Next week, each day from July 9 to July 13, Mark Bullen will hold master classes in landscape painting. The classes are from 2 to 6 p.m. and cost $125 per day.

The Vineyard Playhouse gets going this weekend with three very different performances, at three very different locations, too.

Bekah Brunstetter was feeling lackluster about her play last week. She had already completed a first draft, but there were still kinks to work out.

“I told her to go have a lobster roll with it or something,” said Brooke Hardman Ditchfield, the co-founder and producer of New Writers, New Plays, a part of the Vineyard Arts Project. “She sent me a picture of herself with her open notebook at the Edgartown lighthouse that said, ‘We’re in love again.’”

When the Edgartown Federated Church choir sang their first notes at a church service in Padua, Italy on April 15, they heard something they don’t usually hear on the Vineyard — their own voices reverberating back to them along the endless walls and high ceilings of the Basilica, sometimes for as long as eight seconds.

The choir was performing in St. Anthony’s Basilica in Padua, Italy, in front of a crowd of 1,000, as part of their ten-day tour of Northern Italy.

If you need an extra incentive to attend the Chamber Music Society’s first concert of the summer this week, here’s one: It’s free. The tickets have all been pre-paid by Sam Feldman, whose late wife Gretchen was an avid supporter of chamber music.

“I’m trying to help her legacy in continuing the [Chamber Music Society] and making it healthy and strong,” Mr. Feldman said. “We are both very involved in our community and love to give back to this wonderful place.”

Lullaby CDs, like Fred Mollin’s recently released Martha’s Vineyard Lullaby CD, adhere to their own set of parameters. Most important, the music must be pleasing and consistent so it doesn’t jolt the little one out of the land of Nod.

“It’s interesting and musical, but it’s also calming,” Mr. Mollin said. “It’s almost a science for us. There’s nothing there to make the unconscious nervous.”

The Island is known for its iconic animals. There’s the black dog, the flying horse, the Jaws shark. But long ago, there was also a red cat. According to Island lore, she was a handsome young gal with fiery red hair who tickled the fancy of Stan Hart, Island bibliophile, sailor and author, who died in 2010.

The housing crisis affects us all.

While the ups and downs of the Island real estate market are not a major concern for these crustaceans, they do have their own domicile dilemma. A version of the Vineyard shuffle is undertaken by hermit crabs year-round.

The Vineyard is a huge maternity ward for birds at this time of year. I have e-mails and phone calls galore about young birds in people’s yards, at their feeders and along the roadside. It is a pleasure to hear the youngsters learning to sing their songs and the adults singing, perhaps with pride, over their brood. The birth of a black skimmer on Norton Point, verified in a photograph by Jeff Bernier, is exciting. This species has an interesting history in Massachusetts. Jeff’s photo was taken on July 3.

Everyone in the gardening and landscaping business has been commenting on how weird the season has been. We’ve been talking about the mild winter and super-warm spring. Both seem to be factors in how quickly the summer plants have moved along. I saw some New England fall asters blooming at the entry to the YMCA, for heaven’s sake.