Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. At least, it was for Margaret Murray Bloom, who as a local event planner (and a woman tired of hauling around a purse all day) needed a solution to keep her hands free. “I developed the idea from a true pain point,” Bloom says. “I never […]
Late in the evening of Halloween 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakomoto published a white paper to an obscure email list. The paper described a new system of exchanging value, named “Bitcoin,” which wouldn’t require the involvement or intervention of a third party. At the time, the paper was largely ignored. But nearly 10 years later, […]
Custom Ink has been operating out of Charlottesville for nearly a decade, but the company has only recently put its name up for all to see. The custom design and printing firm, which has shown staggering growth over the last 15 years, focuses on its online audience. Wherever you are in the country, if you […]
Spring is traditionally a time of year when the real estate market begins to heat up and people look to move homes. In the Charlottesville area, we have the benefit of a robust economy, stunning natural resources and excellent entertainment. But with our high quality of life comes our seemingly ever-increasing cost of housing. According […]
Remember when there was so much talk about supporting the coal industry in West Virginia and it turned out that coal only employed about 12,000 people in a state with a population of 1.8 million? When we make decisions about our community, it’s important to know where we invest our labor force. The university, hospitals, […]
The Virginia state legislature recently passed a bill that will allow farmers to grow hemp statewide. So area kombucha fanatics and music festivalgoers can now update their wardrobes with local goods just like the rest of us. This, of course, is just the type of joke industrial hemp advocates abhor. Hemp, they say, is a […]
The house that Stacey Evans and John Grant share has been his home for 35 years; hers, for 10. It’s a pleasant, unpretentious place with a private backyard where the couple enjoys growing flowers and watching birds. For a long time they’d been living with a small, traditional kitchen that, while it overlooked the gardens, […]
The first time she saw her house, no one lived there and the doors were not even locked. For years, its previous owner had held onto it, not yet ready to sell. But in a stroke of good timing, just when the current owner got interested, the house became available—something of a rarity in this […]
Agarden’s appearance depends on its purpose, says Marlene Condon, and sometimes messier is better. “Aesthetics for me are secondary,” she says. “The most important thing is the quality of the habitat for wildlife.” Condon is a Virginia-based nature writer and photographer who has penned columns for the Daily Progress and Crozet Gazette, written for C-VILLE […]
There are as many ways to garden as there are ways to cook. Some folks plant neat rows of vegetables; others create geometric arrangements of herbs. Traditional ornamental gardens in our part of the world might feature forsythia, crepe myrtle and daffodils—plants that originate in Asia, Europe and other faraway places. But for gardeners sensitive […]