Windows

So maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it was just a fluke. A few short days after my last column went to press, where I discussed chasing kids who beat on the windows of businesses, I walked out to my car after work and discovered an unfortunate new expense - the rear window of my car had been smashed out. This wasn't a theft. Nothing was stolen. It was nothing like that. It was either just a random act of a window giving way, or someone committed vehicular vandalism.

Is the window closing for the Ravens to win a Super Bowl? It definitely is for stalwart linebacker Ray Lewis and free safety Ed Reed. But Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti believes the window is wide open for his franchise. “I don't see age as being a window closing, not when you have a franchise quarterback coming up that's entering his fifth year,” Bisciotti said at Wednesday's news conference. “We got great contributions this year from three of our seven draft picks, and I know that we are very excited about the other ones.

The Carroll County Sheriff's Office has released surveillance photographs of a suspect wanted in connection with the vandalism of two Westminster-area schools on Christmas Day. Just before 3 p.m. on Dec. 25, deputies responded to a burglar alarm at the William Winchester Elementary School on Monroe Avenue just outside of Westminster. On Wednesday, Jan. 11, the Sheriff's Office released a surveillance image, and said it shows a white male, approximately 25 years old, with a brown hair, seen approaching the school from the Englar Road side with two bricks in hand.

It's a good thing Gertrude Stein never said, "A phone is a phone is a phone. " Clearly, these days, her tautology would be a disconnect, received like a dropped call. The mobile devices we're so dependent on, attached like an extension of our brains, are so much more. Ultimately, they allow everything to be knowable. But while the smooth, mirrored glass on an iPhone presents a funhouse from which anyone can observe all the YouTube videos, Facebook updates, Tweets and apps, ad infinitum and at an instant - when blended with the speed of driving, it's enough to send a person careening through the glass of a car windshield onto the hard, real world pavement.

Police officers on Thursday shot and wounded a man driving a car linked to an armed robbery after chasing the vehicle nearly 30 miles from southern Anne Arundel County to Lansdowne, according to a Baltimore County police spokeswoman. During the chase up Interstate 97, police said the man waved a handgun out of the window of the car. The pursuit involved troopers from the Maryland State Police and officers from Baltimore City and Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties. Det. Cathy Batton, the Baltimore County police spokeswoman, said the chase began about 11:07 a.m. on Solomons Island Road, southwest of Annapolis, and ended about 11:48 a.m. at Virginia Avenue and Fenor Road in the Baltimore Highlands neighborhood.

Kathy Woods tried everything she could think of to save the female red-tailed hawk that was injured last year by crashing into a library window at the Johns Hopkins University. Even bird acupuncture. But the hawk's nerve damage proved too serious to overcome, and she was put to sleep. "The impact of the glass was just too much," Woods, who runs the Phoenix Wildlife Center in Baltimore County, said Tuesday. It wasn't the happy ending many wished for at Hopkins, where the hawk and her mate were such common sights that they attained "celebrity status on the Homewood campus," according to The Gazette, the university's newspaper.

City officials will dedicate the community meeting hall at the Laurel Police Department on Saturday, Sept. 10 at 10 a.m. The meeting hall, named the Partnership Activity Center, was the sanctuary of the former First Baptist Church building and is the last area to be renovated as part of the Laurel Police Department's move to the complex at 811 Fifth St. in April 2010. Design plans included adding a kitchen and bathrooms and making the room handicapped accessible. Floors and lighting have been upgraded; the room has been painted; and high-energy-efficient windows were installed when other windows were replaced in the rest of the Police Department building.

Harley and Aaron Magden grew up working in the family business — supplying replacement windows to homeowners — but decided to make a change when their father sold the Ohio company. The brothers are still selling windows. But now they're doing it from Glen Burnie. Five years after founding Window Nation in the Baltimore area, the brothers have built the company into the 28th-largest firm on trade magazine Qualified Remodeler's list of the top 500 home-improvement companies nationwide.

Sometimes, it's just the littlest of things that can bring people together. In this case it's a kitten, a little furry thing that's charmed an entire Baltimore neighborhood. No one's sure exactly when the kitten came into their lives. She was just there one day, perched in a window on Lombard Street. She was a tiny thing then, a black and white cutie. If someone would tap on the window -- and they always did -- she'd follow the finger with a pink paw pad. If she was feeling frisky she'd try to pounce on it -- not realizing a pane of glass was holding her back.

A string of terrible luck brought Deborah Goldring to the brink of foreclosure. Her husband died. All their savings were exhausted paying down bills from his long illness. Then she lost her job. But just as the Baltimore woman's lender notified her that her time had nearly run out, a new federally funded program was launched to help homeowners like her. Now Goldring is about to close on a no-interest loan that will allow her to catch up on her mortgage and that will cover a large chunk of her monthly payments while she looks for work.