Articles by Sandra Olivetti Martin

Saving the Bay Foot by Foot

Grants to restore shorelines multiply dollars and deeds

Restoring the Bay is like cleaning house: We do it chore by chore. Fortunately, the Bay multiplies much of the effort we put into it. Put water in motion and it keeps moving. Put $800,000 into shoreline restorations, and the grants multiply dollars and deeds. The dozen new shoreline restoration grants in Maryland and four in Virginia are putting that money to work, multiplying the momentum. This Bay chore is supported by the Chesapeake...

Article - Green Living; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/6/12

The Reader

Janet is an utterly personal book describing the human experience with purity, truth and guilelessness. That is how elegies work.

The elegy is a literary form dear to the human heart, for it’s the best reply we can summon to death’s speechlessness. Janet is such a work, created by Bay Weekly contributing writer Al McKegg in honor of his wife, Janet. With soaring highs and crashing lows, theirs was a love story made for literature. It was too cruel for real life. Cupid struck them with wayward arrows. Al was 12 years older than Janet and otherwise...

Article - Books; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/6/12

The Path to Success

Step one is putting the pieces together

The Labor Day weekend rain mostly skipped Chesapeake Country — at least my part — but tumultuous skies and soggy forecasts dampened a lot of parades. In Annapolis, First Sunday Arts Festival cancelled this month, and the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra moved its Labor Day Pops concert inside Maryland Hall, quashing plans for musical picnics in Quiet Waters Park. Our personal parade changed locations, too. Instead of cruising the Chesapeake, Bay Weekly the boat...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/6/12

Finding Your Way in Our Capital City

Good signs make ‘meaningful experiences’

Are we there yet? No, dear. But in a couple of years, visitors to our capital city will arrive surely at their destinations, guided by a new Wayfinding Master Plan. Wayfinding is a fancy word for signs with a lot of thought behind them. Sixty-five thousand dollars worth of thought. That’s how much Merje Designs is earning to plan a system of signs to guide visitors into...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/30/12

School Is for Everybody

At Parks and Rec classes, even old dogs can learn new tricks

Feeling envious as kids strap on their new backpacks to explore the wonders of the universe? Don’t let age stop you. Whatever your age, or youth, Anne Arundel and Calvert counties can open new worlds for you. And for your dog. Want to learn wedding calligraphy? Hip-hop dance? Sign language? German or Spanish? Get fit in a couple of dozen ways, including Tom’s No-Nonsense Karate? Play senior billiards? Do art in the park? Partner with you dog...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/30/12

Help Wanted

Without transportation jobs, planning and spending, what will we do when we can’t get there from here?

Bay Weekly reporter Ashley Brotherton missed the news this week. Instead of getting to know crabs in Cambridge, she spent two hours and $4 to go over the Bay Bridge twice. So she also made the news. She and the thousand of other drivers whose routine 4.3-mile trip across Chesapeake Bay turned into — depending on their disposition and opportunity — hours of frustration, windfall time to play with their cell phones or impromptu, make-the-best-of...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/30/12

North of $15 Million

Hard Traveler Kenn Roberts on making — and giving away — millions

Bay Weekly: The Hard Travelers are in their second life. How is this one different? Kenn Roberts: Buddy Renfro and I had been listening to the Kingston Trio when we started the Hard Travelers in 1958 in the basement of the Phi Delt house at the University of Maryland. We were young guys grasping for notoriety and a career in music. Now nobody’s looking to get discovered. It’s all about playing this original music for people and using that to raise money for...

Article - Bay Weekly Interviews; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/23/12

So Long, Summer

With all fall offers, parting is such sweet sorrow

Anticipation eases the sadness of summer’s leaving. Officially, summer is with us until the autumnal equinox September 22. But the light is already changing, and so are the temperatures. There’s less sweat, more breeze. Lovely weather, isn’t it? we say to one another. Our allocation of four seasons doesn’t do justice to the complexity of changing time or to our experience. Closer to the truth is 12, for three divisions of each of...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/23/12

A Rock and a Hard Place

For some boaters, jetties are Scylla and Charybdis

Two jetties protect the Deale harbor in Southern Anne Arundel County. Neither is new. Yet 900-foot jetties are bad news to a few of the thousands of boaters entering Rockhold Creek. Saturday, August 18, What’s Next rocketed up onto a jetty. “This one must have gone quite a way up and turned since the stern is on the jetty and the bow is in the water,” said Doug Roberts of Deale. What’s...

Article - Boating; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/23/12

This Week’s Creature Feature ... Counting Clicks and...

Lend an ear for the D.C Baltimore Cricket Crawl

It’s a symphony out there. The players are crickets and their cuter green cousins, katydids. Their instruments are their wings, specifically the tooth-covered stridulatory organ thereof, rubbed one against the other. Males play this instrument to attract females and repel other males. Katydids, plant eaters, come in 6,400 species worldwide. Crickets, omnivores, are far fewer in species, with 900. How many are playing near you we...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 8/23/12