Editor's Notebook: Week in Review

Judie Hurtado has been cornering the market in Maplewood on holistic health and healing stories, so we finally realized we should put her talents to dedicated use and give her a regular column. Judie will write about health and fitness on the first and third Mondays of each month. Her first column, Food for Thought, has been a top story all week.

Judie is sharing the spot with Tim Reynolds of The Gym on Springfield. If you saw Tim's picture accompanying his first column on December 28 (How Resolved Are You?), you'll understand why. Tim is a paragon of physical fitness. Tim will be doing the heavy lifting and write about exercise and other fitness techniques on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. (What if there's a fifth Monday? Hmmm.)

Still on the topic of health, the Town announced more free H1N1 vaccination clinics and the Health Officer warned that a rabid raccoon had been captured by Animal Control. The School District expanded the CATCH healthy eating and exercise education program to Seth Boyden Demonstration School, and debuted the program at two assemblies on Friday.

On the political front, we profiled former Maplewood mayor Ellen Davenport as she contemplates leaving her post as the Secretary of the New Jersey Senate.

The Township Committee held a very short meeting on Tuesday night (50 minutes) but produced lots of news about the upcoming U.S. census, a scheduled budget priority meeting and pool fees.

On Thursday, many locals were at first excited and then deeply disappointed and even angered by the defeat of the marriage equality bill in the NJ Senate by a vote of 20-14. 

Local writers were the focus when we reviewed former Maplewoodian Brad Parks' new murder mystery crime novel "Faces of the Gone" (big thumbs up), and we featured the fantastic local news-gathering work of Joe Strupp over at Maplewoodian.com.

As the weekend loomed, we gave parents of youngsters the heads-up on preschool registrations and lotteries that began taking place this past Saturday. Never fear! Even if you missed those dates, there are plenty of options left and rolling enrollment for many quality preschool programs.

Deputy Mayor Fred Profeta ended the week with a bang with his many long-range proposals for reducing the Town's budget burdens and increasing its revenues. Most of his suggestions were overshadowed by his idea of merging the South Orange and Maplewood libraries and closing the main branch library on Baker Street.

What lies ahead? This week we are looking for reviews of I.Dance and Ellis Paul, profiles of music groups for the upcoming Battle of the Bands, some new gardening news (yes, even in January), more in-depth analysis of the town and school budget process, and reports from the Green Team.