Terry Stevens gathers reference books and a few family photographs for an elevator trip from the sixth floor to the fourth. Perhaps a dozen employees of Raleigh-based Highwoods Properties Inc. will join him there. They’ve got a lot of work ahead. Eleven-hour days, probably. For the next few months — what remains of 2005 — Highwoods has dibs on one day each weekend.

We grew up together, Piedmont Airlines and I. My first airplane ride was on one of its DC-3s. I was just off the farm, and the Army was sending me to journalism school in New York City. Flunk out, they told me, and we’ll put you in the infantry. In those days, that meant Vietnam, but that wasn’t why my stomach was in a knot on this particular summer morning. It was insecurity, the fear of failing.

Ford Motor Co. executives didn’t try to hide their displeasure after NASCAR driver Dale Jarrett announced he will race Toyotas next year instead of Fords. “We’re obviously not happy,” says Dan Davis, director of Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford Racing Technology.

Gail McDonald helped six disgruntled bakery owners figure how to work with state government to hang on to their dough. As the first small-business ombudsman for the N.C. Department of Commerce, it’s her job to guide the little guy through regulations that can leave business owners fuming.

Call it carrying coals to Newcastle: Starting a college a stone’s throw from the Triangle — home of UNC Chapel Hill, Duke and N.C. State and several smaller schools — seems far-fetched. But a Duke professor says Founders College could open as soon as fall 2007.

It’s bigger, more established and has the better name. So why do some of the state’s leading winemakers want to put a cork in the North Carolina Wine Festival in favor of a new event that attracted only about a third as many people?