DORSET — This Saturday Contemporary – Designer, JK Adams of Dorset is inviting the public to stop by for an open house and tour as part of Career Week.

The kitchen store is located at 1430 Route 30 in Dorset Sockets & Socket Sets, and will be open this Saturday, April 8, from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. This year marks the business’ 73rd anniversary.

“JK Adams Company is a second generation family owned company that has been producing high quality wooden houseware, entertaining, gift and storage products in Dorset Tops & Tees, VT since 1944,” said JK Adams CEO Jon Blatchford, “A number of our cutting and carving boards, as well as some of our rolling pins have been recognized as being best in class by Cooks Illustrated. Our customers include leading retailers such as Williams Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Sur La Table, and Uncommon Goods and well as numerous smaller specialty retailers throughout the United States Hoodies & Tracksuits. We employ approximately 45 people and are proud of the fact that most people have been with us for over 15 years. Our Production Planner recently celebrated her 50th year at JK Adams.”

The company’s mission is, “to put a J.K. Adams product in the hands of every person who is passionate about their kitchen, about the food they make, and about the connections made while entertaining with good food and good friends. We will design and produce products that are exceptional from a functional, aesthetic, and quality standpoint. We will stand by our products with a full 100 percent replacement guarantee. We will continually work to prove that well run companies with committed and customer focused employees can grow and prosper by producing high quality products in an environmentally and socially responsible manner in the United States Tops & Tees.”

This is the third year a business has hosted an open house to cap off Career Week, but the first time that business has been located in the Northshires. Abacus Automation of Bennington participated last year and NSK of Bennington took part the year before. This year, however, career-centered activities will continue throughout the month of April with events hosted by the Vermont Department of Labor and more. Career Week is the result of a community-wide effort that is overseen by the Bennington County Industrial Committee’s School and Workforce Partnership.

To learn more about J.K. Adams, visit their website at jkadams.com.

Reach staff writer Derek Carson at 802-447-7567, ext. 122 or @DerekCarsonBB

Valentine’s Day is traditionally the type of holiday where the guy plans a big night out for his girl. But that’s why it’s even sweeter when the girl take the initiative and surprises her guy instead! Whether it’s your first holiday together as a couple or if you’re celebrating a new milestone (translation: engagement) Swimming, there are many ways for you to show your man that you’re serious about being the Best Girlfriend Ever. Here, we asked seven real guys to reveal the most memorable things that their wives and girlfriends have done for them for Valentine’s Day.

“As a guy, I get a little tired of the old Valentine’s night set menu dinner date Swimwear… I would much prefer to go drinking instead if you ask me. One year, my wife planned a historical bar tour around the city, complete with maps and tidbits on each bar we visit. I also love history so it was the perfect combination for a great night out.” — Dave

“One year, my wife gave me a painting she created based off one of my baby pictures Bras. It was such a sweet, personal, and unexpected gift that I loved.” — Cris

“For our first Valentine’s Day together Knickers & Bras, my girlfriend cooked me my favorite meal at home. It’s simple but so sweet and made this at-times high pressure holiday a lot more enjoyable. Also, she’s a fantastic cook!” — Neil

“One year, my girlfriend booked us a trip to Paris for Valentine’s Day. Doesn’t get more romantic than that.” — Rob

“This year, my girlfriend bought me tickets to the San Antonio Spurs vs. Knicks game for Valentine’s Day. I’m from San Antonio and I’ve never been to a game at Madison Square Garden, which has long been on my list. I mean, I was pretty close to shedding man tears.” — Paul

“My girlfriend always packs me a special lunch with treats and food that I like.” — Will

“My birthday falls around Valentine’s Day so the year that I turned 30, when we were only dating, my (now) wife planned a trip for us to go to the Bahamas with two of my friends without my knowledge. She barely knew them, but she knew how much I would enjoy it, and that was the most important thing to her. She’s the most incredible woman I’ve ever known Winter Sports, and I’m so lucky to be married to her.” — Jeff

I turned 50 in 2015.

Oddly, I first thought about it back in 1975. I vividly remember lying in bed as a 10-year-old wondering what year it would be when — God-willing Eyewear & Accessories, as my Catholic training taught me — I would turn 50 or 100. I did the math. The years didn’t seem real: 2-0-1-5 and 2-0-6-5. The second still doesn’t. I’ll need to drink less bourbon to have a chance.

As I lay in bed in my full-footed pajamas, the Disco Era descending upon me, it was no more possible to imagine a 50-year-old me than to predict a Bethlehem or the Lehigh Valley of 2017.

In 1975, the Steel was belching smoke and stink across our Bethlehem neighborhood. The Clean Air Act had yet to take hold. Not many moms went to work. Some that did walked to the Sure-Fit textile mill at Linden and Ninth streets in Miller Heights to make clothes and slipcovers.

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Allentown still had the Mack Trucks world headquarters. Most of us had yet to hear the word Volvo. A&B Meats at the west end of the Hamilton Street Bridge gave Allentown its own stink. Slaughtered animals generated a different aroma than the sulfur-rot of baked coal.

Bethlehem and Hanover townships were mostly farms Shorts & Trousers, as were all of the Macungies, and the areas that supply East Penn and Parkland school districts today. Easton was for Eastonians. If you didn’t live there, you didn’t go there; may as well have been Jersey. Emmaus, Parkland and Nazareth were the easy games on the sport team schedules for high schools in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton. We’d yet to hear of Pleasant Valley or Pocono Mountain.

The landscape has changed. The population has grown. And, the economy has evolved.

In this special Outlook section, The Morning Call focuses on three economic sectors that combine for more than half of the jobs in the Lehigh Valley: health care, e-commerce and warehousing; and arts and entertainment. In 1975, two of them hardly existed, and health care was pretty much for doctors, nurses and a few admins. Today, health care and social assistance employ 55,332 people, our largest employment sector, accounting for 17 percent of total jobs in Lehigh and Northampton counties. Lehigh Valley Health Network is the region’s largest employer. St. Luke’s University Health Network is second.

In 1975, entertainment was pretty much high school sports, social halls and neighborhood clubs. There are more restaurants now in two blocks of Easton than existed in the entire Lehigh Valley. Warehouses were small, primarily in urban areas and close to the factories and mills that produced the goods that they stored Nightwear. Today, warehouses are larger than a million square feet and house goods made here, there and everywhere. They’re located close to major highways or rail lines with access to extensive and dense populations that can be reached within an eight-hour truck drive.

The Lehigh Valley is one of the largest logistics markets on the East Coast and one of the fastest growing in the U.S. The internet and online buying — where goods are delivered to the doorstep — created the sector, which is the Lehigh Valley’s fastest growing, adding nearly 3,000 jobs last year for a total of 24,071 jobs.

E-commerce and warehousing, however, still don’t come close to manufacturing employment in the Lehigh Valley. Manufacturing employs 32,000 people at 680 manufacturers Handbags & Wallets. Less than 20 years after Bethlehem Steel closed in 1998, manufacturing is again the Lehigh Valley’s largest sector of economic output, generating 15 percent of our gross domestic product. By comparison, manufacturing accounts for 10 percent of the U.S. GDP.

Manufacturing job growth has outpaced total job growth in the region Competitive Swimwear, growing by more than 2 percent a year. The industrial and distribution sector helps. It’s more cost-effective to make products close to distribution corridors.

The Lehigh Valley economy has changed and it will continue to change. What’s important is that it has not declined. Today’s economic base is much more diverse than it was in 1975. Our air is much cleaner, and, yes, we still make things here.

I’d like to be here in 2065 to see the changes of the next 50 years. That’s why I really tried to give up bourbon for Lent, I really did try.

Science and art rarely overlap or rub elbows with one another. One is a systematic enterprise while the other dances with expression and splashes of color.

Marrying the two themes comes in the forms of “Fragments of We,” a culminating exhibition for Chico State University master’s candidate, Holland Larsen.

It’s an art show that brings the humanistic and emotional visual representation of art into science. Larsen will have about 30 original works in her exhibit and an artist reception with talk 5:30-7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Jacki Headley University Art Gallery. Admission is free.

Last August, Larsen’s mother had a brain tumor removed. It impacted her language, vision and memory.

“When my mom had to have surgery, it just kind of hit me,” Larsen said. “The basis of my show is fragile mortality but also something that is so science-based that is often explained to us in a scientific way. I wanted to introduce the more human aspect of it Tops & T-Shirts.”

Mono prints, woodblocks, etchings and a large sculpture piece illustrate these themes.

A wealth of research and reaching out to specialists in the field aided in Larsen’s understanding of what her mother was going through Sunglasses & Eyewear Accessories. The printmaker then internalized these notions into her prints.

“As a contemporary artist,” she said, “a lot of what I’m talking about is so logical and representational, and the way that I show it is abstract because there are realities from all this information that can’t be described to representational work Competitive Swimwear.”

After her mother’s surgery, the idea of memories lost weighed heavily on Larsen’s heart.

“I was just thinking about memories and how I’m not OK with them just being this ethereal thing that is in this part of our body,” she explained.

Her curiosity lead her to the enneagram theory. It explores the notion that all human memories are written in code in the brain.

She used her discoveries and applied them to her abstract prints. Larsen created a language for these codes based on specific memories and where they are located in the brain.

An entire piece dedicated to memories collected from loved ones in Larsen’s world connects specific smells, words and places and why they get imprinted in one’s brain.

“It’s not a unique thing, brain surgery or loss of memory,” she said. “Not to sound cheesy, but it’s going to happen Suits & Blazers, and for some it happens a lot earlier for people.”

The artist has been working on these pieces for a year and half, mirroring the time she aided her mother through recovery.

The largest piece in the show drapes across the gallery wall and represents the printmaker’s biological connection to her mother.

Woven within this piece are varied neuropsychological disorders inherited from Larsen’s parents.

It sprawls across the gallery wall to symbolize its progression of DNA and what children receive from their parents. The piece is about 40 feet long — Larsen’s largest creation to date, she said.

“It’s the first time I’ve done sculpture-based print making as opposed to just having flat prints on the wall,” Larsen said. “It was scary to see her scar and to see what was happening so I wanted to blow that up and see what would happen on a larger scale.”

The blush pink Larsen rendered to dye pieces of latex is the same fleshy tone of her mother’s surgery scar.

“It was just the weirdest color combination,” she said with a laugh. “The aesthetics of it were so bizarre and interesting. I tried to replicate it in my prints.”

The gradation of bruising on the latex and paper pieces strung together are sewn with a loop stitch, often used in medical procedures.

Approaching this subject as an artist while also compartmentalizing being a daughter to a sick mother has been rough.

“It’s been interesting,” Larsen explain. “The 20 smaller prints was about collecting written memories from my mom and my dad and my grandmother who has dementia and it was a lot more intense than I thought it was going to be.”

Larsen wanted to broaden this aspect of her show to include her other loved ones and not have each piece reflect her mother’s experience.

She asked both parents and grandmother various questions like what was their most impactful memory when they were 5 and 20 years old or what smells impacted their lives and the stories associated with each scent.

Larsen took their memories and transposed them into her artwork.

The artist tried to take a clinical approach to this gathering of information but she could not put her emotions aside Knickers.

“These people are everything to me,” she continued. “This is about people that I love and it’s really hard to talk about it even though I’ve been working on it for a year and a half.”

Howard Hughes Key Jr., of Stuttgart Work Utility & Safety Clothing, to Stephanie Kaye Henderson, of Stuttgart

‒ Antonio Roshaun Walker Shoes, of Stuttgart, to Lashanda Maria Willis, of Stuttgart

‒ James Michael Vaughn, of Little Rock, to Kimberly Dianne Busick, of Little Rock

‒ Darryl Lee Mixon, of Dubach, Louisiana, to Courtney Irene Pullman, of Stuttgart

‒ Van Johnson, of Stuttgart, to Cherion D. Philmon, of Stuttgart

‒ Joseph Lee Craig, of Stuttgart, to Shelley Michelle Lawrence, of Stuttgart

‒ Shavis Sloane Roop Boys, of Stuttgart, to Skylan Marie Guynes, of Stuttgart

‒ Richard Randall Hodges of Roe Underwear, to Mary Sue Renfroe, of Roe

‒ Nathan Daniel Rankin, of Stuttgart, to Natalie Nichole Wood, of Stuttgart

Divorces:

‒ Cassy Harrison from Kevin Harrison

‒ Stanley Shannon II Pinegar from Cassie Brooke Pinegar

‒ Shirley Walker Phillips from Ira Phillips

‒ Allison Bednar from Randal Bednar

‒ Rebecca Kittler from Jeremy Kittler

‒ Steven Tyler Cupples from Maegan Elizabeth Brixie

‒ Ashley D Running Shoes. White from Charlie R. Green