Zip Code

The Carroll Eagle and Eldersburg.Net are teaming up for the seventh annual Eldersburg Photo Contest, open to residents in the 21784 ZIP code and the Carroll County portion of Marriottsville. We're looking for photos that depict life in our community - and you could win one of several prizes. • First Prize - $100. • Second Prize - $50. • Third Prize - $25. Additional prizes will be awarded for winners in categories of Landscapes, Still Life & Architecture, People, and Ages 13 and under.

St. Mary's moved into a distinctly different - and enviable - zip code Monday morning after the latest United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association poll placed the team at No. 20. It's a significant step for a program that was 6-9 less than two years ago, but coach Chris Hasbrouck doesn't want the ranking to overinflate the players' egos. “I did meet with the team,” he said Monday afternoon. “I said that it's just one small step and we need to keep working hard. But it's exciting, and it's showing that the program is moving in the right direction.” The Seahawks (2-1)

My husband and I have long used a post office box at the Roland Park post office for business mail. Our street address includes the letter “B,” which presents a problem for mail sorters and carriers, who don't know that our house is separate from the one next door with identical numbers, but no letter. The post office box has always been a prompt way to receive mail until recently. Mail addressed to our box now seems to arrive later than mail that comes to the house.

The idea, born as leaders at Goodwill Industries of the Chesapeake brainstormed ways to expand training programs, was simplicity itself: Let's go where we're really needed. Translating inspiration into action has proved trickier than anyone expected. It's not that Goodwill couldn't figure out where to go. It quickly settled on ZIP code 21223, a high-crime, low-employment swath of Southwest Baltimore that's largely south of U.S. 40. It's not that Goodwill couldn't decide what to do. The nonprofit resolved to bring a fairly modest number of jobs that would serve as a training ground for local youths, who could then move on to other employment.

The residents who purchased expensive townhouses and single-family homes in a western Howard County community in the state's most expensive ZIP code ended up with views of open, grassy slopes, proximity to a golf club, capacious living rooms with high ceilings, open floor plans, extra bedrooms and countryside-like quietude. For their money - around a half-million dollars and significantly more in many cases - they also bought a headache: A truck rumbles down their street several times a day to cart away sewage because the community's on-site sewage plant does not work.

Doug Ashton takes pride in Orchard Beach, his community of small homes and cottages nestled along northern Anne Arundel County's waterfront, where the laid-off construction superintendent has organized cleanups of shorelines sometimes littered with beer cans and other trash. Now Ashton is pushing to clean up his area's reputation as an outpost of the scrappy South Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay, leading an effort for his community to get its own ZIP code. Orchard Beach is one of six waterfront communities of cottages and townhouses that recently banded together to lobby the U.S. Postal Service to officially recognize their communities; though they won't get their own ZIP codes, they'll soon be listed as independent postal destinations.

IT IS always interesting to note what outside observers have to say about our fair city. A recent report in the New York Times focused on the campaign to make Baltimore, "once characterized by blue collars and blue crabs," a leading biotechnology center.The Times piece gives Maryland an A for effort, noting widespread cooperation among players in both the private and public sectors to make cheap rental space available for incubator projects, to offer tax breaks and other incentives to locate here, to ginger up the training of biotechnicians by institutions of higher education and to tap into the expertise of the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute and, of course, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland.

Jason Berkowitz sold his Baltimore County townhouse more quickly than he thought possible . Getting a new place? Not so easy. I shared his story a month ago, when he'd just accepted a contract on his home in Lutherville-Timonium after only six days on the market. He was concerned about the lack of inventory he was seeing, especially in the sweet spot of homes with asking prices that accurately reflect their condition, but hoped more was just about to hit for the spring selling season.

Andre Wright and Kena Douglas were intrigued with the new-looking bungalow on High Ridge Road in an old-fashioned, nearly rural neighborhood just east of Interstate 95 in North Laurel. They had been hoping to find a place to buy in Columbia, where Wright works and Douglas goes to school, but she was enamored of the all-new "green" features in the completely renovated home rescued from abandonment and foreclosure by the Howard County Housing Commission. "That appeals to me," said Douglas, 49. Wright, 51, added that winter heating oil bills in homes with conventional systems can run hundreds of dollars a month.

Most people have some skeleton in the closet, an offbeat pastime, a guilty pleasure, something that, in their most paranoid daydreams, could land them as guest specimens on one of those sleazy TV talk shows.My bad dream goes like this:''Men who compost! On the next 'Geraldo!' ''Or: ''Men who compost, and the women who love them! Next time on 'Sally Jessy!' ''OK, there it is, the complete dirt: I keep a compost bin in my back yard. What can I say? To quote the T-shirt I once received as a gift, ''Compost happens.