As home heating costs continue to squeeze consumer budgets, the blame game also escalates.

Homeowners fault the weather - here and elsewhere - as home heating fuel originally intended for the Northeast is diverted to the Midwest and other regions where last summer's heat and this winter's single-digit temperatures have spiked the demand.

The leading spokesman for the Herring Creek Farm Trust told the Edgartown planning board this week that the sale of the farm to a private buyer now hinges on the board's approval of a luxury home subdivision plan for the farm.

It takes dedication and hard work to achieve Dr. Martin Luther King's goals and visions.

Which is exactly what some Vineyarders are willing to offer.

The new sewer system in Oak Bluffs was supposed to begin operating by late June, but top officials in Oak Bluffs now say there is almost no chance it will be finished by then. The project is more than a month behind schedule.

A contractor in financial crisis is to blame. Workers abandoned the site at the old landfill for most of the last three weeks, leaving the bulk of the treatment plant phase of the job undone.

Skateboarders and their backers have high hopes for a meeting this Tuesday when board members at the Martha's Vineyard Ice Arena are expected to decide whether to lease arena land for use as a skateboard park.

Steamship Authority governors unveiled an ambitious business vision for the 21st century yesterday that calls for a new emphasis on summer visitors to both Islands with more passenger service, reduced car service, streamlined high-speed ferries from distant ports and a price tag that is potentially sky-high.

And when they exhaled from that, the boat line board voted to ink a $1.75 million deal to buy the New Bedford passenger ferry Schamonchi.