We've been anxiously waiting to be able to vote on the Calendar Contest that Kingdom Animal Shelter is running - however, as happens when working with web sites, not everything goes as we might wish, and they are still having difficulties getting the voting aspect of the contest to work.  Helen Morrison (W.Shore Rd.) volunteers at the shelter and has been keeping me posted on the progress by their web master, Mike.  Here's what I got from Helen this morning:

It's still not working correctly.  It works for some and not for others.  Mike is working diligently on it, trying to get it working, hopefully in the next few days.  There will still be able to be 3 weeks of voting, so that is good.

We know something about these things, having struggled a bit a few years ago getting the Ice-Out Contest on-line tickets page to operate, and again this past year when we included a pay-on-line option for tickets.  Web mastering can be frustrating, for sure.  We'll keep you posted on Mike's progress - in the meantime, we urge you to go to the contest page and check out the cute pictures - it will be hard to choose which to vote for, there are so many really interesting shots of pets.  The votes that show up now will not count.  Helen mentioned that to be fair they will clear all votes and begin anew once the site is operating properly.

Last night I posted a notice about the benefit that Water Tower Farm is having on Sept. 28th (see below).  In case some of you who regularly pass by the farm on Route 2, just east of Marshfield, noticed the metal sculpture of a horse is missing, Dianne Lashoones, owner, said the artist moved it to Waitsfield.  She said the statue was a temporary loan and they miss him, too.

We had a brief thunderstorm last night, but nothing as severe as the weather folks had been warning us about.  Other areas got much more rain than our .17 inch, and probably had high winds, too, but we fortunately didn't get that.  Lyndonville got much more rain - over an inch, according to the CoCoRaHS report; so as often happens, the storms were very spotty.  The humidity is high today - I'm showing 88% and a temperature of about 60 degrees.  So everything is cold and clammy.  I climbed the hill to Jamie and Marie's earlier and it was hard going for me - some days are more difficult than others, depending on temperature and air, as well as how limber or stiff I happen to be that day.  Today was hard.  I'm beginning to think the old timers who claimed their "rumatiz" hurt more or less according to the weather, had  it right.  My "rumatiz" has kicked in big time today.  I will now go do some stretching exercises to limber things up, if possible.