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My book is called Well Out to Sea. My son still calls it “My Life in Kenya.” One morning last winter, as I sat in a parking lot on the mainland waiting for the appointed time for my meeting with the potential publisher of my book, Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” came on the car radio.

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Bomb squad

“Well, you just missed the bomb squad…” “Now what? Did Nellie turn up another old hand grenade in the back of a desk drawer?” “No,” I replied. “This time, we had to blow up one of Suzanne’s best Historical Society artifacts.” Emily sighed. “How many times are my parents going to have to call the

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Essay: Tweeting island news

The Twitter phenomenon, and the way Twitter “connects the world” is (according to the little magazine supplement that we find in the Sunday paper) one of the past year’s “Big Things.” That technology, closely aligned with thinking out loud, seems hardly equal to the other major news items these days. Some Americans have been neglecting

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Improvements planned for island airstrips

Each day that the weather cooperates, residents of Matinicus drive to the gravel airstrip on the north end of the island, where pilots and islanders unload groceries and prescriptions, furnace parts and birthday cakes, mail bags and UPS boxes, medical oxygen and plumbing fittings from the small Cessna airplanes operated by Penobscot Island Air. They

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Coastal cleanup on Matinicus Island

I’ve been reading Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano’s recent book Flotsametrics, a happy accidental find in the Rockland Library. The book describes the science of worldwide ocean currents, or gyres, that circulate floating objects such as the many thousands of Nike sneakers lost overboard from a container ship in a 1990 storm. Beachcombing becomes more

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What is “phase separation?”

According to literature provided to fuel dealers by Irving, “Phase separation occurs when the ethanol blended into the fuel absorbs enough water to separate from the gasoline. It only takes a small amount of water to cause phase separation in a tank, making it critical that ethanol-blended gasoline is not exposed to water at any

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