Political Stretch

Take me out to the ... Tisbury Democratic town committee meeting? Yes, at the Martha’s Vineyard Sharks baseball game. The brief meeting will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 31, at the picnic tables adjacent to the playing field. Then the Sharks take on the Torrington Titans at 5 p.m.

Tickets are $5 for adults, $3 for children. Everyone pays their own way.

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I’m much happier in the sixties. I’m talking temperature not the decades, although that works, too! What a week — nationwide. I am very grateful to live near a large body of water. I can’t imagine being trapped in some sweltering river valley somewhere in the Midwest. Let’s not even talk about Texas.

It was a small group of birders from the Chilmark Community Center that met Tuesday morning for the weekly bird walk. Luckily Lanny McDowell came along bearing his camera as well as his binoculars. The flats at Quansoo were covered with chattering shorebirds. It was difficult to determine which species were the most abundant; least sandpipers, semipalmated plovers or semipalmated sandpipers. My vote was for least sandpipers, they were everywhere. Small groups of short-billed dowitchers wandered in the shallow water probing their long bills with a sewing machine needle action.

A proposed change in the guidelines for the state Community Development Block Grant program could spell a doubly whammy for the Vineyard, which has already lost out on $2 million in block grant money this year due to a clerical error.

The guideline change, which is still proposed and has not been adopted, would restrict communities who receive grant funding from applying for the program the following federal fiscal year.

Kenneth Feinberg is a busy man. You wouldn’t know it, though, as he sits on a porch that cranes far above Lambert’s Cove, providing a glimpse to the Vineyard Sound. It’s a calming view for a man plagued by the problems of nations and people alike.

“It certainly is very important that I manage to escape occasionally to Martha’s Vineyard to recharge my batteries,” he says with a laugh.

The old Massachusetts State Lobster Hatchery found new life last Friday, with the formal announcement that the Oak Bluffs facility will be used for raising shellfish for the Vineyard once again.

State and local dignitaries came together to officiate an agreement to share the facility, which had not operated for many years. There were speeches and a public tour of the hatchery, which will be used by the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group to augment its other hatchery, on the Tisbury side of Lagoon Pond, and the shellfish nursery on Chappaquiddick.

State health officials will today conduct an inspection of the Aquinnah laboratory whose fluctuating test results have led to a series of recent beach closures on Martha’s Vineyard.

Late yesterday a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Health, Jennifer Manley, confirmed the audit of the Wampanoag tribe lab, but said it was routine and not related to recent results of water sampling.

On Saturday, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick strolled through the newly-minted, solar-paneled Eliakim’s Way affordable housing community in West Tisbury — which by midday had become a virtual power plant in the boiling summer heat — on the Island leg of his summer conversation tour through the commonwealth.

The Martha’s Vineyard Museum is close to selling the West Tisbury land once envisioned as its future home to the neighbors, the Polly Hill Arboretum and the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society.

The sale is likely to be completed by the end of the week, arboretum executive director Tim Boland said. Surveying work was underway and everything was going very positively, he said.

“We both could see real utilitarian needs [for the land] ... and we feel strongly about keeping it in the agrarian spirit,” Mr. Boland said of the unified purchase with the agricultural society.

Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but at 5 p.m. the circus — complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music — gets underway.