DAIRY TIME

You get to visit a lot of dairy farms when you hang around 4-H’ers.  Most of the barns I’ve visited (accompanying Carly and Audrey who are participating again this year) are pretty dim places despite overhead lights.   Milking is a dirty business.  Barn floors are often wood or dirt, the dirt churned into mud by the cows in season.   Hoses filled with pure clean milk wind past floors that can have varieties of mud, hay, manure and/or cow pee.   Everyone wears muck boots.  On a cold day a barn may feel colder inside than out. 

The dirt floor turns into mud in season

The first farm we went to one chilly day in March is run by Farmer Dan, the same farmer who mows our field, and his brother.  It’s his brother who mostly handles the dairy cow operation whereas Dan’s income comes mostly (or in part?) from repairing farm machinery and engines.  Dairy farming was in the family, their father before them a dairyman, and maybe it goes back further than that.  His brother is less presentable than Dan:  a few missing teeth right up front, a big belly, and much less of a conversationalist.  The cows they have are boarded from one place or another.  They don’t actually own any of them.  This is not an unusual arrangement.

Dan's brother (right) with Audra, cow expert and 4-H leader

Another farm, and another chill and dimly lit barn, wooden floor.  A newborn calf (days old) stood shivering in its stall.  This seemed to be a matter of small importance to the farmer.  After all, cows can be outdoors in all kinds of weather, while calves are almost always indoors, sheltered from wind at least.  Yet one can’t help thinking that if the world were different, this calf would have been sheltered by its mother, and would have been taking its mother’s milk.  But that is absurd on a dairy farm.  Calves are separated from their mothers almost immediately after birth.  Mothers need to keep producing milk and get pregnant all over again.  Holsteins are the preferred milk cow because they are big and produce a lot of milk.  One can’t forget this is a business.

Something different:  a bright cheerful-looking calf barn

A barn we visited in April had a different look.  We were led around (“we” being half a dozen 4-H’ers, me, and two other adults) this 1,000-cow operation by the chief herdsman.  (How many people have you ever known with the job title herdsman?)   He was a fairly hip looking guy, the telltales of his work the confetti of hay on his hoodie.  A single light-filled structure–more Quonset hut than barn–was filled with calves of various ages. The bright clean space conveys a sense of well cared for calves.

(In reality all cows are cared for matter-of-factly, to my eye.  They are a commodity, they have value, and they are someone’s livelihood.  Cows are big, and they are dumb, and they have to be pushed around sometimes.  I see a cow stumble when it's been shoved, and I say "Oh!"  But I'm being soft.  Me before you, cow!  Let's not get emotional.)

These calves’ metal cages were filled with fresh straw and each cage had a pair of clean white buckets with grains and water.  One larger corral held half a dozen calves that were ready to be weaned.  A row of rubber nipples were arrayed on one side attached to hoses that led to a barrel of substitute milk so the calves could suckle whenever they wanted. Younger non-weaned calves get their substitute milk via individual bottles. 

Chief herdsman, in profile

The cows in this 1,000 size herd (a “closed herd,” no cows boarded from anywhere else, all cows owned by the farm) are housed inside full-time, their milk marketed as Monument Dairy, a completely local operation.   Along with “local” we like to think “natural,” where natural in this case would suggest cows munching the grass in the scenic outdoors.  That’s the image.  And there are many cows in the fields in Addison County, plenty of them right on our street.  But pasturing or not, it’s a personal decision, depending on the kind of dairying you want to or are able to do.  Because it’s a business, these are business decisions.  Pasturing is cheaper.  However, it’s harder to keep track of or monitor cows that are out to pasture.  They have to be rounded up to be milked.  Or maybe there’s not enough pasture for all the cows.  Or the pasture isn’t right for these particular cows.  One has to weigh issues of soil quality and type, the amount, type and quality of forage (vegetation) to determine how many cows can feed on how much acreage.  Dairy cows, because they are lactating, need more forage and better quality forage than beef cattle.   An agricultural service elaborates on how soils can vary: 

Soils in "herd pastures" that serve as lounging areas for cattle often are very high in phosphorus and potassium. However, soils from an adjacent field where harvested forage is grown may be low in these nutrients.

I like thinking about lounging cattle.

Management info at the calf barn

Dairy has been a major farming business in Vermont for a very long time.  I remember hearing some years ago how Vermont’s population was described as consisting of “more cows than people.”  If this was ever true, it isn’t anymore.  On the other hand, Vermont has the largest number of cows in the country per capita, that is, the ratio of cows to people.  According to the University of Vermont, with a population of about 626,000 people, we currently have about 150,000 milk cows that produce some three billion pounds of milk (one gallon of milk = approximately 8 pounds; figure it out!)  per year.

At right, an early (primitive) milk pan and skimmer; at center (quite unrelated!) a boot dryer

Any businessman, farmer or not, wants to decrease the workload and increase efficiency.  Hence the large number of inventions related to the dairy business.  We heard a talk about Vermont inventions a while back from a former engineer who collects these objects.  Many of them have to do with the prime issue of separating the cream.  The most primitive form of this was letting the milk sit until the cream rose to the top, then skimming it off.

 

A pair of butter printers (you stamped on the name of the producer and/or a design)

The very latest thing in dairy management was recently in the news in the New York Times.  A dairy operation in upstate New York has entirely automated the milking process.  With a transponder around her neck, a cow walks into a milking cubicle (seeded with specially tempting grains) whenever it feels a need to be milked.  There a laser guides the milking nozzles to the udder.  There’s hardly a limit to the kind of data about the cow and the milk that can be collected automatically.  This farm also has a robot that functions much like a Roomba vacuum that sweeps the cows’ feed neatly along the floor for the cows to eat.   A smooth concrete floor is needed for that.

Lot of acreage, but the cows stay in the barn
(In the distance, the ubiquitous used tires covering manure that will become compost)

Probably in a few years milking robotics will come to this area.  Maybe it’s already here, somewhere.  Maybe the floors of all barns will be concrete instead of dirt or wood, and milking will be automated.  Maybe only beef cows will feed in pastures.  Maybe (hey, why not?) milk will be made chemically instead of taken from cows.  Maybe male cows will have a brighter future beyond veal, somehow.  In a more perfect world of course.

All things considered, I would rather farm plants.

*”With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When its Milking Time,” The New York Times, April 22, 2014. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html?_r=0

MELT

Ice, rocks, leaves

ONE DAY last week some neighborhood cows decided to take a stroll.  An entire herd of twenty or so decided to mosey down Hallock Road, past our house and on down the hill north of our property.  Somewhere around the bend they paused to munch some stubby grasses in a field.  Eating out, you could say.  According to my daughter and neighbor, a couple of guys had come by asking if anyone had seen a bunch of cows.  “We looked where they was supposed to be and the gate was open and all of them was like, gone.”  They found their cows.  After some hooting and hollering and a couple of toots of a car horn the herd was persuaded to stroll in the other direction, back up the hill toward the farm to our south, their home for better or worse.  They’d probably walked a half mile all in all.  It seemed like a pleasant outing, all things considered.  I like to think their adventure was brought about less by opportunity, the gate left carelessly open, and  more because spring was in the air and they got the itch to travel. 

The herd moves up Hallock Road

SPRING IS HERE, or coming, anyway.  It’s hard to be sure because there have been mixed signals.  Skiing is still viable in the mountains.  Both Sugarbush and the Middlebury Snow Bowl are open, although Rikert’s cross country trails have closed for the season.  Yet there is melt, and plenty of it.  All the rivers are high and low-lying fields have become temporary lakes, receiving visits from ducks and newly arriving geese.  Our own pond is momentarily stuck in two seasons, evidence for which is a duo of mergansers (symbolizing spring) swimming amongst small icebergs (winter, obviously).  The two main flows that feed the pond are almost streams:  one drains down the hill from the south, and the other drains more slowly from the western border along the road.  Still––magic will happen––it could be only days before stains of green appear.

March

Pond in early April

Normally a field, now a lake, complete with geese

WE HAVE HEARD red-winged blackbirds in the field.  They will be nesting there when the grasses begin to grow.  A great blue heron flew overhead as I drove on the road to Middlebury.  Skunks are on the prowl.  Salamanders are laying their eggs.  Rodents find themselves exposed as the snow melts over their pathways.  Daisy and Skyler uncovered a vole last week that became, after I tossed its body into the woods, food for some other scavenger.  Now is when baby opossums are born, babies so tiny that some twenty could fit into a teaspoon.  Hardly viable at that stage, they have to find their way to the opossum’s pouch if they are to survive.  The Virginia opossum has been emigrating north in recent years as the climate warms and is no longer uncommon here.  (I remember reading many years ago when we lived further south in Lexington, Massachusetts, when opossums were first spotted in the area––it was a novel occurrence then––with frost-bitten toes and ear tips. I hope they have evolved since then!)  Woodchuck litters are being born right about now.  A woodchuck family, we can say with confidence, has been living under our patio for some time.  As the snow melts we find piles of pebbles that were layered under the concrete and are now piled up next to large holes.  The evidence speaks for itself.  Skyler and Daisy have investigated numerous holes in the lawn behind the house that suggest an extensive network of tunnels.  A little contraception among woodchucks would be a plus.

Pebbles dug up from under the patio in the dried oregano bed

BUCK MOUNTAIN forest area behind us is extensive, not one of those small interrupted woodland plots that have become so common with development and tend to lack animal corridors.  This particular woodland, like many parts of the Champlain Valley consists, at least in part, of what is called a “clayplain forest.”  Trees there consist mostly of white and red oak, red maple, white pine, shagbark hickory (a tree favored by bats, where they exist), white ash, hemlock, sugar maple (syrup!) and beech, among others.  

This is the forest that dominated the clay and silt soils of the Champlain Valley prior to European settlement and the subsequent conversion of forest to agricultural land. Today this forest community is extremely rare. The clay soils were deposited in the Champlain Valley during and following the Pleistocene glaciation, both when the valley was flooded by a large freshwater lake, and later when salt water invaded the basin from the north. The soils are deep and fertile, and make ideal agricultural soils, especially when drained. Moisture in these soils varies with soil texture and topographic position, and the most well drained areas were the ones preferentially cleared for agriculture. The Valley Clayplain Forest remnants that are left are generally on the moister sites, though they typically contain a mosaic of wet and less-wet areas. In some areas, thin lenses of sand lie over the clay.*

THE FOREST DEER migrate slightly eastward during the winter, toward the higher elevations and larger forest areas.  A large nearby field abutting forest alongside route 17A is an area considered a “deer yard,” the name for a site where deer tend to hang out.  Higher elevations and to our east is where the moose are more likely to hang out.  Ken’s grandson Spencer has found numerous discarded moose antlers in the forest around Bristol.  There must be no shortage of moose.  A few weeks ago Spencer’s dad spotted a bobcat.  We haven’t seen one ourselves, but at least three bobcat dens have been noted by wildlife researchers in the Buck Mountain area, not far from where we are.  I talked to someone last week who said she had seen a catamount (Vermont’s word for mountain lion), the presence of which remains officially unacknowledged. 

Bill Norland captured this shot of a bobcat

MAKING SYRUP is the best sign of the season change, with hope for the warmish days and cold nights that make the sap flow.  Those kinds of days haven't been abundant.  The cold weather lasted far too long and it may be too late for a good maple syrup season.  A few weeks of the right weather is optimal.  Lovely spring weather is not particularly optimal.   Chris tended the boil this past weekend with a record low amount of sap but with a new and better evaporator pan and some professional quality filters.  We may yet have at least a small amount of excellent syrup.

The sugar house, wood stacked and ready

Tending the boil inside the sugar house. A trough of sap (foreground) awaits

 ***

LOCAL ISSUE UPDATE (For readers of the previous post)

It was inevitable.  As I suggested in the posting called “Local Issue,” a petition for a re-vote of the decision to build a new Town Office building has been submitted to the Middlebury Selectboard.  Some 250 required signatures were gathered and are now in the process of being verified.  Still, it will be an uphill battle for the diehard opposition.  The side that voted “NO” will not only have to win the re-vote (the original vote at March’s town meeting was 915 to 798 opposed), but must win with a majority plus two-thirds of the “Yes” vote.  Since the “Yes” vote numbered 915 they will need 603 (66% of 915) additional votes on their side. 

An ironic sidelight of this petition drive is that the person who initiated it (not, by the way, the chief voice of the opposition at the March town meeting) has an interesting set of reasons for his desire to undo the vote.  He would like a new Town Office to be built on the outskirts of town, the recreation center to be in an entirely different location than the one overwhelmingly voted way earlier, and, what’s more, claims to have a plan (no drawings, no consulting engineers or architects involved) that would, according to his own calculations, cost less than the present plan.  Well, lots more, actually, since Middlebury College’s huge contribution would be out of the picture.  These notions blithely ignore the opposition’s (supposedly) passionate concern, expressed with great vigor in March, about moving the town offices as much as 300 feet from its present location.  I guess the idea is to overturn the vote any old way–­–who cares what the reasons are!

Once more, stay tuned!

*Excerpted from "Wetland, Woodland, Wildland: A Guide to the Natural Communities of Vermont," E.H. Thompson and E.R. Sorenson. 2000 and 2005. Published by The Nature Conservancy and Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, distributed by University Press of New England.

  

LOCAL ISSUE

View of Main Street, Middlebury, with the proposed new Town Offices (in white)

A Model Town?

We live in the town of New Haven.  Technically.  It’s where we vote and pay taxes.  What feels more like “our” town is Vergennes to the north by four miles, or Middlebury, nine miles south.   (Waltham town is right next door, but it’s an entity without schools or town center, so doesn’t really count.)   New Haven is about eight miles east.  Distances, though, have less importance than what’s available in each place.  (New Haven has a delightful tiny library, a general store and not much else, but hosts terrific monthly lectures on nature and wildlife.)   We sort of “belong” to each one in different ways.  Early March was Town Meeting time, but our own in New Haven looked to be pretty boring.  Middlebury had the only one that promised drama.  So that’s the one I went to.

Some 250 residents filled just about all the available seats in the gym section (more of that later) of the Middlebury Town Offices on Town Meeting day.  (We observers were cordoned off to the sides.)  The air was electric with impatience and anticipation as agenda items 1 through 5 plodded by, all less compelling than the main event, Article 6.  This night was the culmination of several years of failed plans and months of meetings, angry rhetoric, angry letters to the editor, points made and rejected––all about the proposed actions in Article 6. 

To this almost-outside-observer* the furor is about something more than the named topic.  The beast behind the voice of Oz, metaphorically speaking.  If that isn’t the case, all the vituperation doesn’t make sense.  To me, anyway. 

The focal point of Article 6 is a building, one that, if you wandered down Main Street in Middlebury as a visitor, you probably wouldn’t pay much attention to.  It’s not an imposing structure, and looks vaguely high school-like.  Sitting on a sort of triangular lot opposite houses on one side and more eye-catching places on another side (Samas Cafe, the Otter Creek Bakery Café, a wine bar), it sprawls across almost all of the space allotted.  In other words, architecturally forgettable.  With its five (or six? seven?) facades, it’s hard to tell where to enter.  Once inside, you may be hard put to find where to exit.  This is the Middlebury Town Offices building.  It has a full sized gym attached, an odd combination if you stop to think about it.  How many town office buildings have a gym?  The look of the place is a bit of a let down in such an attractive town. 

The present Town Offices (gym section at left)

This is the plan:  Remove the existing building, re-site the gym and make it a recreation center, turn the now empty space into a park, and build a new Town Offices building some 300 feet away on the site now occupied by a Middlebury College building that will be moved elsewhere.  This entire project is estimated to cost some $6.5 million, all but $2 million of which will be paid by the college.  The college will have gained the park land and the site of the now-moved building. Quite a lot happening for the town’s contribution of $2 million. 

The building that Middlebury College will move.

Some of the arguments on the “yes” side are obvious:  Quite a lot happening for the town’s outlay of $2 million.  A nice site for a park.  A more functional recreation center.  An end to years of “kicking the can down the road” on what to do with a town building that was originally built as a school in 1911, and lacks sprinklers, has water leaks, asbestos, foundation cracks, no insulation, antiquated heating and cooling.  What’s more, the building lost its second floor to fire in 1954, a loss that has never been remedied.  As someone at the town meeting put it, “I’ve lived here for 40 years, and the town offices were decrepit then and they’re decrepit now!”

The proposed new building in its setting.  The present Town Offices are located
beyond the model on the triangular point of land at right

A New Building?  Or Not!

An easy choice, perhaps?  Or a plan in need of a few thoughtful suggestions?   Not a chance!  For months now I have been reading the steady stream of angry letters in our local newspaper with a growing awareness of the size of this issue.  I think I’ve become too used to Vermont niceness.  This issue is big.

At the Town Meeting on March 3rd I heard many of those angry voices first hand.  Given that the issue was a building, albeit an important one, I was astonished by the temper of the crowd.  I’m no stranger to events that that can divide a town.  It brought to mind Lexington, Massachusetts, back in 1971 when there was plenty of angry rhetoric.  The town issue then was the mass arrest of over 400 local residents who had protested the war in Vietnam on Lexington’s Battle Green.**  The Lexington Board of Selectmen, the local police, and residents lined up on one side or the other, each holding strongly felt views of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the arrests, views that for nearly everyone precisely reflected how they felt about the war itself.  It was a local enactment of what was happening on a national level.  "All politics is local,” as former House Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said.

Town Meeting, in the gym, Chris Huston presenting Breadloaf''s plan

What We Talk About When We Talk About Parking

When people debate a local issue it’s often a proxy, frequently unacknowledged, for some bigger topic.  To use Lexington as an example again, when we talked about, say, building some housing for people with lower incomes, we were actually talking, not about housing, and not just about city residents moving to the suburbs, we were talking about race.  The emotions displayed were not about house construction. 

Take parking.  It has been said and explained more than once (as it was again on March 3rd) that this project, Article 6, is parking neutral.  In the plan some parking places may be moved but only a single parking space will be lost.  Yet the lack of sufficient parking, and lack of parking in Middlebury center overall was brought up time and time again as if this project had something to do with radically altering the amount of parking in Middlebury.  If it is, in fact, an urgent concern, is there a clearer way to address it?

Take deviating from the town plan.  Moving the town offices away from its present central location (the southern end of downtown) was cited repeatedly as a flaunting of the town plan that called for keeping it in a central location and opting for repair.  This would be the strict constructionist point of view if we were discussing the Constitution.  So where is the building going?  It will move some three hundred feet.  This puts it closer, actually, to the shops and public library on Main Street than it is now.  It will be accessible to the disabled. 

Take process.  Should one count as part of the process the number of years that have passed during which time the issue of what to do with or how to repair the present old building has been discussed?   Do you include the time it was thought that the building could be rebuilt on its present site, estimated to the tune of $10 million?  (A number that probably didn’t even include the cost of relocating town employees in the interim.) What is an ideal process and ideal time span for discussion and input?  Ideally I suppose there should be several public presentations and lots of meetings open to the public over a period of time.  How many is enough?  How long is enough?  Are eleven open steering committee meetings and six public presentations over a six-month period not enough?   If opponents don’t attend one of those meetings, does the meeting count?  Has everyone, especially those opposed, been included in the design process?  Should everyone in town have been sent pencil and paper?

New building design 

  

New lobby design

Take magical thinking.  With blithe optimism it was suggested that the College would surely help pay for some unspecified project at some unspecified time in the future, so this opportunity can be easily passed up.  Or maybe we don't need Middlebury College at all.  We’re all creative people, we'll do it ourselves!  Better yet, the College should buy the land where the town offices are now located if they want it so badly and pay what it's really worth, say $12 million. The College should pay for the whole thing anyway!  On the other side of the magical thinking is paranoia:  The College is encroaching on the town with its crazed out-of-control love for new big buildings, and will eventually eat us up!

What is fueling these arguments, or the scurrilous letters, the accusations, the cries of “lies!” and "betrayal of trust!" and "lousy process!" and so on and on?  I can’t fit the complaints to the evidence.  It’s as if the opposers want to hear only themselves, and have their eyes squeezed closed and their fingers in their ears.  From all the heat, you could imagine the topic was faith, or religion, or abortion, for goodness’ sake.  And no, it’s not taxes.  Remarkably, no one has mentioned taxes.

The bottom line is I don’t know.  It bothers me that I don’t know, because it suggests there’s a social or political dynamic in this town that I am not getting.  It goes deeper than a building.  People are hating something.  Or giving a good imitation of hating.

Craig Bingham (left) and other opposition supporters

The Vote is Taken!

The next day Article 6 passed, 915 to 798.  The most rabid of the anti’s, Selectman Craig Bingham, was defeated in his own reelection bid as Selectman.   This is certainly an expression of opinion.  But does that mean it’s over?  Not necessarily!  I hear that, led by Bingham (who no longer has an election at stake), petitions and whatnot may be underway to overturn the vote. In order to achieve that goal some manner of skullduggery would need to be uncovered, necessitating a search for same.  Perhaps something will turn up.  Should this happen, it will doubtless insure acrimony for some time to come.  Oddly, comments about community “healing” seem to be coming from those very people who created the wound in the first place. 

It will be interesting to see what happens.  Stay tuned.

------------------------

*Full disclosure. Chris Huston, lead architect on this project for Breadloaf is my son-in-law.  His role has been to present his company’s design and answer questions pertaining thereto.  Caught in the crosshairs.  People have praised his restraint throughout and his fair-mindedness.  But it is taking an emotional toll

**Details of the Lexington event and materials can be found in the archives of the Lexington Historical Society and http://www.lexingtonbattlegreen1971.com

ICE COLD

Siberia.  That’s what is feels like as I write.  In the morning there was even an almost-fog of the kind that exists in extreme cold places sometimes, a fog actually made up of tiny snow crystals floating and blowing in the air with dim sun shining through an otherwise clear sky.  The clear sky tonight will help bring the temperatures down to minus 20 F.  That’s minus 28.8 Celsius, for most of the world not using Fahrenheit.  In some places, maybe in mountain hollows or some more northerly valleys, the temperatures could go down as far as 30 below zero or minus 34.4 Celsius.   (Interesting how Celsius and Fahrenheit appear to be more disparate as the temperature descends:  -40F is also -40C, but after that number comparisons seem to get weird.  They’re not really weird, they just look that way.  If you had a scale based on absolute zero for all temperature scales they would be more logical.  If you care.) 

The winter so far (it’s only January) has been memorable for its ice.  Cold, too, but the ice has been in a class by itself.  Before Christmas there was an ice storm topped off by some snow that managed to coat every blade of tall grass, every branch of every tree, cars, house–everything in the Champlain Valley–with a one-inch thick layer of ice, which happened, thankfully, without maiming many trees.  When the sun shown through the trees appeared to be made of glass. Step across the ice crust of the meadow. your feet touching and breaking the tubes ice-molded around leaves and small branches, you would feel as if you were crushing layers of eggshells.  Crunch, crunch.

When the top snow layer disappeared after a slightly warmish (20’s, low 30’s) day we were left with just the ice.  The driveway was (still is, under more recent new snow) solid ice from one end to the other.  The meadow was frozen snow, the lawn (some lawn!) was frozen snow.  Ken dug into our hiking equipment to come up with crampons in case we wanted to walk in the field.  I could use crampons just walking to the shed. The ice is too hard now to stomp your feet and break crust.  I drove the car to the mailbox one day to avoid walking, only later remembering that I could have used my ski poles to keep from sliding.  A visit to the compost bin is a minor adventure.

It only looked soft...

The Hustons and the Goudeys, kids and adults, had some fun with these ice rink-like conditions New Year’s weekend.  Sliding down the hill in front of our house down to the pond, and skidding around on the pond––that was the sport, no equipment necessary.  You’d have to be crazy to use a sled, not to mention a toboggan, in these conditions; you’d be safer doing cannonballs on a half-pipe.  I don’t think anyone did the pond slide either while standing up–too tricky.  No injuries for the younger set that we heard about, but among the adults–well, I’m conflating two events–Chris Huston banged his ribs hard, and Cliff Goudey got himself a walnut-size bump on the forehead. Fun yeah!  (We stayed inside, by the fire.)

It is so cold outside that dog poops (result of three dogs, not two, as Daisy often visits) are near permanently locked in place.  You’d need an axe to get them loose, no kidding.  (Twice yesterday Daisy and Skyler each gaily tried to carry frozen turds they found into the house.  To play with, probably, because they were basically rocks.)  Anyway, all that excrement is now covered with yet another layer of snow, to be forgotten until the next big ugly melt.  And it will be ugly.  However, all is beautiful again after the latest snowstorm––white, pristine.  Cold.

2014 is here.  A new year.  We are in a new mode, too, at last:  Ken’s treatment is over and done with.  No more early trips to Burlington for radiation, or anything.  (The chemo ended earlier last month.)  Back to ordinary check-ins and check-ups.*  We’ll kick it off with a Boston trip next weekend.

*On the topic of health, a local headline in a December 23^rd Addition Independent:

            STARKSBORO MAN IRKED WITH HEALTH CARE WEBSITE

                                                     Such is our local not-news.