A large roll of paper, about a foot thick, rested on a desk one recent morning at Henderson's Development Services Center, prepared for various levels of approval.

It is just one of a mountain of plans for everything from retaining walls for individual homes to pools to large condominium developments that city of Henderson staff is handling on any given day. In a city consistently ranked as one of the 10 fastest growing in the nation, facilitating new development has become almost an art form.

While Samuel Wright was working to develop a large-scale trails plan for the Las Vegas Valley, he became interested in a side project.

On Jan. 19, that undertaking, called the Pioneer Trail, came to fruition with a celebration at the home of KCEP-FM radio, site of the one-time Westside School.

There is a short list of hospitals in Southern Nevada which perform open-heart surgery. Summerlin Hospital is now one of them.

On Jan. 17, Dr. Nancy Donahoe, director of cardio-vascular surgery, spent roughly 3 1/2 hours in the operating room with her team of 10 performing a quadruple bypass. The patient was Susan Rodriguez, 61, who lives near Palace Station.

It is a Broadway smash set in Baltimore, but the newest show on the Strip will have a few signature Sin City touches by the time the curtain goes up.

"Hairspray," set for an invitation-only premier on Feb. 15 at the Luxor Theater, follows the adventures of Tracy Turnblad, an overweight teen with a big heart and big hair, who dreams of becoming a dancer on a 1960s Baltimore TV hit -- "The Corny Collins Show."

While Samuel Wright was working to develop a large-scale trails plan for the Las Vegas Valley, he became interested in a side project.

On Jan. 19, that undertaking, called the Pioneer Trail, came to fruition with a celebration at the home of KCEP-FM radio, site of the one-time Westside School.

Since 1994, February has been designated as National Bird Feeding Month by the Wild Bird Feeding Industry to help bring awareness to the plight of wild birds during the colder months.

The severity of winter across North America and the limited availability of food can have a tremendous impact on the wild bird population.

Tony and Dana Delgado have approximately 40 years of dance teaching experience between the two of them.

The husband-and-wife team were still teaching from their Summerlin home studio at press time, but their new 3,600-square-foot studio is set to open soon.

Ask Anthem resident Stacey Allen about planning an event, and a plethora of ideas spring to the surface accompanied by plans detailing all the ways to bring those visions to life in a seamless and orderly fashion.

Allen said she's always been this way when it comes to planning events, so last fall she decided to turn her planning skills into a business by opening Imagine Special Events.

There are no meals taken together, no calling "dibs" on who sits up front in the car or cheering one another on at school sporting events. There is no excited whispering the night before Christmas or trade negotiations after Halloween trick-or-treating.

When siblings are separated by foster care, these experiences vanish.

Some 200 volunteers, 150 of them Unilever employees, poured out buckets of sweat Feb. 1 in a major physical makeover effort that turned the plain-Jane local Boys & Girls Club into a Taj Mahal playland in less than five hours.

Sales, marketing, financial and corporate middle and top-level executives from across the country representing the world's largest consumer products company descended by the busloads on the Adams Boulevard facility at noon and joined forces with about 50 dedicated residents to not only assemble and install a playground unit, but also paint all of the interior and exterior walls of the club, build planter boxes, dig holes and plant shrubs and assemble and varnish picnic tables.