You can make it, you can do it! I´ll be here cheering watching you get through it! It doesn´t matter what you do or don´t do, I love you anyway, I love you just because your you!!!.

After roughly a year-long hiatus, lunch is back at Bottletree Cafe, and it may be better than ever. I used to take the crazy girl there, because it had all the vegetarian and even vegan dishes she preferred.

Mix my martini, fast: it's back to school in the Magic City. As summer slowly folds up like the last beach umbrella at sunset, we shake the sand out of our sandals, dust off the Mary Janes, and brace ourselves once again for the sheer horror of what lies ahead: the back to school ride through hell.

When the Summer growing season finally arrives in Alabama, I always look forward to the fresh, local, and sustainable produce that´s always readily available. When I was a child my father Sidney Vizzina and my mother Grethcen Vizzina always had tomato plants and cucuzza growing in our back yard.

The upside is you won´t need much space for appliances. Environmentalist guru Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, notes that a 60 percent reduction in fossil fuel usage would result in a dramatic reduction of carbon emission per person.

Palo Pallas is fascinated with transformation: most particularly in how transformation relates to individuals and life experience. Pallas also believes that thought is energy and as energy cannot only be transformed but transferred. These concerns are the basis for an exhibit of the artists' work at Avondale Bricks Gallery opening August 30.

The extensive woodlands that house deer and even a wild boar population, used to be forbidding to all but a few humans willing to dare the expanses of kudzu and poison ivy.

Sweet tea, smothered pork chops, fried green tomatoes, blackberry cobbler, okra, lima beans, hopping john, chow-chow pickle, tea cakes... these are only a few of the tasty delights you might find on a hunt for bon-a-fide southern cuisine. The list goes on and on.

If you thought Crestwood Coffee as just a place to stop for some Zambesi roast (just like you thought Bottletree was just a place to hear The Great Book of John), then you may want to think again next time you are styling down Crestwood Boulevard with hunger pangs, heading east with nothing but fast food and an abandoned Hooters ahead.

While crossing from platform to platform in the trees, you will sometimes swing across, sometimes cross a rope bridge, sometimes go for a short ride hooked to the zipline strung from tree to tree, and sometimes glide for a hundred yards or more with your feet dangling in the air.

First there was the botched Facebook IPO which caused alleged losses at some banks totaling $365 million. This was due to so called computer issues with the electronic stock exchange the NASDAQ. Apparently, computers used to drive the auctions were overwhelmed by order cancellations and updates in the opening moments of the IPO.

Since 1990 and the dawn fun & Stuff, and the first official publication of the Birmingham Weekly in 1997, much has changed in what a newspaper is supposed to do as you can read in the Birmingham News some days but not others. We have spun off several other publications ourselves and they are spinning off as well.