http://www.inlander.com/spokane/articles.sec-55-1-last-word.html It’s National Bike Month, which got me thinking about a neighbor kid from my childhood. We grew up in the woods outside Sandpoint, and there weren’t many other kids around, so we had to ma]]> My great-grandfather is forever lost on Monumental Mountain. The cowboy, Eagle Scout and war veteran left his family more than five years ago to pick huckleberries outside of Colville, Wash., an]]> Last Thursday, we published our 18th annual Best of the Inland Northwest readers poll, which, at 120 pages, is one of our biggest papers of the year. To celebrate, we threw a party at the Lincoln Center on March 23 and invited all of our honorees..]]> As a broad spectrum of generally annoyed conservative people were loosely gathering themselves into a “movement” that more closely resembled gripe sessions in retirement communities, one woman from North Idaho briefly became the face of the Tea Party after the New York Times.]]> Bake Cookies Many families staying at Spokane’s Ronald McDonald House arrive with nothing: No luggage, pajamas or toothbrushes. They got a call that their child had been in an accident and was]]> Unmoving, his face blank with two large eyes staring vacantly off in the distance, the doctor looks lifeless. But once he vivifies, he’ll be a font of information, able to pull up vast amounts of data and test results and bring in the opinions of specialists from around the world.]]> first glance, the lobby of Gonzaga’s Jepson School of Business Administration resembled nothing so much as a middle-school dance. A line of teenagers waited shyly along the near side, staring out across an empty floor to where their partners also stood, waiting.]]> Julyamsh Powwow is family-friendly in a cosmic sort of way, beginning with Mother Earth. It involves all ages, from the youngest children to parents to grandparents. It celebrates extended family, too, through art, music, dancing, storytelling and the mingling of voices from myriad age groups and regions.]]> When I look at my college diploma, matted in a $200 frame on my wall, I feel nothing. Four years of spreading myself too thin, taking classes and extra activities I thought would guarantee me a job. It worked for a while. Then the economy bombed and my job was gone.]]> Mary Ann Wilson is the kind of person you want to spill your heart to. I’m 20 minutes late for our interview — there are too many Starbucks locations in this town — but Mary Ann still greets me with a smile, warmly touching my arm with sincere “it’s all right” understanding.]]> You wake up from a dream with a start. Maybe you were being chased by greyhounds, or being de-pantsed in front of your high school classmates. Whatever the case, it was vividly real. Sitting up, your heart is pumping, and your pajamas are drenched in sweat.]]>