Town Hall is an unassuming little building, but a lot takes place there. Downstairs is where Betsy, the Town Clerk and Treasurer, conducts business. And bimonthly Selectboard meetings are held in the meeting room next to the town office.



Upstairs, the ILM Historical Society houses their archives. The Stone Museum isn't quite as climate-friendly for old documents and photographs, so they're filed here. I've had the pleasure of sifting through the museum collection on several occasions. You would be surprised at how much history fits into 17 square miles.

.

These are the sourdough loaves which reminded me of why I dislike baking bread. Cakes are cheerful and eager to please, while breads sit dully on the kneading board and pout, "What do you want?"



These were supposed to be fluffy white loaves of sourdough, but they refused to rise any measurable amount, even with both bubbling starter and fresh yeast in the dough. I baked them anyway and they came out dense, but chewy inside. Good for one day, but hard as a rock after that. Even as bread pudding, the centers of the tiny bread cubes refused to soak up the custard.

Why does bread fight you every step of the way?

.

"In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It's mainly there to make you think it works.
—Nick Baumgarten, Esquire Magazine"

.

It's certainly cheaper to throw all of your household garbage into a large pile in your backyard than to pay for a trash hauling service. It also means that a few decades later, the new owners of your property will have a fine mess to deal with; an acre-wide, man-high pile of wood, debris and refuse.







We found a U-bend, an axle with two tires attached, several buckets, Ball jars filled with mysterious brown goo, an old tractor, a disc plow, various pokey things that look like medieval farm implements, the head of a pickaxe, heavy metal gears, the hood of a car, piles of rebar, large screws, a well pump, concrete building footers, brown glass medicine bottles, a kidney dish, a hot water boiler, ten thousand asphalt roof shingles, barn siding, and several unidentifiable pieces of machinery.

Anyone have a trash bag?

.

I secretly love it when at least two bananas get overripe in the fruit bowl.

This particular recipe calls for a sour cream/baking soda mixture that fizzes up and gives the bread some lift. I like to sprinkle some brown sugar over the top before baking to give it a sweet, golden crust.

There's nothing better than a slice of this with some butter and a cup of tea.

.

We planted ninety trees in our backyard this weekend. Fifty are along the back edge of our property and forty are heeled in near the garage and will be moved later.



The forty near the garage are a mix of different evergreens (fraser fir, balsam, etc.) which will someday be Christmas trees. (They look large because Trevor got down on the ground to take the picture. They're actually just a few inches tall.) The fifty in back are sugar maples for syrup-making in about a decade.

.

Trevor and I gathered pinecones from under our evergreens and made pinecone bird feeders. We get a lot of birds on our island -- we'll see if any are interested in this type of seed. Trevor hated the old-bacon smell of the lard/oatmeal mixture, so I had to do that part. He rolled them in birdseed afterwards and we hung them in the trees.

.