Advice columnist and Freeville native Amy Dickinson will be speaking at the Freeville United Methodist Church on Saturday night at 7:00pm. Her subject? "Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Dairy Princess: Mostly True Stories of Small Town Life."
Also in Briefly in Tompkins, there's a notice that the playground rebuild at Dryden Elementary School will be this Saturday from 8:00am to 5:00pm. It strikes me a little strange that children in sixth grade and younger are told to stay away, since it's likely their parents are the ones working on the playground, but it's still great to see the schools creating opportunities for parents and other volunteers to help on projects like this.
Briefly in Dryden notes that the Ellis Hollow Fair will be held Saturday, September 10th, at the Ellis Hollow Community Center from noon to 4:00pm.
There are two stories on local taxation worth a close look. It seems to at least be possible that the county will manage a budget with a 0% tax levy increase, while the Ithaca school's levy for this year increased 4.32%. Because of the increase in assessments, the tax rate fell 5.4%, but overall people are still paying more taxes in than last year.
On the opinion page, Cathy Wakeman (who writes the Dryden Town Talk column) has a letter about end of life choices, in which she talks about her father's fifteen escapes from death, and some difficult days:
Posted by simonstl at August 24, 2005 09:34 AMThese choices and others, already printed, disseminated and discussed with the family well in advance of the event, allowed us to concentrate completely on him on what became his last day.
I'm so glad that we didn't sacrifice sharing that last meal of watermelon or those last precious conversations with family and friends to an invasive machine. And I'm extremely thankful that we won't spend months or years second guessing the decisions we made.