Alison O. Bender

Early copies of Tahoe Blue are in and I hear it looks fabulous! I couldn’t make an event last week at South Lake Tahoe’s Bona Fide Books, so unfortunately missed picking up my copy early. However, there’s going to be an event in Reno on June 20 at 6:30 p.m. at Sundance Books. I will definitely be in attendance and you should be too! If you can’t make the event, feel free to pre-order the book (official release date is June 8) from Bona Fide here.

I was in Truckee last week so I stopped by the Tahoe Quarterly offices and picked up the Best of Tahoe issue. As always, beautiful photography and great articles! I’ve got a couple of bylines in the issue: I wrote a piece about the Squaw Valley Institute, which is a very cool speaker series that occurs monthly, another story about some of the best museums and cultural sites around Reno/Tahoe (to include stops ranging from South Lake Tahoe’s Explore Tahoe to Reno’s National Automobile Museum and Children’s Discovery Museum) and lastly, a small piece for the Arts Department about UNR’s Peter Goin, a photography and videographer who specializes in the Nevada landscape. Grab a copy on stands or subscribe here!

I’ve been pretty busy the past few weeks and not great with updates: The Washoe fire ended up coming much too close for comfort, so we evacuated up to Incline Village. However, between smoke inhalation and anxiety, I ended up in the ER and was pretty sick for about a week. Since then, I’ve had a couple of projects going on with the house (I could not live with the brown bathroom any longer), am trying to get back into Bikram yoga and have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and rereading Elmo’s Animal Alphabet to Nora. I did not expect my reading material to change so much with parenthood!

Anyway, I finally got my copy of the Winter 2011-12 Tahoe Quarterly! This is the first issue that I haven’t worked on and it was surprising pleasurable to enjoy the articles as a reader and not as an editor (although, who am I kidding, I can’t read a cereal box with a little mental editing!). I wrote a Valley View piece about the children’s Discovery Museum that opened in downtown Reno (and Nora’s got a cameo appearance in the story) and a Well-Being piece about the new Cancer Center that is opening in Truckee in the coming months. There are some interesting reads, including a piece about the Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows merger, one about the High Fives Foundation and another about the Woodward camp opening at Boreal (which I used to attend in Pennsylvania for gymnastics). And of course, always gorgeous photography, so grab a copy if you get the chance.