After serving 21 years as Oak Bluffs selectman and eight years as Dukes County commissioner, Island political mainstay Roger Wey this week announced his intentions to run for the soon-to-be vacated seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives now held by Eric Turkington.

In the summer months, Island cook Jan Buhrman starts her days early. After waking her two sons, feeding her two pigs, checking on her 12 ducks and saying goodbye to her one husband, Ms. Buhrman gets into her car. Rather than head straight to work, many mornings she seeks out the farmers who sell to her. More often than not, these farmers are women.

It’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday inside the brand new World Revival Church — a colorful, million-dollar building on the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road in Oak Bluffs. Weeping men, women and children are belting out popular Brazilian evangelical songs. At the pulpit, a dozen harmonizing singers are accompanied by electric bass guitar, keyboards, and a full drum kit, while band leader Jorge Silveira plucks an amped-up Spanish guitar in front of an arcadian painted backdrop.

The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is ready to pour the foundation for construction of its 90,000-square-foot expansion.

The site has undergone nearly six months of preparation for the construction, a project for which more than $46 million has been raised.

The expansion is on schedule for completion in late 2009.

The state-backed home insurance provider of last resort for most Vineyarders is called the FAIR plan, but most Island residents readily complain that their ever-increasing premiums and deductibles are anything but fair.

In fact, at a special public forum at the Tisbury Senior Center on Monday, many Vineyarders were crying foul about their FAIR plan rates.

Though it is brief and stated without much detail, an article on the warrant for Tisbury’s special town meeting on Tuesday puts forward a radical idea.

The proposal foresees an energy future for this part of the world in which the people would own the means to produce their own electricity.

All the article seeks is approval to apply for membership in the Cape and Islands Electric Cooperative Inc., and authorization for the selectmen to negotiate terms and conditions.

Correction

An obituary and news article in last Friday’s Gazette about Herbert Putnam 3rd incorrectly reported a piece of written verse given to him by a friend during Mr. Putnam’s battle with cancer. The piece was not the Prayer of St. Francis as printed, but rather a Sanskrit poem of hope. The Gazette regrets the error.

The blood alcohol level of 20-year-old Island woman Brandy Gibson was over twice the legal limit when she was killed in a motor vehicle accident at the intersection of Edgartown-Vineyard Haven and County Roads on Jan. 29, according to a toxicology report released this week by the Oak Bluffs police.

A Vineyard Haven woman was arrested and charged with felony attempted murder Saturday night after she allegedly attacked and violently choked the girlfriend of her infant’s father in a fit of jealousy.

Silvana Dias deCampos, 31, was arrested by Tisbury police after she reportedly went to the home of a 20-year-old woman on Lagoon Pond Road and attacked her.

Ms. deCampos initially was held on a $7,500 cash bail and was arraigned in Edgartown district court on Monday.

It’s bigger than butterflies, changing clocks, crocus, or — arguably — even pinkletinks. Nothing marks the coming of spring quite like a gang of kids running at full bore for the Edgartown Dairy Queen.

In this Island’s version of Pamplona’s running of the bulls, children pelt down from the Edgartown School to be first in line at the soft serve ice cream outlet when it opens in March.