Does food actually taste better outdoors, or does it just seem that way? It’s certainly more festive, more romantic, more of an event. So we’re here to point you in the direction of some area restaurants with nifty little outdoor dining spots.

Got kids? If so, you probably know that a pilgrimage to New Hampshire’s Story Land and a swan boat ride in Boston Public Garden are standard summertime fare.

‘Potter’ pack

       Somewhere along the line, the “Harry Potter” series evolved from a phenomenon into a classic. And now that J.K. Rowling has completed the series (she thinks), it’s a great time to pick up the Harry Potter Hardcover Box Set. After all, if your kids are any judge, this series will be entertaining many more generations of young ones. $136.50 at www.scholasticstore.com.

The mailman must get miffed at Peggy Greenough.

The 53-year-old Concord homemaker and her brood subscribe to “Better Homes and Gardens,” “Architectural Digest,” “Cooking Light,” “Newsweek,” “Time,” “Popular Science” and — the mother lode of thick, slick glossies — “Vanity Fair.” Add in this family of five’s subscriptions to “The Boston Globe,” “Wall Street Journal,” “New York Times” weekend edition and “The Concord Journal,” as well as the 20-odd cookware and clothing catalogs that arrive monthly, and the weight would make even a pack mule groan.

And yet, a lone trash barrel stands sentinel each week outside their Main Street home. It’s enough of an anomaly that Greenough’s neighbors have begun to talk.

Looking up at the gleaming skyscrapers of today’s Beijing, I began to wonder where the history was in this imperial city turned modern metropolis.

On highways packed with highly prized new Audis and other cars in the city center, you may glimpse the peak of an old temple, but you have to look hard.

Beijing hides its history behind a bustling concrete jungle.

Consequently, most visitors to the China capital these days have the same reaction: “It’s not what I expected.” As it prepares to host the world at the Beijing Olympics in August, the city feels as much like a clean version of New York as a place with a 5,000-year-old legacy. You start to wonder how a foreign place can look so not.

Remember wallpaper?

It was that tacky stuff you had to strip off the walls of that 1927 Arts & Crafts style house you just bought from an 82-year-old woman who hadn’t updated the home since the Eisenhower administration. The faded wallpaper was pink flowers, blue bows, or — saints preserve us — both, and it was a messy job to remove it. But as soon as you got it down and slapped a new coat of paint on the walls, you had increased the value of your home by about 7 percent.

Well, a funny thing has happened while you’ve been busy poring over 13,567 paint chips for your living room makeover — wallpaper has had a renaissance. In fact, it’s even outgrown its name. At the higher end stores, they call it “wall cover” now, to better reflect the remarkable range of prints, colors and textures that are available. They can be handmade, custom-fit, and, believe it or not, downright hip.