Gathering

I'm confused about choosing a color to paint my kitchen. I've heard that green is the color of the year. And then I hear about gray being the new neutral. What are the best colors to paint the kitchen? A kitchen should be an inviting gathering space, so warmer or brighter tones are ideal, such as deep ivories, rich coppers, luscious reds, golden yellows and yellow-greens. Be sure to take countertops, appliances and floors into consideration when selecting your color. You'll want something that complements these accents and flows naturally into the surrounding rooms of your home.

Soon after a massive tornado devastated Moore, Okla., last month, a Linthicum seamstress leaped into action, formulating a plan to help the victims. Kathy Furth began reaching out to thread-savvy friends from her parish and a local sewing organization to gauge interest. She asked them: Do you want to join forces to make clothes for children who lost everything in the disaster? The positive responses to her inquiries were overwhelming, she said. "It just spread like crazy," said Furth, owner of Sew Many Seams, a business that specializes in creating one-of-a-kind liturgical vestments.

On the steamy second floor of Adrian's Book Cafe, strangers fan themselves and talk aimlessly about the unexpected burst of summer heat. It's all small talk, subterfuge really, for what's truly on their minds. Those gathered here - from the clean-cut Catonsville couple to the ribald divorcee - harbor one unyielding thought: Sex.Before the night ends, they will speak of it. The secret urgencies and cries of love, rain-swept sheets and ripening fruit. The great beast within? It will come out, in conversation at least, and the unleashing will make them laugh and fidget, stare dreamily at the ceiling tile and applaud - out of relief and satisfaction - when it's over.

Chanting "Free Bradley Manning" and wielding signs that read "my hero" and "Americans have the right to know," hundreds of demonstrators descended on Fort Meade on Saturday to support the soldier now facing a court-martial in the largest security breach in U.S. history. Manning, an Army private who lived in Maryland before enlisting, has acknowledged leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including diplomatic cables, Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and gunsight video footage of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad, to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Sen. Rand Paul is recruiting plaintiffs - and seeking donations - for a class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency. “Dear Patriot,” the Kentucky Republican wrote Thursday in an e-mail to supporters. “I'm looking for ten million Americans to stand with me and sue the federal government and TAKE BACK our rights. “Can I count on your help? “Without it, I truly fear where our fragile Republic could be headed …” Paul, who is expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, told a Fox News interviewer this week that he would be asking Internet providers and telephone companies to join him in a lawsuit against the electronic eavesdropping agency based at Fort Meade.

There is nothing definite, but there is in the works a gathering in memory of the restaurateur Morris Martick. The plans, in these early stages, would involve a mid-morning weekday gathering at the Charles theater, followed by a reception at the Metro Gallery. This would happen sometime in January, possibly sometime around Jan. 18, when Martick, who died last Friday, would have celebrated his 90th birthday. Details about a formal funeral service, if there is one at all, have not been made public.

Early on, Friday night's food truck rally looked like a washout, but once the rains stopped, the crowds came. Organizers estimate that as many as 2,000 people came through the Gathering at some point. Then, the only problems were long (and confusing)  lines and early sell outs. The tweets I saw were all positive, though, and the food-truck operators are all already gearing up for another rally next month, which they may have to find a bigger lot for. Baltimore photographer Marty Katz sent along his walk-through footage from Friday night's Gathering.

The date -- Friday, Aug. 5, 5-10 p.m. -- had already been announced for the Gathering: Take 2 , the follow-up to Baltimore's first food-truck rally that was  held last month on Central Avenue. Here is the new location. The Gathering: Take 2 will be held on the parking lot across from Red Star . The lot's address is 901-911 S. Wolfe St.  

I'm still at the office. And I'm not near a window. Has it stopped ranining? This was the scene at the Gathering just after 5 p.m.

Baltimore's monthly food truck rally, The Gathering, is holding fast to its first-Friday schedule. The next edition is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 7. UPDATE (Oct. 6, 5:37 p.m.): The Gathering is not changing locations. It will be back again on Wolfe Street, across from the Red Star. The new location for this fourth go-round is the big Fells Point lot bound by Aliceanna on the north, Eden to the east, Lancaster on the south and Central on the west.

Maryland's death penalty will be wiped from the books in October now that efforts to reinstate capital punishment have fallen short. The petition drive to halt repeal of the death penalty ended Friday afternoon, when organizers said they could not collect enough signatures to go forward. Meanwhile, advocates who worked for nearly a decade to end capital punishment in Maryland celebrated the final landmark in their victory. The failure is the first for MdPetitions.com, which had successfully forced a statewide vote on three laws, including same-sex marriage, in 2012.

Dressed in the traditional garb of a Civil War Union soldier, Vince Vaise led the two dozen marchers through Mount Auburn, Baltimore's oldest African-American cemetery. Sword drawn, and a stoic look upon his face, Vaise and his followers snaked through the overgrown grass Sunday before stopping at a small white gravestone, which he later explained belonged to Peter Purviance, the city's first freed slave to join the Union army. On this eve of Memorial Day, Vaise and the small group spent the afternoon honoring African-American veterans from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

In Washington, as in any seat of power, most acts of folly begin with hubris. Government leaders, elected or appointed, usually don't intend to do the wrong thing, to overstep or cause harm, but they become so convinced, so certain of their purpose, that they are blinded by their pride. Perhaps that's the root of the problem infecting the Justice Department, where officials secretly obtained months of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press. That Attorney General Eric Holder or anyone else there could find that action acceptable is frightening, to say the least.

To nobody's surprise, all four living former presidents were on their best behavior last week at the dedication of the library and museum named for the latest of them, George W. Bush, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The honoree's father, George H.W., along with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, dutifully latched on to the positive about the junior Bush's eight years in the Oval Office, eliminated the negative and, as in Johnny Mercer's old song, didn't mess with Mr. In Between.

When hearth and home - together with a growing family and an onsite family business - are at the center of day-to-day living, a small and dated one-story farmhouse in Ellicott City begins to burst at the seams. To keep their extended family under one roof while preserving the one-bathroom house built in 1954, the Harbin and Taylor families found the only solution was to build additions. "My mom and uncle were raised on the original farm down the road," Kim Harbin Taylor said. "That house was on 18 acres, and they farmed an additional 44, raising sweet corn and tomatoes.

Less than 24 hours ago, an apparent act of terrorism marred this year's Boston Marathon. It's too early to know many of the details about this tragic event. Late last night, officials were reporting three deaths and well over 100 injuries; soon we will have a clearer sense of how many were killed and wounded. Their families, friends and co-workers will pay tribute to and then bury their loved ones. When they are ready, some of the wounded survivors and spectators will come forward to recount the horrors they experienced.

Friends and fans of Owl Meat Gravy will gather in Little Italy on Sunday, Aug. 21 in the lounge at Chipparelli's for a  celebration of his life and writing. The informal event will begin at 7:30 p.m. and all are welcome to attend. Bob Swank, best known for his masterful writing on electronic media under the name Owl Meat Gravy died in his Little Italy home late last week. Swank wrote, post, tweeted and updated regularly from his perch at Chipparelli's . "We want everyone from all facets of his life to attend," said Carson Jacokes, a bartender at Chipparelli's who helped plan Sunday evening's gathering.

Inspired by an ancient Chinese symbol, which also serves as the logo for her practice, Jade Connelly-Duggan decided to open WisdomWell, a family acupuncture and wellness center in Columbia. “For myself and the people I work with, wellness happens in the gathering place,” she says. “I wanted to create a place where the community can come and gather and share ways of being well.” Connelly-Duggan, a second-generation acupuncturist who has been practicing for four years, founded WisdomWell in November 2011.

Leading a tour of the Soldiers Delight area of western Baltimore County on Sunday afternoon, Paula Becker, an ecologist with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, was pleased to report the first blooming of serpentine chickweed - a plant as rare as it is splashy in spring. And while that might not constitute earth-shattering news, it is certainly reassuring to those monitoring the health of the plant. Serpentine chickweed grows in the shallow serpentine soil of the strange, hilly grasslands of the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, at 2,000 acres the largest remaining ecosystem of its kind in the country.

Three endangered sea turtles that spent the winter in Baltimore departed Saturday evening, joining a caravan of at least 43 others bound for Florida's warm waters and a return to their natural habitat. The three turtles — Chet, Biff and Two-Bit — were among more than 200 sea turtles to wash ashore on Massachusetts beaches, critically ill with hypothermia, last November and December. When The New England Aquarium's sea turtle hospital reached capacity, rescuers reached out to other facilities up and down the East Coast to find foster homes.