Kyla Long is looking for a home for these dogs because their owner died last fall. Photo/Provided

For more than two months Aggie and Olivia have been waiting for their next forever home.

The two dogs lost their owner when she died in a mobile home fire in Stateline in November.

“I’m trying to keep them together. I’m not sure how long I’ll wait before I split them up,” Kyla Long told Lake Tahoe News.

Long runs Tahoe Tails and Trails on Lower Kingsbury Grade. While this type of service is not part of her business, she has placed 11 dogs in the last 6½ years.

Aggie and Olivia were brought to Long by a neighbor of the deceased woman in the hopes of finding someone to take them in.

Both are active – having been used to multiple walks a day, are good off leash, and play well with children of all ages. They get along with other dogs. Aggie, though, likes to chase cats. Both are spayed and are current on vaccinations.

Aggie is about 50 pounds and is 3 years old. She is a Lab mix – with some pit pull and Catahoula.

Olivia will be 8 in February and weighs 100 pounds. She is a Great Pyrenees with some Lab.

For now their home is at the doggie day care center; they even have a private room.

Anyone interested in adopting the animals should call Long at 775.580.7121.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Brady Dennis, Washington Post

Each approaching blizzard brings warnings about the dangers of shoveling snow, an activity that sends thousands of Americans to emergency rooms each winter. Don’t tackle the walkway if you aren’t in good enough shape, say the experts. You can get hurt or, even worse, trigger a heart attack or stroke.

Medically speaking, a person is indeed more likely to keel over while heaving snow than, say, jogging on a treadmill. But why?

“Physically, what happens when you get really cold is you have constriction of the blood vessels,” says Lawrence Phillips, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center. “It decreases the blood supply you’re getting to your vital organs.”

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By Perry Garfinkel, Los Angeles Times

British author Graham Greene, in his 1980 book, “Ways of Escape,” put into words what most writers know: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

Academicians trace the idea of writing as therapy to the time of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, about 1,200 BC. The entrance to his royal library declared: “House of Healing for the Soul.” American Unitarian minister Samuel Crothers coined the term “bibliotherapy” in 1916. In the late 1980s, James Pennebaker, psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, led the modern writing therapy movement in a landmark research study that showed the potential health benefits of “expressive writing” about emotional upheaval.

In the last two decades, writing therapy has joined dance and art therapy as a legitimate therapeutic tool. And that has triggered growing interest in a type of writing that focuses on the healing power of putting feelings down on paper or screen — as evidenced by the burgeoning popularity of the memoir, as well as the use of journaling in businesses and American schools.

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By Matt McCue, 99U

Chances are you’ve seen a James Niehues painting before, but you didn’t know it. His canvas is the ski trail map, which is often overlooked for its artistic value. But since 1986, Niehues has created more than 240 different maps for resorts on five continents including Aspen Highlands, Sun Valley, Vail, Whistler Blackcomb, and Big Sky.

For this ski season, the 70-year-old has designed the trail map for the newly-combined Park City and Canyons ski areas, now America’s largest ski mountain.

Niehues’s mastery of a single métier may sound familiar. One day you design something relatively obscure for a client, and they recommend you to a colleague. The referrals snowball until pretty soon you’re the go-to book jacket, wedding invite, or font designer, whether or not that was your intent.

The referrals snowball until pretty soon you’re the go-to book jacket, wedding invite, or font designer, whether or not that was your intent.

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The Tahoe Improv Players will take the stage Feb. 6 at 7pm as a benefit for Tahoe Arts Project.

The performance will take place at the Duke Theatre at Lake Tahoe Community College.

Tickets are $12 for adults and $8 for children, and may be purchased at the door.

In addition to the public performance, Tahoe iMPRoV Players will be putting on a free improv workshop for middle and high school students on Feb. 6 from 10am-2pm, with a free performance from 2:15-3pm in the college theater. There are 20 spots available on a first come, first serve basis. Call 530.542.3632 to reserve a spot.

Members of Tahoe iMPRoV Players will be performing in the South Shore schools Feb. 1-5.

By Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times

To handle stress and adversity more effectively, we should probably pay closer attention to what is happening inside our bodies, according to a fascinating new brain study of resilience and why some people seem to have more of it than others.

We live in difficult times. Worries about the state of our world, our safety, our finances, health and more can lead to a variety of physiological and psychological responses.

“When faced with stress, whether it’s giving a talk in front of a hundred people or feeling pressured to get a second gold medal at the Olympics, we experience changes in our body,” said Lori Haase, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego and lead author of the new study. Our heart rates rise, breathing grows shallow, and blood levels of adrenaline and other stress chemicals soar.

While this stress response can have desirable results — “I need anxiety to motivate myself to write a grant,” Haase said — it can easily can get out of hand.

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Award-winning novelist and short story writer Rebecca Makkai will be giving a reading, engaging the audience in a Q&A, and signing books in the Aspen Room at Lake Tahoe Community College on Feb. 10.

This free event is at 7pm. Books will be available for purchase.

Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels “The Hundred-Year House”, winner of the Chicago Writers Association’s Novel of the Year award, and “The Borrower”, a Booklist Top Ten Debut which has been translated into eight languages.

Her short story collection, “Music for Wartime”, was published in June 2015. Her short fiction was chosen for the Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years (2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008), and appears regularly in journals like Harper’s, Tin House, and New England Review. Makkai is a recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship.

Sting and Peter Gabriel are going on tour together, with one of their stops being in Stateline.

They are the second act to be booked for the Harveys Outdoor Concert Series. Country star Keith Urban was the first.

Sting and Gabriel will be in town July 15 at 7pm.

Tickets go on sale Jan. 25. They range in price from $89.50 to $255.

While with the Police, Sting was part of five albums. Since then he has had 14 solo albums.

Gabriel was a founding member of Genesis. He left in 1975 and has had 11 solo albums.

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Kathryn Reed

A tropical country, surfers, a legendary wave, drug dealers and corporate greed – all the makings for fictional fantasy. Only this was reality.

Controversy and years of legal haggling started in 2004 when a company received approval from Costa Rican government officials to build the world’s first yellow fin tuna farm off the coast of this Central America country.

       South Lake Tahoe author Jeremy Evans captures the strife and intrigue in “The Battle for Paradise” (University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

The subject is intriguing – taking the reader to a remote impoverished coastal town that is home to a legendary wave. The problem is the book gets incredibly bogged down with the drug dealer. He is integral to the town’s evolution, but he takes over the book.

The last chapter where Evans professes his environmental stance is where the heart of the book should have come from. Instead it reads like an afterthought.

If this had been a book heavy on the relationship between the environment and surfing, and less on the drug dealer, it would have been more profound. The drug dealer could be a book unto itself; a biography, perhaps. Evans didn’t weave it all together in a manner that flowed well or gave balance to the real issues.

Evans also inserts himself into the story at times when it is not necessary, and is even distracting. This contradicts what he says in the introduction about needing to be an observer.

The subject matter is interesting. And for those who know nothing about the world of Dan Fowlie, the town of Pavones or the corruption of Costa Rica, this would be a good introduction.

Science author and journalist David Quammen will give a lecture at UNR on Feb. 4  titled Ebola and Beyond: Scary Viruses in a Globalized World.

It will focus on his most recent works about Ebola and AIDS – his books “The Chimp and the River” and “Ebola” – which stem from his acclaimed book about emerging diseases, “Spillover.”

David Quammen

Quammen is a journalist as well as a science, nature and travel writer. He has authored 15 books, five of them fiction.

In his 30-year career as a writer, more than 100 pieces of his short non-fiction have been published in popular magazines such as Harper’s, Outside, Esquire, Atlantic, Powder and Rolling Stone. He also wrote a column called “Natural Acts” for Outside magazine for 15 years. As a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine, he travels often, usually to wild and remote places.

The Quammen lecture begins at  7pm in the Redfield Auditorium in the Davidson Mathematics and Science Center at UNR. Admission is free.