Columns

This year’s summer solstice falls on June 21, and sun scientists have figured the exact solstice to occur at 5:04 a.m. that Friday. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and is the calendar opposite to the winter solstice in December, the shortest day of the year. On our longest summer Friday, dusk is predicted to occur around 8:34 p.m.

The American people are fortunate to have the most abundant and affordable food supply in the world.  This bounty is the result of the hard work and initiative of our nation's family farmers.

The recent furor over the revelation that the United States government is collecting extensive records of phone and Internet data in order to track their own citizens is an eye-opener.

Twenty-five pounds.

That’s how much fat I’ve gained since falling off the resolution bandwagon sometime in early February of this year.

It’s the entire 15 pounds I managed to lose in 2012 plus an extra 10 – just for the heck of it.

As I have gone through the past five or ten years, my current wallet has always had a rather unpleasant existence. It's been either sitting in my pants or pitched haphazardly on the top of my dresser amidst the other pocket trash. Every night I pull stuff from my pockets and dump the detritus of a day on the dresser - scraps of lint, forgotten bits of paper with scrawled phone numbers, and bottle caps I rammed into my pocket late in the evening, because I was too lazy to walk to the trashcan.

ALLAGASH WILDERNESS WATERWAY - One of the most beautiful spots on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway (AWW) is Long Lake Dam. The actual dam is long gone, having washed out many years ago but the remnants still remain.

Just like my dad said, I grew out of my distaste for onions and discovered that you can probably eat anything as long as it’s fried. But unlike he predicted, I have yet to grow out of my revulsion for carrots, especially cooked carrots. Sure, I can drown baby carrots in ranch dressing and I chew and swallow just fine.

Wednesday was Franco-American day at the State House. Father Jacques Lapointe from Madawaska gave the opening prayer, and the day was filled with French music and French food, including ployes from Bouchard Family Farm! I was also honored to speak about the late Leon Albert Guimond of Frenchville, who was posthumously inducted into the Franco-American Hall of Fame.

I have a special, albeit unhealthy, relationship with food – right down to the way I eat certain things.

It was a classic counterexample, a moment in time that I swore I would never foist off on my own children. I had just earned my learner's permit to drive, my father met me at the school, and he made me drive home. It turned out to be one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life.