Springtime’s probably my favorite season for biking on the Vineyard. The colors and sounds and smells are just the antidote to a long, gray winter; or, if you’re a seasonal resident like myself, it’s a great time to get reacquainted with New England. The weather’s cool enough to pedal fast without overheating, you don’t have to carry as much water, and the traffic is still relatively light. Of course, you do have the drawback that, of the vehicles that are on the road, most of them are landscaping trucks.

In this year-long serialized novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe fears and detests Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe has been obsessed with “taking down” Moby.

By LYNNE IRONS

Roseanne Roseannadanna had it right. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. I am grateful to own a couple of vehicles, but wouldn’t you know, two were on the blink in the same day. Everyone should have such problems! The good news was, however, it forced me to stay home and tend my own garden.

To see a new species of bird is always fun but particularly if it is in a place where you have birded frequently. Flip and I have been traveling to and birding in Costa Rica since our hair was brown, not gray. Thirty years of bird-watching in Costa Rica should have netted us close to all the 878 species known to this Central American country. No such luck, but we haven’t been there every month of the year.

An artist since the 1950s, Jack Greene recently reached into his archives to retrieve a number of airbrush drawings and paintings he created 30 years ago, and will present a small revival of the retro-artistic style for an exhibition opening at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs this weekend.

“Look up, it’s a bird, it’s a plane”

No, it’s not Superman, but it is super-natural. The superheroes of the sky this week will be the Lyrid meteors, showering the night sky with a light show from April 16 to 22.

Plymouth Rock Studios, a $500-million film and television studio complex scheduled to open in 2010 in Plymouth, has selected Hurd Publishing of Oak Bluffs to produce the company’s quarterly publication, Plymouth Rock Studios Magazine. The publication will report on studio plans and events and on Massachusetts as an up-and-coming film venue. The first issue is due out in June. It will be distributed to members of Hollywood’s Producers Guild of America and to major East Coast hotels.

In celebration of national poetry month, there will be a reading of 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne at the Old Whaling Church at 4 p.m. on April 19. The program will also include the music of William Byrd and other composers from the English Renaissance. Donne’s work will be read by John Ortman and Elizabeth Villard, who will be joined by Matt Pelikan on recorder and violin, and Jan Hyer on cello.

Tisbury's meeting will run for at least one more night, after voters got through less than a third of the warrant.

The major debate of the first evening concerned a plan to spend $4 million on road works in town — $2.5 million of it on a new road to connect the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road with State Road.

Voters opted to split the article in two, and overwhelmingly approved spending $1.5 million for the rebuilding or resurfacing of various streets and sidewalks in town. But they bridled at building the connector road, in view of the difficult economic climate.

In response to the loss of summer programming at the Island YMCA and the growing need for valuable summer learning experiences and full-day programs that foster healthy choices, friendship and cognitive exploration for children, the Farm Institute is considering options to extend their summer programs to meet the scheduling needs of Island working parents for children ages five to fourteen.