BOSTON, MA - Friday, May 2, 2008 - The Boston Cannons of Major League Lacrosse (MLL) will host their annual Season Ticket Holder Appreciation Day as training camp for the 2008 season resumes tomorrow, May 3, at Harvard Stadium, Cannons Vice President and General Manager Mark Kastrud announced today.
The exclusive event will begin with a reception at 12:00 PM in the Hall of History*, where Season Ticket Holders will have the opportunity to interact with Cannons players and coaches, get autographs and take photos in a small, private setting. Qdoba, the Cannons official family restaurant, will provide a complimentary taco bar inside the Hall of History.
In addition, all Season Ticket Holders in attendance will receive a ticket to the Harvard Men’s Lacrosse game versus Dartmouth, which will begin immediately following the reception at 1:00 PM.
Brine, the official equipment sponsor of MLL, will also be at Harvard Stadium with their King of Spring College Tour. Brine will set up inflatable shooting targets and a display of their 2008 equipment in the new Cannons Fan Zone courtyard area.
Please RSVP for Season Ticket Holder Appreciation Day by calling the Cannons Front Office at (617) 746-9933, ext. 2613.
The 35 players on the Cannons training camp roster, led by Head Coach Bill Daye, are scheduled to take the field on Saturday from 3:30-5:30 PM. Another practice session is scheduled for Sunday morning, May 4, from 9:00-11:00 AM. Both practices will take place in Harvard Stadium.
All training camp sessions are open to members of the media and to the public.
Stay tuned to BOSTONCANNONS.COM for training camp coverage including recaps, roster updates and player interviews.
The Cannons will open the 2008 season at their home field of Harvard Stadium versus the New Jersey Pride on Saturday, May 17 at 7:00 PM.

oursportscentral.com

One foot forward will be for Peg. The next step might be for Andrew. The one after that, and the hundreds - thousands - to follow will all be in memory of those touched by cancer.
Christopher Barry won’t know all their names, but they’ll be with him for Monday’s 112th running of the Boston Marathon nevertheless, each of the names affixed to shirt, shorts or firmly in his heart.
Barry, 28, is running Boston as part of the 19th annual Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge, which is expected to raise some $4.5 million for cancer research. Barry, a 2003 Keene State graduate, said he raised $6,838.06 as of Friday, and by Monday’s race expects to have more than $7,000 toward his $8,000 personal goal.
Barry said he wrote letters to everyone he knows explaining his role in the marathon challenge and asked respondents - with or without a donation - to provide names of cancer victims they’ve known. Those are the names Barry will wear on his T-shirt on Monday. Peg is for Peg Barry, Barry’s grandmother who died of breast cancer in the early ’90s. His friend, Andrew, died of testicular cancer at the age of 22 a few years ago.
“A few years after (my grandmother) died I saw how much it affected my grandfather who lost his life partner of all those years. It showed me just how deeply cancer affects not just the person who has it, but everyone else,” Barry said, explaining his inspiration behind running what will be his second marathon and his first in Boston.
“It’s easy to get up at 5:45 on a winter morning and get out and do the run. You have that little extra motivation and especially on the runs, when I get out I’m just so happy to be doing it and to be challenging myself. I think of a lot of the people who I’m running for who I know - and the people who I don’t know who I’ve been told about - and there’s a story for every one of them.”

sentinelsource.com

The Ten-Year Nap
Meg Wolitzer’s 1982 debut novel, “Sleepwalking,” focused on the painful transition to adulthood of three college women who share an unhealthy fascination with suicidal female poets. Her eighth and newest, “The Ten-Year Nap,” is an exploration of the somnolence that overtakes the lives of four middle-aged New York City mothers who have opted out of careers to stay home with their children. Wolitzer’s titles may evoke images of slumber, but this penetrating prober of family dynamics has hardly been dozing these last 26 years.
After her string of early novels exploring unconventional relationships and intense female friendships, Wolitzer’s last two books were a wake-up call to readers, making it clear that she’s more than just a pillow-fighter on gender issues. “The Wife” (2003) was a startling story about a 1950s marriage in which a talented woman took the role of helpmate to extremes, ghostwriting her less-talented husband’s prizewinning books. In “The Position” (2005), the children of the authors of a “Joy of Sex”-type manual cope with fallout from the sexual revolution. The underlying theme of both is an idea expressed by a character in the new novel: that women have been given “a raw deal in society.”
“The Ten-Year Nap” is more topical, focusing on the so-called opt-out generation — the much-discussed phenomenon of educated professionals (often daughters of feminists who fought for the right to work outside the home) who quit their jobs after having children. Is this the perk of women with wealthy husbands or a self-inflicted raw deal?
Because so many have spent time tossing and turning in this feminist hotbed, including New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin, who has made women’s issues her focus, the issues feel somewhat rumpled, less than fresh. Wolitzer tries mightily to add starch. Her writing abounds with lovely images that capture her characters’ lives — the “spackling of peanut butter onto bread” or coaxing “the last of the sunblock from the snouts of bottles.” But “The Ten-Year Nap” often sags like an old mattress with the weight of its characters’ earnest discussions about ambition, aging and societal expectations.
Three of the novel’s protagonists are friends with 10-year-old sons in the same tony all-male Upper East Side private school. It’s the sort of place where fourth-graders learn Latin, a world skewered in the movie “The Nanny Diaries” and Ayelet Waldman’s book “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.” Wolitzer’s goal, however, is understanding, not satire, and her focus isn’t hyper-parenting: It’s what the absence of purpose does to educated, formerly ambitious women.

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Staying married is hard enough these days. Could you stay in business with your spouse, too? In a new twist on the traditional mom and pop shop, millions of couples are running businesses together, from bakeries to software consulting, and clothing lines. “Co-preneurs” prize the intense togetherness that others might find suffocating, and the idea of finding a business partner they can fully trust.
“It’s impossible in almost any scenario to find a business partner whose interests are so much aligned,” says Dan Ratner, who became chief operating officer of his wife Genevieve Thiers’ start-up, Sittercity.com, a few years after she founded the online caregiver service in 2001. Thiers is the company’s chief executive.
Still, the risks are high. If the partnership or marriage sours, all is at stake, says Miriam Hawley, a Cambridge therapist who runs an executive coaching firm with her husband, Jeff McIntyre. Together, they interviewed 50 couples for their forthcoming book “Intimate Leadership: The Power of Couples In Business Together” (New Win Publishing, fall 2008).
“There’s a downside to everything being in one basket,” says Hawley. “If you’re having a hard time on the business or personal side, everything can fall apart.”
By one estimate, the “drop-out” rate may be steep. Twenty percent of co-preneurs surveyed in 1997 had quit working together by 2000, according to national surveys by Glenn Muske, a professor at Oklahoma State University. Still, the total number of such couples - 3 million - remained steady, meaning just as many went into business together as quit during that period, says Muske, adding that about one-third of US family businesses are led by couples.

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At Dessert Works in Norwood (38 Vanderbilt Ave., 781-769-1133, dessertworks.net), wedding cakes are as fussed over as the wire-stiffened, ostrich-plume pouf hairdos of pre-revolution Versailles. Owner Kristen Repa, her own blond hair flattened under a pink bandana, sits perched on a red mechanic’s stool drawing intricate Florentine ivy with a paper cornet. Her husband, Leonardo Savona, packs a finished multi-tiered cake. Savona has long, dark, curly hair, plus lots of earrings, and black leather biker boots. Last year Dessert Works made cakes for 230 weddings. In a “bridal suite,” as the pair calls it - a private tasting room adjacent to the bakery - prospective brides and grooms can look at cakes, sample some, and order what they like. Repa bakes and decorates; he delivers. “We take it slow in the van,” he says, “but potholes can come out of nowhere. We’ve had a couple of mishaps over the years but my wife always comes out to save the day.” - JONATHAN LEVITT
Repa uses only homemade buttercream, which consists of egg whites and cooked sugar creamed with butter. “If you see a cake with white that looks too white and too bright you know you’re looking at shortening,” she says. “Butter is more challenging to work with and more expensive, but also silkier and shinier and worth it. So many cakes out there are full of decorative components that don’t really taste good. That’s not our style. We don’t rely on anything that’s not food.”

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“She barely lost,” Welch said. “She could have won it. It could have been determination or that she just worked a little harder than last year, but I always knew she had the talent in her.”
While Chesson will be the only one continuing her season Friday, several Blue Devil runners made their presence felt. Freshmen John and Godfrey Mbengam both had top 20 finishes in the 300. Godfrey placed 11
“They set a season’s best with a 3:39 and just missed making the cut,” Welch said. “It was a big accomplishment for them. It’s an all sophomore and freshman team so that leaves the door open for next season.”
Senior Keisha Johnson (leg injury), Louis Bloom and Comilla Mbengam (personal commitments) missed their individual events. Ashlee Pitts just missed joining Chesson at All-States in the 55, but came up short. Starr Nathan also had a good race in the 300 then joined the 4×200 team with Johnson, Chesson, and Pitts to place eighth.

wickedlocal.com