Opening a massive new front for offshore energy development around the Island this week, state and federal officials kicked off a federal leasing process that will see wind developers bid on blocks of the Atlantic south of the Vineyard and Nantucket.

A raging house fire marked a terrible end to an otherwise peaceful Christmas day for one family in West Tisbury.

Wet, windy, warm and sunny are terms to describe weather, and there was plenty of it on the Vineyard in 2010. There was record rainfall. The National Weather Service cooperative station recorded 56.18 inches of precipitation for the year, 10 inches above average.

Yet for all the rain clouds, the Vineyard had one of the sunniest, hot, dry summers in a while. Much of the drama of bad wet weather, or the threat of bad weather, came late in the summer, making the year good for tourism and also fine for the aquifer.

A huge snowstorm that brought blizzard conditions and record snowfall to much of the Northeast a day after Christmas was comparatively kind here, where only a light snow fell. Still, with winds gusting to nearly 70 miles per hour on the Vineyard and extreme high tides, the severe storm left thousands of down-Island homes without power, many holiday travellers stranded, Island roads flooded and icy enough to cause several accidents, and erosion transforming some Island beaches.

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride: It’s the story of my life. But the hairiest part of the story is that I am the only bridesmaid I know with a mustache.

That is why I was not surprised to find out that I recently finished second in the Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year Contest.

We’ve been accused of being lazy, complacent, having everything handed to us on a silver platter, growing up in the boom years without a care in the world. Trust me, I know some of those people.

Nature’s Everyday Strength

High tides follow low, the full moon follows the new, the spring ever follows the bitter cold. Nature freely offers us her perspective; the nature writer Hal Borland said, “If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.” So as we pause to make sense of this year’s elections, selectmen, line items and legal battles, we offer a selection of the Gazette’s observations of our natural world from throughout the months of Two Thousand and Ten.

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By PETER BRANNEN

Frequent travelers off-Island will have more offsite parking options this off-season as the Steamship Authority voted on Tuesday to approve a $225 parking permit option that would run from January to May.

ITW Annual Meeting

Island Theatre Workshop Inc. announces that their annual meeting will be held on Sunday, Jan. 9, at their headquarters at 12 Music street in West Tisbury. There will be a potluck luncheon at 2 p.m. followed by the meeting at 3 p.m. Both are open to all.

The West Tisbury Public Library presents the exhibition Vineyard Signs and Then Some by Marshall Segall, throughout January, with an opportunity to meet the artist on Friday, Jan. 7, at 4 p.m.

Visiting artist Marshall Segall is a newcomer to the world of painting. A West Tisburian for only a decade, he has welcomed a sense of community at the Up-Island Senior Center at the other end of the parking lot from the West Tisbury Library. There, in 2009, he found the regular Friday afternoon watercolor painting group, directed by Nancy Cabot.