the “why do you want to leave here” question. As with any soul-searching question, the answers were never easy. Life isn’t always as prosaic as we would like, and it was just the right time to move on.

This decision would have been a lot easier if we lived anywhere but in the Old Northeast. As anyone who is reading the Journal knows, the ONE is about as close to perfection as you can get in a neighborhood.… Read More

Sitting on the corner of  5th Street and 1st Avenue South, lays a forgotten triangular sliver of land called Liberty Bell Park. Nowadays, motorists and pedestrians pass by with barely a glance of this shambles of a place that offers little to make the casual passerby to want to enter anyway. The neglected sidewalks are crumbling and the landscape is strewn with litter, leaves, broken branches, and little evidence of any rake, broom, or parks department interest. Over the years, the few existing benches have been vandalized, and sit as unusable broken skeletons of their former selves.  To add more insult to this lost space, there is an incongruous and faded No Trespassing sign stuck in what looks like a public space warning people to ignore any interest in entering.… Read More