Imagine coming home from being off-Island seeing family and friends, and opening your door to find an overpowering stench of home heating oil. Then you discover your basement floor is covered with oil that escaped from three tiny pinholes in your oil storage tank. This happened to us.

One of the authors of America According to Connor Gifford, a book by a young Nantucket man who writes in the prologue how blessed he is to have Down syndrome, will be speaking at the Vineyard Haven Public Library next Friday, May 7, at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and all are welcome.

An Ohio native, he took many mainstream classes, and fell in love with history years before he graduated from high school is 2002. He now lives year-round on Nantucket.

Jonathan Mayhew was elected Wednesday to replace J.B. Riggs Parker on the Chilmark board of selectmen, who did not seek re-election this year after serving his second term. Mr. Mayhew, who previously served three terms on the board before stepping down in 1994, was elected with 245 votes. His opponent William Rossi received 181 votes.

April is Holocaust remembrance month, and as part of our study of the history of the 20th century, we have been watching some films and reading some personal stories describing the horrible things that happened during the Nazi era in Germany. Working together with Ms. Holter’s class, we learned how to write “found poems” where you take ideas and concepts and words from written pieces and turn them into poems expressing the meaning in a very different, and more deep way.

Nectar’s has begun booking musical shows for the coming summer on the Vineyard, and club owners confirmed this week that they are negotiating to lease and eventually buy the building at the airport that formerly housed the Hot Tin Roof and Outerland.

Each week, Menemsha summer couple Paula Lyons and Arnie Reisman join colleagues in a raucous radio game show of wordplay, taking questions such as, What’s an anagram for “Armed Possibles” and “A Slob Impressed?”

The answer is Possible Dreams, and this year the couple will bring their repartee to the podium as emcees of the 32nd annual celebrity auction for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services on August 2.

A townwide moratorium on wind turbines and a complicated question centering on the long-term impacts of affordable housing rules occupied much of the night when Chilmark voters gathered at their town community center on Monday for back-to-back town meetings, one special and one annual.

And while the annual town meeting warrant was a relatively straightforward affair, by contrast, a short, two-article special town meeting that kicked off the evening sparked wide-ranging discussion and debate.

By JIM HICKEY

Wednesday’s meeting of Vineyard Power, a fledgling cooperative formed just last year to chart a stable energy future for the Island, took place just hours after U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar gave final approval of Cape Wind.

Leaders of the group unveiled preliminary plans for a Vineyard-owned wind farm.

The federal government has given its blessing to the development of Cape Wind, America’s first big offshore wind farm, on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound.

The Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced his decision to approve the project, with only minor changes, at a joint press conference with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in the state house in Boston at noon on Wednesday. In words suggesting a conclusion to the nine-year controversy, Secretary Salazar called his approval “the final decision of the United States of America.”

ATTEMPTED RESCUE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 24, my wife, Lauren Crosbie, called me on my cell phone. She was upset and proceeded to describe to me the seal that she and her friend Diane Levin had come across on a beach up-Island. The seal was tangled in some sort of a mat or rug and was in dire straits. It was dying and the surf was pounding.