I'm approaching I-89 in Waterbury, grateful to finally be leaving Route 100 during Vermont's first real snowstorm of the winter. I'm almost halfway home and the weather is getting worse. It is beautiful, mind you. I imagine I'm following a flatbed tractor trailer loaded with used feather pillows, the tops of which were sheared off when the driver ignored a "low clearance" underpass warning. The wet, heavy flakes come at me through the headlight's aura, a cannonade of white down.... Read more

Vermont's economic-development efforts to attract major manufacturing or service employers to Vermont have been largely ineffective, non-strategic and a waste of money. What's more, few in the economic-development sector would debate this conclusion. In the Douglas administration, leadership on the issue is MIA. This is arguably true in the tourism department as well. As one staffer recently commented, "It's mostly about the leaves."... Read more

A real estate developer named Radcliffe Romeyn Jr., who "attended Harvard," is inveighing to created an "equine community" of 24 houses on a former 110-acre dairy farm on the west side of Hinesburg. The farm is characterized by rolling meadow and extraordinary views of the Green Mountains.

A farmer next door would like very much to keep the fields in agricultural use, but cannot afford the purchase price - which the widow who owns the land deserves to get for her and her departed husband's 30-year stewardship.... Read more

We're in the Metropolitan Opera to hear Renée Fleming in La Traviata. As the lights dim and the crystal chandeliers are drawn up on their four-story cables towards the vaulted ceiling above the orchestra, I look over the balcony. A dozen or so Blackberries glowing below their readers catching one last email before the curtain rises and they must suffer the pain of withdrawal that will follow when they turn off the devices, as the house manager has requested.... Read more

We're in the Metropolitan Opera to hear Renée Fleming in La Traviata. As the lights dim and the crystal chandeliers are drawn up on their four-story cables towards the vaulted ceiling above the orchestra, I look over the balcony. A dozen or so Blackberries glowing below their readers catching one last email before the curtain rises and they must suffer the pain of withdrawal that will follow when they turn off the devices, as the house manager has requested.... Read more

My first job, at age 12, was to let Volney Farr's cows out to pasture before I left for school. It was well after their morning milking, which started at 4:30 a.m. After school, I'd open the pasture gate to let them in again. My only real responsibilities were to count them on their return, to ensure that all the gates were properly closed behind them, to count them again and secure them in their stanchions.

Mr. Farr explained to me that I was not their leader; "Irma" was. I should do only what I was told. Irma, a Jersey, would take care of the rest.... Read more

Editor's note: Peter Freyne is away this week.

Yours truly got off his duff and out of Burlap this week. Not to Saratoga but Plainfield, where we conducted an undercover investigation of accounting irregularities at the Monks of the Plainly Held Truths Community in the abandoned buildings of Goddard College. Holy Hippie!... Read more