Thank you to all the businesses (way too many to list) for your generous donations to the Ginny Ellison-Herald benefit supper and silent auction Dec. 13. It was an incredible turnout of family and friends to help support and honor the memory of Ginny.

The news of the Genesis Community Loan Fund leaving Damariscotta as reported in the LCN on Nov 21, 2014 prompted me to clarify CEI’s move to Brunswick, as reported in the LCN Aug. 28, 2013 – and to offer this bit of history and concept of community investing.

On Friday, Dec. 12, I hired a person for some last minute work to ready my home for the holidays. I had to leave before the job was complete but could see the project was being done with care and attention to detail. I paid with a check and expressed my heartfelt appreciation.

My father always disliked Christmas because he never knew what gift to buy for his family. I always loved Christmas because I loved finding the gift that fit the person. Everyone in the family was easy to figure out – except my dad.

We have days on our calendar, and rightfully so, that specify times to honor certain groups of people.

I would like to thank all of the people that attended Neil’s celebration of life held on Oct. 18, 2014. I always knew that Neil was a kind and gentle man, but I was overwhelmed by all the people he touched, which was obvious by all the tributes, as well as people in attendance paying their respects.

We have a very stressful situation at our place.

Someone has been taking rocks from our stonewall out front of our house.

In his letter to the LCN last week, Chris Johnson closes by writing the following: “If you’re fed up with the role of money in our elections…”

There is never a bad time to thank a veteran.

We set aside two special days of the year specifically for our military: Memorial Day which honors the lost; and Veterans’ Day, which honors the living; but really every day is a good day to be grateful.

A happy Veterans Day to all our men and women who have served and those who are now serving all over this volatile world.

Let me see if I have this right: the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship was told by Bowdoin’s Administration the group could no longer meet on campus because it has not adhered to the college’s “non-discrimination policy.”

Therefore the Christian Fellowship moved off-campus into its own building.

While this is the 2014 election issue, it is also our annual Veterans’ Day issue and this year, for the first time literally in decades, we do not have a feature story on a local veteran ready for our front page.

I have read a lot of post election analysis over the last two weeks. Many pundits who clearly haven’t liked Governor LePage over the last four years have written pieces that express befuddlement as to how he got re-elected. There is one fact which has gotten very little attention and that is that our current governor got the highest vote total for that office in Maine history (291,937).

As we sift through the rubble of last week’s election, two things are apparent to us.