By Diane O'Brien

ragrugs@midcoast.com

789-5987

Municipal meetings

All meetings are held at Lincolnville Central School unless otherwise noted.

The Conservation Commission meets Monday, Feb. 11, 4 p.m. at the Lincolnville Improvement Association.

Also Monday, at 6 p.m. the Selectmen hold their regular meeting, which is always televised on Channel 22.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Feb. 12 and 13, the Selectmen meet with the Budget Committee to go over the 2013-2014 budget, both nights at 6 p.m.

The Planning Board meets Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 7 p.m., meeting televised.

The Cemetery Trustees meet Thursday, Feb. 14, at 6:30 p.m.

Town

The town’s website, http://www.town.lincolnville.me.us/, has much interesting information on it. If you haven’t visited it recently, check it out.

School

The Scholastic Book Fair, which supports programs and books for the school library, will be held Feb. 11-15 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; on Wednesday, Feb. 13, Parents’ Night, it will be open until 7 p.m. Children and teachers fill out wish lists early in the week to help out parents (and grandparents) looking for the right books. If you wish, you can help out your child’s classroom library as well. Books make great Valentines!

A Teacher Appreciation Lunch, put on by the PTO, will be held Thursday, Feb. 14. Community members as well as parents can help out by volunteering or providing a food item. Contact Jennifer Aselton at jaselton@tidewater.net for information on the lunch.

Want to help out Five Town Football? Graffam Bros. Harborside Restaurant, located on the harbor in Camden next to the public landing parking, will donate 50 percent of all sales from 5-9 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 12, to the program.

Attention knitters

…and crocheters and weavers. A large quantity of yarn, most of it mohair in beautiful shades, has been given to the library project. (Now that we’ve Moved It, we need another name, but more about that later.) Some members of our neighborhood knitting group spent several hours last week sorting it by color and bagging up pleasing combinations, each enough to make a scarf. I think we have about 60 bags! We’re looking for people willing to take a bag or two home and make scarves for us to sell. This Saturday at the Farmers’ Market, we’ll have all this gorgeous yarn spread out, along with patterns. Come by and help yourself!

There’s a precedent for such a project: when the United Christian Church was raising money to build its Parish Hall (complete with the church’s first bathroom), a group of talented seamstresses took orders for one-of-a-kind quilted jackets, raising significant funds for the new Hall.

Farmers Market

The market is a lively place Saturday mornings, with shoppers coming by for baked goods, seafood, homemade soup, eggs, maple syrup, crafts, milk, yogurt, farmers cheese and meat. Stop by for a cup of coffee, browse the library books and best of all, get out and see your neighbors!

Fundraising spaghetti dinner

A spaghetti dinner at LCS on Saturday, Feb. 16, will support John Stephens, traveling to the Domincan Republic with a group from the Owls Head Baptist Church. The group’s task is to install the roof on a new refugee center. The supper starts at 5 p.m., and donations will be greatly appreciated.

Sympathy

The Collemer family suffered the loss of two siblings within a few weeks this winter. Reggie Collemer passed away Dec. 24 in Belfast; less than three weeks later, his sister, Elinor Collemer Johnson, died in Camden. When I was writing "Staying Put," Elinor and I got to know one another, as she told me the story of her family during the Depression and of her childhood, first on Chester Dean Road, and later on the farm on Searsmont Road where the family lives today. Condolences to the Collemers and friends.

Antler hunting

In case you’ve missed it, this is antler-hunting season. Corelyn Senn, with her network of wildlife cameras and live-feed transmission from the woods around her house, knows her deer. When a buck, who has been sporting a fine rack, shows up one night minus his headgear, Corelyn knows those antlers have probably been discarded somewhere nearby.

On the weekend, every weekend, she comes by for Fritz, our 6-month-old Golden Retriever puppy, and off they go, antler-hunting. Fritz, of course, had no idea what he was supposed to be hunting, even though she explained it to him. So she brought him a piece of moose antler to chew on, hoping he’d get the taste. Apparently he did, for he’s found antlers under the snow even she didn’t see.

Cleaning out

A few comments and pointed looks from my daughters-in-law aimed at my tendency to, well, hoard stuff have hit their mark. Those D-I-Ls seem to think they’ll be stuck with the job after I’m gone. Well, of course they will!

But in an effort to make it a bit easier for them, I’m making an attempt this winter to get rid of some of the 40-year accumulation of things in this house. Lots of it gets tossed without a pang, but now and then I’m stopped in my tracks. The other day I opened a small box in a drawer to find half a dozen syringes and needles. Really big syringes and needles. They were remnants of our cow-keeping days, the decades we milked a cow (not the same cow – serial cows) and occasionally had to treat with various injections. A sick cow usually means a visit from the vet – George Holmes was always on call – but eventually we could diagnose problems and handled the administration ourselves. Of course, I should have tossed out the whole box; we’ll never need them again. But no, I closed it up and slipped it back in the drawer. Let the D-I-Ls ponder them.