4/13/2008 we're a church again!!

Look how much of the church sign you can see now! The snow is really melting. (And look how black it's gotten over time from all the sand that was once on the roads but got plowed up into the banks and splashed up on the banks by passing cars.)

4/11/08 Dance

Friday night I went to the UMF Dancers' Spring Concert. One of my advisees, Katie Rose, a junior, is a member of the troupe and actually choreographed one of the numbers in the show. It was very cool. The concert was a lot of fun. I sat next to Geoff, a student in one of my classes last semester. He had been to the winter concert and told me that this was the best concert of the year. We both really enjoyed the show . . . a lot. There was a Red Sox game that night and many of the audience members were wearing Red Sox paraphernalia. Actually, that would happen anytime / anywhere in New England even if there isn't a game on, but I overheard several of them talking about the "sacrifice" they made to come to the concert instead of staying home to watch the game. However, I never heard anyone after the concert say they wished they had watched the game instead. There was a little girl on the front row who was watching everything very intensely. During a solo performance that was particularly beautiful, I noticed that she was mesmerized. AND she was dancing in her chair. Her little leg would stick out with a pointed toe, then she'd raise her arm just like the dancer did. She was copying every move the dancer made. It was so cute. I expect to see her enrolled at UMF in a few years and auditioning for the UMF Dancers.

3/10/2008 Town Meeting

It's that time of year again. If it's spring, there must be town meetings. Here I am at Farmington's Town Meeting. It didn't last nearly as long as last year's. One of the big items on this year's agenda was the library budget. For the first time in the library's history, they were paying insurance benefits for the employees. Seems more than reasonable to me. Yet some people objected. There were some pretty heated debates in the budget committee and selectmen meetings that led up to the Town Meeting. Fortunately, it was approved. In this photo you see the budget committee on the left and town officials (town manager, head of the police department, a few selectmen, . . . ) on the right. They had the same guy as moderator. He's really good. He knows his Robert's rule of order, kept everything straight, knew practically everyone's name, kept his sense of humor, and got us through everything.

The state passed some law that mandated that certain issues be voted on by secret ballot. Even though it was pretty obvious what the vote would be, they voted by ballot because they had to. The issue was raising the taxes in order to have a balanced budget since they had approved more expenditures than last year's budget.

They have a pretty clever system to make this go quickly. The ballot box has obviously been around for a very long time, but for ballots, everyone got a white card approximately 3x5 that had "YES" on the left and "NO" on the right and a perforation down the middle. So you picked up your ballot, tore it in half down the perforated line, put the half with your vote in the ballot box and put the half with the side you weren't going to use in the trash can.