Speaking this week with Dover-Foxcroft based musician/teacher, Susan Ramsey, I found out Foxcroft Academy's String Program, which she directs, is a model other rural Maine communities can follow. From the start, I was surprised at the extent of FA's overall music programs. But I especially could not fathom why the FA String Program was so popular.

The Aroostook County community of Limestone’s search for a new town manager has concluded with the selectboard hiring Matthew S. Pineo, who previously held the same position in Brownville and later Sangerville on an interim basis.

Heather Wheaton, Penquis Autism Community Services program manager, accepts a $1,200 check from representatives of the Widow Sons Temple Guard on Sept. 29 at Penquis’ Dover-Foxcroft office.

Maine fishing writer Bob Leeman, alias “Mr. Trout,” has decided to put away his pen.

Partners for Peace, the domestic violence resource center serving Piscataquis and Penobscot counties which earlier this year announced a name change from the Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance, will mark Domestic Violence Awareness Month with a free Walk to End Abuse in the late afternoon of Wednesday, Oct. 4 in Dover-Foxcroft.

Melissa Reynolds says her family, her husband Frank and their children Ashley and Brady, does everything together, and since January that includes running their Our “FAMB”ily Restaurant. An extra letter was added to the name to include Brady Reynolds’ first initial along with those of the rest of the family.

A Dover-Foxcroft resident who family members say lived her life with kindness, generosity, good humor and grace, including during her 15-year battle with cancer, will be remembered through the Tracy Hibbard Kasprzak Cancer Treatment Center on the second floor of Mayo Regional Hospital. The center was formally dedicated on the morning of Sept. 23.

There's no doubt the immediacy of the Internet has coarsened public discourse. Not everywhere online, but, it seems, in more and more places. Of course, the same can be said of a coarsening of our culture in other areas. That is, language most people not too long ago avoided in public, if not in all areas of their lives, is now commonplace on television, in the movies, on radio, in music, and certainly in print.

In recognition of their decades of being land stewards through forestry and farming at Breakneck Ridge Farm and efforts to educate young and old about conservation management at the local, state and national level, Steve and Diana Hobart were recognized by the Piscataquis County Soil and Water Conservation District (PCSWCD) by receiving the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award during a presentation at their farm on Sept. 16.

The Piscataquis County Commissioners are looking to follow their counterparts in Somerset County by drafting a letter to express their opposition to additional industrial-scale wind development near Moosehead Lake. The commissioners authorized County Manager Tom Lizotte to write a letter during a Sept. 19 meeting, and the document is scheduled to be on the agenda for the Tuesday, Oct. 3 session for a formal vote.

In an effort to deal with space issues at the SeDoMoCha School, RSU 68 officials are considering moving the superintendent’s office from the second floor to a vacant building a stone’s throw from campus. During a Sept. 19 school board meeting, Superintendent Stacy Shorey was authorized to make a $36,000 offer for the former Head Start building off of Autumn Avenue next to the SeDoMoCha campus.

Grandiose delusions are not unknown to me. As a young man the challenges of a Navy carrier pilot appealed to me – until I joined the Navy and saw how inherently dangerous it is to land a jet aircraft on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier on a dark and stormy night. No thank you.

The selectmen gave their approval to both a $155,000 financing package for a fire department brush truck and an approximate $41,700 bid for a 2018 Ford Expedition to serve the police department, during a meeting on Sept. 11.

Dover-Foxcroft Deputy Fire Chief Patrick “Rick” Pembroke was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Maine State Federation of Firefighters during the organization’s recent convention in Boothbay Harbor.

Several days into the job new Dexter Town Manager Jim Chandler was welcomed and sworn in during a Sept. 14 town council meeting.

During a Sept. 12 meeting of the SAD 4 school board at the PCSS, Principal John Keane said the idea of changing the name of the secondary school back to just Piscataquis Community High School (PCHS) has been discussed by students and staff.

Maine Highlands Senior Center Directors President Dr. Lesley Fernow, left, and Piscataquis Thriving in Place Collaborative Project Director Meg Callaway hold open a bin for two young helpers during for the Piscataquis Shredding Event on Sept. 16 behind Central Hall on River Street in Dover-Foxcroft. The center, collaborative and the AARP Fraud Watch Network sponsored a visit by the Shredding on Site company to enable resident to bring documents, such as those with confidential and personal information, to be shredded. Dr. Fernow and Callaway said older adults are at a greater risk for fraud and those stopping by could watch the bins be automatically dumped into the rear of a truck with the papers then cut into numerous little thin strips.

Stepping out of the gray, light rainy weather at the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center’s Pie Social & Pie Baking Contest in Livermore into a small mudroom at the center’s old one-room schoolhouse, my girlfriend, Eileen, and I have no idea we’re stepping back in time 164 years.