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6/30
Sure was a beautiful day today, and it looks like the weather will
hold through the holiday week-end, too - warm days, cool nights, lots
of sunshine.
Have a happy
Fourth of July!
We'll be around most of the time, so don't be surprised at the occasional
page update!
6/29
Just a reminder, Saturday, July 1st is the registration deadline for the
Norfolk Men's Softball League tournament. The notice is on the
Bulletin Board.
6/29
I'm a night owl, I admit it - who else would be up this late, still typing,
all the windows open, listening to the soft rain in the trees.
6/28
Received a request looking for recommendations for someone to regrout tile.
If you know of someone, see the notice on the Bulletin
Board.
6/28
In case it slipped your mind, the circus will be coming to Wrentham tomorrow.
They'll be setting up early in the morning, and have two performances in the
afternoon. More in the Calendar.
6/27
It's a slow season for news. Let's see - you know about the heat,
the humidity, the thunderstorms, the downpour, and the subsequent relief,
and you may have noticed that it's not quite dark even at 9pm. But did you
know that the St. John's wort is starting to flower by the post office?
Or that the linden trees in Newton are in full bloom?
6/27
If I hear one more story about the human genome project, my DNA will unravel.
This is not news! The mapping is not in fact complete yet.
This staged-for-the-media event is about nothing but a brokered truce between
a couple of competing research labs, who agreed to call it done and do nice.
And even a complete genome map is just
raw information, devoid of knowledge - it's like knowing the sequence
of letters in a book, but without speaking the language. The real news
will be when they begin to understand some of that mapped DNA.
6/26
Well, they said it was going to be warm and humid, but ``warm and humid''
doesn't do it justice. I'm waiting for the refreshing thundershowers.
6/26
By popular demand, the library hours are now listed on the
town info page.
6/26
We just discovered the MBTA family fares. During off-peak hours, up to five
people (one or two adults and the rest kids under 18) can travel for the
price of two adult tickets. Normally, fares for children younger than
12 are half price. Children younger than 5 ride free when with an adult.
6/25
Does any one know who "Parachute Man" is? On Saturdays around 5 pm, this
man can be seen flying over Mirror Lake. He is in a seat that has a
motor and a huge white, blue and red parachute - DN.
6/23
Good Morning! TGIF! Lovely day, too :-)
6/23
Received this note of congratulations to our new selectman:
Hello Mr. Perron. Congratulations on your new position and good luck moving
the train station from Norfolk center, I think it's a great idea.
Thanks,
appreciative resident
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6/21
On to more earthly topics - it sure was a gorgeous day today.
Even received a comment from Mirror Lake echoing the sentiment:
The lake was really crowded today!
The wind was whipping up and there were actual waves on Mirror Lake.
What a good day it was! - DN
6/21
Even closer to home (about as close as one can get, actually) -
the first fireflies of the season have made their appearance.
Saw two of them,
blinking brightly in the back yard, with long pauses in between.
I'm always so pleased to see them again. Summer is now really here.
6/21
I looked at the moon animation some more, and discovered a labyrinth of
interesting information (including more animations) on the
author's home page.
6/20
Found a couple of distant, but interesting, news items.
First, there appears to be evidence for some surface water still
existing on Mars.
According the the BBC,
NASA researchers have detected seasonal seepage in some of the deepest canyons
on the planet, giving a new target to their search for possible signs of life
on that planet.
Second, scientists have discovered a simple form of sugar,
glycolaldehyde, in interstellar space
some 26,000 light-years from Earth. ``The discovery ... means it is
increasingly likely that the chemical precursors to life are formed in
[interstellar] clouds long before planets'', commented of one of the
researchers who conducted the observations.
6/20
Happy
Summer Solstice!
June 21, 2000, at 1:48am GMT (9:48pm Tuesday night
our time) marked the moment when the Sun reached farthest north. This
day, the longest of the year, starts the season of summer
(which, if you're wondering when the heat will let up,
ends at the
autumnal equinox
on September 22, 2000, at 5:11pm GMT).
The days will be getting shorter from now until winter solstice in December.
The image of the moon on the right is from
this page (which also
links to this neat
moon phase animation!),
courtesy of the
official U.S. timekeeper.
The image is updated regularly to always depict the current phase of the moon.
6/19
Happy birthday, Vijay! - AR
6/19
Enjoy the dry weather, the heat and rain will return by mid-week.
The forecast is again for showers and thunderstorms for the latter half
of the week, with highs in the low 80s.
6/19
I finally split the
notes archive
into two volumes, one for this year and one for 1999.
The single file was getting too large and unwieldy.
6/17
The Norfolk Men's Softball League will be holding the 4th Annual Tom
Daley Memorial Softball Tournament on Sunday, July 16.
Registration deadline is July 1st. - CK
Additional details on the Bulletin Board.
6/17
The library has free passes to the Circus; one per family, applicable
to a child under 4. (If you missed it, the circus is coming on June 29;
more details on the Calendar.
6/17
Guess summer vacation's here -- there's a noticeable drop in the
number of events in town. Slim pickings on the calendar this month.
6/16
The soccer game Friday evening was tiring, but fun.
After a strong start, the white-shirts lost momentum and started trailing
pretty badly, but made a good comeback to tie the game at 13 to 14 :-)
6/16
To the solicitor that rang the front door-bell last night at 7:30 -
it may not be customary to greet strangers by making faces,
waving arms above the head, and shooing with the hands, but the bell
started the dog barking, which woke the baby, who has been having trouble
falling asleep lately. Sorry; it was not a good time.
6/16
Get the lemonade ready, it'll be hot Saturday! The forecast is for
humid and very warm, with highs 85 to 90. But they also predict a good
breeze, and the warm spell should break by nighfall, with a pleasant day
on Sunday.
6/15
Gee, this site was busy on Wednesday! We had over three times the usual
number of visitors - either we're getting good press somewhere,
or everyone checked to see the election results.
6/15
If you're still puzzled about the date in the Welcome banner, it is not
today's date, but the day when the page was last updated.
Both adding new material and removing dated items are updates, so if
the date changed without anything else having happened to the page,
perhaps some calendar items or old notes disappeared to the archives.
I'm pretty good about remembering to update the timestamp, and always use
the actual current date even if it's almost midnight. Once I
tried post-dating a message and I immediately got called on it
(hi, Dobritte! :-)
6/14
The election is over, but another circus is coming to town, one which
under-age residents can also enjoy. The Carson & Barnes 5-Ring Circus
will be performing in Wrentham on Thursday, June 29 (4:30pm and 7:30pm shows;
details on the Calendar).
6/14
Found the town page for
Plainville
by accident. Noticed links on the Wrentham page to
"North Wrentham" (us), and "Slacksville", which turned out to be Plainville.
6/13
Special override election today!
6/13
Hi, Lisa and Jordan W.! Congratulations on the addition to the family!
You have a greeting on the
Bulletin Board.
6/13 9:15pm
Election results are in! and it looks like our taxes are going up.
All four measures passed, all by roughly the same margin.
An all-time record number of 2099 voters cast their ballots
(which is a 39% turnout, meaning that almost two out of three residents
eligible to vote didn't care one way or the other.)
The detailed results:
| Article |
Favor |
Against |
Abstain |
| #1: $92,158 for two additional police officers |
1122 (53%) |
958 (46%) |
19 (1%) |
| #2: $35,170 for full-time youth and reference librarians |
1141 (54%) |
941 (45%) |
17 (1%) |
| #3: $184,079 for two more elementary school classes |
1207 (58%) |
868 (41%) |
24 (1%) |
| #4: $104,544 for world languages classes |
1119 (53%) |
955 (45%) |
25 (1%) |
If you prefer a more graphical presentation, I experimented a little
and this is what I came up with:
#1 for / against
#2 for / against
#3 for / against
#4 for / against
 did not vote
6/11
At this point, I assume there is no-one left in town who is not aware
that there is a special override election on this coming Tuesday.
So be sure to get out there and make your voice heard!
Polls are open from 7am to 8pm at Freeman-Centennial School.
6/11
Technically it's still spring, though it sure felt like summer on Saturday.
It's uncanny how close it came to imitating the hot, humid weather we had
last summer.
6/8
Found space weather reports at
spaceweather.com.
The interesting news is that due to strong solar wind and a southward shift
in the Earth's magnetic field, northern lights may be visible as far south
as Massachusetts, much farther south than usual.
These same solar winds are also what has been making AM radio reception poor
during the past couple of days.
To quote:
Sky watchers should be on the lookout for aurora borealis beginning
after sunset on Thursday, June 8. ...
[N]orthern lights are possible (but certainly not guaranteed)
every night from June 8 to 11, 2000. The best time to look for aurora
is usually during the hours around local midnight. A bright waxing
quarter Moon could obscure faint northern lights before moonset at
about 1:30 a.m. local time.
There is even an
auroral map
that shows the auroral oval extending all the way down to northern Maine.
Major auroral storms like the current one are relatively rare; according to
this writeup,
this will be only the 11-th one in the last hundred years.
6/7
So that's what sunshine looks like! :-)
It's nice to see it again.
6/3
NorfolkNet is ONE YEAR OLD!! We put our first page up just
in time for Norfolk Community Day last year. This
year we're making a concerted effort to get more of the local
clubs and organizations linked to our site, and to get their
calendar and bulletin board items on-line. So, if you belong to
a sports club, a volunteer organization, or any type of group in
town, please have someone from your group contact us about
posting information on the web. It's free, it's easy, and
it's a great way to let people know what you do and how they
can get involved - VJ and Andras
6/4
Update: if you're curious what the page looked like back then, I
resurrected the oldest saved copy
I could find (the site was less than a week old).
Most links on it are broken, since I did not pull up the old sub-pages,
but many of those have changed as well.
6/3
Saturday was a beautiful day for Norfolk Community Day. Even though I could
have been more careful about time spent in the sun (I got sunburned),
we had fun.
6/3
The Lazy Loopers (the Wrentham model airplane flying club) are having a
free public air show at their flying field on Sunday, June 11. (The
field is right next to the Lind Farm conservation land, close to the Wrentham
State School). Tomorrow, June 4, they're having a radio-controlled helicopter
``fly-in,'' and any interested spectators are also welcome.
Their upcoming events calendar is
on their web page,
which we discovered on a notice tacked up on a fencepost at the field.
6/2
Wow, what a spectacular storm! Strong wind, hard rain, heavy humid air,
cloud-to-ground lightning flashes - everything one could wish for in a
summer thunderstorm. There is still the occasional roll of thunder as I
type this, but it's been mostly just quiet rain for the past hour.
6/2
Norfolk Community Day (what used to be called Olde Tyme Day) is tomorrow,
and the weather is supposed to be gorgeous -- the storms will end overnight,
tomorrow will be
``Mostly sunny...Windy to Start. High in the upper 70s.''
See you there!
6/1
Mark your calendars - the circus is coming to town on Thursday, June 29!
They will be setting up their tent during the morning, and will be
open to public viewing.
6/1
The Summer ULV (Ultra-Low Volume)
mosquito aerosol application is
scheduled to start in Norfolk on Friday, June 2. A small amount of pesticide
will be sprayed in designated areas between the hours of 3am and 6am in
the early morning.
More information about the program, the control methods and products used,
as well as the spraying schedules and maps can be found on the
Norfolk County
Mosquito Control Project web page.
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Happy Easter Sunday!