With only 28 days, February has to hurry.     Even more so on the Bay Weekly calendar, where our shortest month gets a late start this year. With January packed full of five Thursdays, our first paper of the month comes to you on February 7. So we’re already late for Groundhog’s Day, when Punxsutawney Phil and Chesapeake Chuck pop up to predict spring.     Not too late for our annual Groundhog’s Movie Guide, however, as hibernating with a good...

In the culture of Polar Bear Plungers — about whom we write this week — our 1,000th issue puts us in the league of Super Plungers like Michelina Scotto, who return to the Bay’s chilling waters (about 41 degrees this time of year) every hour on the hour 24 times.     One thousand issues means we’ve done the same thing often enough to have gotten good at it. If the 10,000-hour rule Malcolm Gladwell offers in his book Outliers is a true measure of mastery,...

When your well runs dry — as Michelle Steel’s did, as you’ll read in this week’s feature story — you’re an outlier. In our part of the country, rural living is a luxury. Suddenly you’re paying for that luxury.     When you live on county or city water, you’re part of a collective that shares the hidden cost of bringing this precious resource into your home in the country. When your well runs dry, you’re on your own.  ...

Bay Weekly’s 51st issue of the year celebrates family, the warm nest where we are born and nurtured.     For this is the season of birth, which we enter each year in hopes of renewal.     If it seems to you a little odd — as it does to me — that our cultural feasts of rebirth fall in the darkest time of the year, when in our cold clime is just setting in, there’s good reason.     This week’s solstice begins a new year...