There is a certain glamour about the restaurant business. People pay you, the owner, to be the consummate host. You dream of serving great food and creating a pleasant environment — a place that people want to come back to again and again. For some, it remains just a dream. Every year new restaurants are opened by daring dreamers putting…
As an award-winning writer Jodi Picoult uses her literary X-ray vision to peer inside homes, family ties, relationships and dark secrets of the heart. Her characters seem unnervingly familiar, her revelations are often disturbing, but the most powerful sense a reader gets while consuming one of her novels is one of being taken into confidence, of being told the sometimes…
Planting a tree is not as simple as you might think. Drive to the store — any big box discount store will do — pick out a nice looking tree, dig a hole, plop it in and let nature take care of the rest. Right? Try to go about it that way, and you’ll soon be calling someone like Mike…
A landscaping project can be a daunting task for any homeowner. Whether the project is big or small, there are many factors to consider. To start with, there are zoning codes and safety issues, not to mention New Hampshire’s inconvenient mud season. Beyond that there are endless possibilities for reshaping the turf. Hardscapes, including stone and brick need to be…
In prehistoric times clans gathered around a fire to bond by telling stories and making funny body noises. In the roaring 1920s and through the Second World War it was the crackle of the radio that brought families together every night. In the 1950s it was the cool gray eye of the television that regularly summoned the family unit, TV…
Why did I buy six parking meters? Well, first and foremost, I’m a guy, and buying the parking meters was as much an “impulse” thing as checking out RVs at Campers Inn whenever I’m within a five-mile radius of the dealership or tire-kicking at Hobbs Automotive every time they get a repossessed car in or using the excuse of “I…
It’s a fact that is both obvious and surprising, serious and ironic. The places we are most endangered are the places that feel most like home. Most people know that cars are the biggest cause of fatal injuries in the U.S. This doesn’t sound unusual at all until you realize that means YOUR car, that cozy refuge with its six…
Most of us who live in New Hampshire don’t spend a lot of time worrying about our northern border. It’s just one of those things that has always been there and has seemed to work OK. We have lots of other stuff to fret about, and very few migrant workers are sneaking across the border to take jobs in the…
A John Irving conversation unfolds like a John Irving novel. The sentences begin, dense with clauses, bristling with specific detail. Merrily they traverse the tangled undergrowth between subject and verb, meandering past, around, never quite to the point. Tagging along breathlessly, the reader or listener starts to wonder: Where in this labyrinth is our hero? Has he lost the plot?…
We asked the dentists of the state who they would recommend to someone seeking a top dental specialist. Here’s who they named in seven specialty areas. The top dentist in each category is listed and appears first. The remainder are listed alphabetically. Endodontics Endodontics is the specialty concerned with the human dental pulp and periradicular tissues. This branch deals with…
