Archive - Apr 21, 2011 - Page
According to the heated rhetoric coming from certain quarters, United States citizens are laboring under a steadily increasing tax burden that is likely to bury us all under a mountain of debt and crush our hopes and dreams.
We all know of “wild” animals particularly adapted to human-made environments. Consider black bears in Adirondack state parks, deer in New Jersey suburbs, pigeons in the city and the ubiquitous raccoons. This winter an opossum was living in our woodpile until the pile got too low, and then it moved into our garage.
This past week I had an opportunity to witness another example, though one somewhat more surprising (at least to me).
ADDISON COUNTY — After two years of rock bottom prices, business is looking up for many Vermont dairy farmers.
Cornwall dairy farmer John Roberts, who with his wife Lisa milk 200 cows at Butterwick Farm, said that this week his milk pulled in $23.19 per hundredweight (cwt) — more than double what it was fetching just two years ago, in 2009.
“It’s a big step forward,” he said.
When my life gets really busy, I fall back on my tried-and-true coping strategies: snapping at my family and keeping my shoulders clenched up around my ears. But sometimes even those aren’t enough to make me feel better.
Recently, I went in search of some real stress relief.
With little time lately for a proper yoga class, I settled for a shortcut I found on YouTube: a 9-minute guided relaxation led by a soft-spoken European woman. I like to call her Elsa.
MIDDLEBURY — For 18 years, Holly Hathaway and her family have lived in a pastoral Shangri-la. Their Halladay Road home features panoramic views of the majestic Adirondacks to the west and is surrounded by fertile green pastures that form an agrarian quilt on display from their backyard swimming pool.
BRISTOL — Playing host to a wide range of interested residents, the Bristol Town Planning Commission had a packed house at its April 19 meeting as they once again took up the issue of gravel extraction in the proposed town plan.
VERGENNES — A connection made after one of the worst March snowstorms in Vermont history is the key to a Northlands Job Corps student project that is sending aid to Japan after one the worst natural disasters in its history.
A Northlands club that goes by the name Ladies of Success — it is essentially a mutual-support and social-activity group for a small number of female students on the Vergennes campus — spearheaded a campus-wide student effort to make more than 1,000 paper origami cranes.
WEYBRIDGE — Local lawmakers on Monday cited the so-called “provider tax” as a prime reason the state should scrap the current health care system and adopt a single-payer plan.
The House recently passed an increase in the provider tax that is assessed to hospitals, home health care agencies and other providers. It has now been extended to third-party health insurance claims.
