Nearly 20 runners from the region braved the elements on Dec. 8 for the Millinocket Half Marathon. Rico Portalatin, 47 of Milo, finished 11th out of a field of 1,123 in the 13.1-mile race. Portalatin’s time was 1 hour, 23 minutes, and 59 seconds.

The Piscataquis Community High Drama Club will be presenting the Christmas play “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas,” a two-act comedy by Pat Cook, at 6 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 14. The Glee Club sings during intermission, with a bake sale and raffles.

At 10 a.m. Saturday morning, Dec. 15 at the Abbott Memorial Library, Dexter Dover Area Towns in Transition (DDATT) will host a workshop with Felix Blinn from Brownville on “being prepared” -- how to take practical steps to prepare for likely disruptive events in a hopeful instead of fearful manner.

A number of football players from Foxcroft Academy and Dexter Regional High School received postseason recognition from the Little Ten Conference (Class D North).

On snow days Mainers get creative and get to work! The Commons at Central Hall, formerly the Maine Highlands Senior Center, is doing just that this winter by coming up with an innovative way to raise money to fulfill the vision of building space for an adult day service center at Central Hall. Some of you may have seen an oddly placed car with a red bow on the hill in front of Central Hall! That classy 2002 Toyota Celica sports car is being raffled to raise money to complete the building project that was started in 2012.

Since the beginning of scientific deer herd management in Maine, the data needed to make informed decisions was always slow in coming. The public and the biologists who manage deer were lucky to get November deer harvest figures by early spring.

The Dexter Public Health Association nurses want to help people in the Maine Highlands region keep warm by holding the Keep Me Warm Raffle. The first- and second-prize winners will each receive a gift certificate from A.E. Robinson for 100 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil. The third-place prize winner will receive a $25 gift certificate from Dexter’s Ace Hardware.

In the past several days, you have heard many things about George Herbert Walker Bush. His decency and goodness. His commitment to service. His dignity. Yet, the former president's most enduring gift to the American people is not only his demeanor. Rather it is in something that never actually even happened. And the legacy of that gift is so tremendous, and his leadership so central to it, that each and every one of us should give thanks for his presence.

In his Dec. 5 column, Matthew Gagnon makes a flawed argument against ranked choice voting. He claims that with ranked choice voting we cannot evaluate the top two candidates for round two of against one another because we do not know in advance who they will be. However, with ranked-choice voting, we have effectively evaluated the top two against one another for a possible second round, no matter who they are, precisely because we’ve already evaluated and ranked all the candidates, including the final top two, in round one.

On Wednesday, Nov. 28 administrators from Foxcroft Academy and representatives from the Libra Foundation met for the first time with local town officials in regard to the newly named Piscataquis County Ice Arena being built in Dover-Foxcroft.