Chilmark police are investigating the theft of 21 solar panels from the Grey Barn on South Road stolen sometime over Presidents Day weekend.

According to the police report, the crate containing the panels weighed over 1,000 pounds. The 270-watt panels are valued at $14,000. Farm owners Eric and Molly Glasgow are currently outfitting their four new barns with solar panels, about 300 of which have already been installed.

The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital announced this week that it will soon begin to provide anesthesia services as a collaborative venture with its affiliate Massachusetts General Hospital. Beginning in June, anesthesia coverage for both the surgical and maternity departments at the Island hospital will be provided by the Mass General department of anesthesia, critical care and pain medicine. The collaboration will mean enhanced coverage that will allow the Vineyard hospital to manage two surgical emergencies at the same time, a hospital press release said.

The Tri-town Ambulance Service is requesting a 41 per cent increase for its operating budget next year due to a new state mandate that requires full-time paramedics for the service.

The budget, now pegged at $641,735, up from $453,000 last year, allows for two new full-time positions. It has been trimmed from an earlier draft that called for a 60 per cent increase.

If all three towns approve, the total cost of the service will go up $188,000 and each town assessment will go from $104,268 to $160,278, a 53 per cent increase.

Passing through the second electronic security-armed gate on the way to Squibnocket it begins to dawn on you: This place is important.

What follows is an edited selection of reader comments from the Gazette Web site last week.

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Court Rules No Price Fixing on Gas

PURE JOY

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Life seldom makes sense, especially when those we love are taken from us in ways that are as terrible as they are inexplicable, and such was Joy Flanders’s untimely passing as the end result of a 15-month battle with melanoma which she waged so bravely.

Editor’s Note: The following was sent by e-mail to Vineyard Conservation Society members on Wednesday morning this week.

Seismic Shifts, Trustees Too Silent

The announcement last week by The Trustees of Reservations of major staffing and organizational changes on the Island operation is unsettling less for what it said than for what it did not say. Ordinarily personnel changes may be taken as matters of ordinary business — a new manager is named here, a position is eliminated there. But the changes announced by the Trustees in a garden-variety press release that arrived by electronic mail are anything but ordinary.

Edgartown Drug Arrest

Edgartown police arrested David Hermann last Friday for possession with intent to distribute heroin and possession with intent to distribute prescription pills.

The other night, six men of a certain age walked into the restaurant Cook and Brown Public House at 959 Hope street in Providence, R.I. They all looked to be in their 50s, an assortment of working professionals, artists and academics. They had gathered for some drinks, a meal and to be together.

At the bar they caught up on one another’s lives. One man had just returned from Heidelberg, Germany. Another recently had surgery to remove some polyps. They raised their glasses and toasted the evening. It was all done as one might expect of men who had reached this point in their lives. Enjoyable but somewhat understated.