Events

Patty Hoyt & AEFI

• Malcolm Odell, a Peace Corps volunteer in the first group to go to Nepal in 1962, has lived and worked in Nepal for 13 years. There he helped build and teach in one of Sir Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa School project that was significantly funded by Rotary Clubs around the world. Malcolm’s career includes working for over 35 years in international community mobilization, women’s empowerment, strategic planning, evaluation/monitoring, conflict resolution, eco-tourism, climate change, training, and project management for poverty alleviation. He is known globally for the creation of an innovative organization development and mobilization strategy, "Appreciative Planning and Action” (APA), known in Nepal as APPA, and used successfully in peace-building following the Maoist Rebellion. Malcolm has used APA with numerous US and international firms and organizations, including a dozen Habitat for Humanity affiliates, 250 local NGOs, and almost 400,000 poor men and women in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, and several other countries. During the 19 years he has lived and worked abroad, he has spent 9 years in villages of Asia and Africa, including 5 years working for the Government of Botswana in Southern Africa. Malcolm has worked with the World Bank, USAID, NORAD, IFAD, CARE, NIH, IRC, Pact, Japan International Cooperation Agency, The Heifer Project, Winrock International, Salvation Army and other organizations. He has a BA from Princeton and MS and PhD degrees in applied development sociology from Cornell University.

• Achyut Hari Aryal is an international expert in Inclusive finance. He has more than 20 years of international/national experience in livelihoods, banking, inclusive finance, microfinance/rural finance, micro-insurance, challenge fund and private sector development, of which 8 years in leadership positions such as Country Director, Program Head, Deputy Chief of Party, Component Leader. At the international level he has worked in various countries including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Laos, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malawi, USA and UK.26 years of Experience 26 years in his fields of expertise; Financial Inclusion, Agriculture Finance, Energy Finance, MSMEs, Microfinance, Value Chain Financing, Private sector support, Fund Management, Impact measuring, Loan guarantee scheme Citizenship Nepal Languages English, Nepali, Hindi, Urdu, Bangla Education MA, Rural Development, ISS, The Netherlands, 1995 PGD, Regionl Planning, Development Study Center, Israel 1992 MBA, Tribhuvan University Nepal, 1986 Countries of Work Experience Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Malawa, South Africa, USA, and the UK.

Join Zoom Meeting at 12:15 PM
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89052896645?pwd=NlhqY24vNVBtVEwvVkQ2SFVJMHFSUT09

Meeting ID: 890 5289 6645
Passcode: 845942

Replace flags on veteran's graves. Coordinator: Kevin Hunt, Amesbury/Newburyport Veterans Agent -- suggests bringing gloves and a pair of pliers to help in removing old, broken flag sticks.

Paul McCartney raffle drawing will be held during Bike Safety Day Event

Our Rotary 2022 Educator of the Year is Courtney Lovett at the Cashman Elementary School, Courtney has taught in Amesbury for 20 years. 

Ann has done a great deal of reasearch into how best to conduct Ipswich Rotary's hybrid meetings; to engage both those attending face to face meetings, and those attending remotely. They have decided on the Owl as the best solution. She will discuss their decision making process, set up their Owl, laptop and projector and screen so that those in attendance F2F and those attending remotely can see how long it takes to set things up, and see the effect of this set up on the quality of our meetings  -- both first hand and how it works for those attending remotely via a recording of the meeting.

Presient's Night is in lieu of the regular 6/29 Wednesday meeting.

Edith was first recognized for her fiction writing at the age of eleven.

She won the Pasadena Star News contest for her short story, “Viking Girl” and walked away with the prize money of $2.00!

So how did Edith go from an 11-year old award-winning fiction writer to the best-selling mystery author and sought-after speaker that she is today?

While writing has been a life-long craft, her fiction career took a few detours before she penned her many multi-setting crime capers.

As an adult, Edith made her living writing technical documentation in the software industry.

She also wrote features and essays as a free-lance journalist, edited medical texts, published several articles, and wrote a dissertation to earn her doctorate in the field of linguistics.

Constructing fictional worlds rich with passion, intrigue, and the true mystery of human behavior is what makes her happiest. In 2013 she left high-tech to write mystery fiction full-time and is now living her dream. 

Edith is a lifetime member of Sisters in Crime, and is a member of Mystery Writers of America. She is also a long-time member of the Society of Friends (Quaker) and a past Clerk of Amesbury Friends Meeting. Her art story was featured in the National Endowment for the Arts 50th anniversary celebration.

Edith blogs with five other New England mystery authors at WickedAuthors.com who were featured in the Boston Globe.

She also blogs at Mystery Lovers’ Kitchen on the second and fourth Fridays of the month.

Preston and Cristabel  and Birdy rose to celebrity status after being featured in Edith’s mystery novels. Preston was the farm cat in the Local Food mysteries. Cristabel, the kitchen cat of the Quaker Midwife series, and Birdy, the star of the Country Store mysteries. All are now deceased, alas, but their fame lives on in the books.

 At the Malice Domestic Convention in April 2022, Edith finally collected her Agatha Award teapot that she won in 2020 for Best Historical Novel. The Agatha Award was for Charity’s Burden, the 4th book in her Quaker Midwife Series.

In 2001, Edith wrote a prose poem about her beloved father Allan Burroughs Maxwell, Jr.

Having been an organic farmer, Edith knows the language and tensions of someone like Cam Flaherty, the farmer in the Local Foods mysteries.

Edith lived in southern Indiana for five years and loved the slow pace and language of its natives, so it made sense to set the Country Store Mysteries there. She was interviewed in the Indiana University Alumni Magazine recently.

As a Quaker herself, and before having worked as a doula and taught independent childbirth classes, Edith has the experience and knowledge to write about the life of Rose Carroll, the 1880s midwife portrayed in the Quaker Midwife Mysteries. Her article about how being a Friend guides her writing and marketing was published in Friends Journal.

And her Cozy Capers Book Group series comes straight out of both her imagination and regular solo writing retreats on Cape Cod.

Edith lives in Amesbury, Massachusetts, but is originally a fourth-generation Californian. She has two grown sons and lives in an antique house with her beau and their energetic kitten, Ganesh.

Short Bio

Alexander Falk founded Altova in 1992 in Vienna, Austria; member of the W3C XML Schema working group that defined the XML Schema 1.0 specs; member of the W3C Advisory Committee; co-creator of the popular Altova XMLSpy XML Editor; established US subsidiary Altova, Inc. in 2001 and relocated to the USA; President & CEO of Altova; VIP member of the Kepler Society (Alumni Club of the Johannes Kepler University). Always interested in new technologies and creating new developer products that improve the software development cycle. As an entrepreneur and investor the focus is clearly on software, drones, IoT, and XML-related technologies. More career details can be found on LinkedIn.

Altova

Altova® is a software company specializing in tools that assist developers with data management, software and application development, mobile development, and data integration. The creator of XMLSpy® and other award-winning products, Altova is a key player in the software tools industry and the leader in XML solution development tools.

Altova offers a complete line of desktop developer software for XML, SQL, and UML; high-performance workflow automation server products; and a cross-platform mobile development platform. With over 4.7 million users worldwide, including 91% of Fortune 500 organizations, Altova is honored to serve clients from small and medium-sized businesses to the world’s largest organizations.

Amesbury Public Library has a new director in its former interim director, Aimie Westphal.Westphal worked as a customer support librarian at the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium before coming to Amesbury as assistant library director in 2019. She became interim director after Erin Matlin’s departure.

“As I started to do the day-to-day work of the interim director, it seemed much more possible to me that I could be able to do this and be a good fit for the library,” Westphal said.

Library Board of Trustees Chair Anne Campbell said in a press release that the board looks forward to working with Westphal more closely as director. “Aimie has made some wonderful contributions to the library during her time as assistant director and it’s been great to see how she’s helped bring the team together while navigating the challenges of the pandemic,” Campbell said.

The new library director will start at an annual salary of $82,000 and is expected to be deeply involved in the library’s strategic planning initiative to create a three-year plan that would include updating the mission and vision statements. “We had a long-range plan which expired in 2020 and we were starting the process to begin the long-range plan then but the pandemic hit and we had to stop,” Westphal said. She said serving the community and getting it involved in the long-range planning for the library are among her top priorities.

“We also want to update our technology so that we can better serve our community,” Westphal said. “We have been working on that for the past year and a half with our IT director and we have a really good working relationship. But it is a slow but sure process.”

Mayor Kassandra Gove said in a press release that Westphal did a great job of serving as interim director. “Aimie has strong relationships with the trustees, the Friends of the Library, city staff and the community,” Gove said. “She’s fully qualified and has successfully led the staff during a tough transition time. As a city, we are committed to providing growth opportunities for our staff and Aimie is the perfect choice to lead our library into the future.”

The September 7th. meeting will be a 5:00 PM evening meeting at the fountain in front of the Amesbury Library. There will not be any food available box lunches. This will not be a Zoom hybrid meeting as supporting utilities are not readily available. If there inclement weather, the meeting will move inside the library.

Kelly Daniell is the new Executive Director of the Amesbury Carriage Museum.

Kelly comes to Amesbury from The Peabody Historical Society & Museum, where she served six years as Curator. In that role, she maintained the extensive decorative arts and research collections, as well as eight historic buildings in the City of Peabody.

Her recent exhibition subjects included examining stories of immigration, profiling veterans, and charting the lives of four notable women in Peabody’s long history.

Kelly earned a bachelor’s degree in Cultural and Historic Preservation from Salve Regina University and a master’s degree in History Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program.

AMESBURY — Ron Quinn has dedicated most of his life to art and his most ambitious project — 365 oil paintings, which he painted one per day for the past year — has just reached its conclusion.

"My girlfriend (Sandy) says it looks like a lunatic lives here," Quinn said. "I told her 'one does.'"

An impressionist working mostly in oil, Quinn, 63, was a married electronic technician in his 20s when he was asked to paint a simple sign for his parents' wedding anniversary and he never turned back.

"As soon as I made the first mark, I said, 'I love this,'" Quinn said. "It just struck a chord. So I quit my job and came home and told my wife that I was going to be an artist."

Having retired after a 21-year career as an art director for AT&T, the Amesbury native often draws inspiration from the work of Vincent van Gogh. Quinn recently became known for live painting at such events as the Fireball Run, the Amesbury Days Art Show & Sale and the Amesbury Pines Music Festival.

"I don't call myself an artist," Quinn said. "Too many people use that title. I call myself a painter. That's what I do. I was trying to find my style and I fell in love with (van Gogh) instantly. It was the color and the texture that spoke to me in volumes."

Working primarily in oil, Quinn has tried to paint something substantial each July 29 to honor van Gogh's death on that date in 1890.

"I feel like I am keeping his legacy going if I paint on that day," Quinn said.

Quinn was too busy to paint a larger piece last July 29, but that's when inspiration struck.

"I only had the time to do one of these little cubes, which was of a red lily in my friend's garden," he said. "So I painted it and then the next day, I didn't feel like I had done enough. So I told my girlfriend I was going to paint one every day for a week. That way I would have seven of them."

Quinn immediately set about his first week of painting cubes but once the week was over, it still wasn't enough.

"I found out, during the last 70 days of Van Gogh's life, he painted 70 paintings," Quinn said. "So my seven seemed pretty weak right then. I looked at Sandy and asked, 'Do you think I can do it for a year?' She said, 'You are out of your mind.' and I am like, 'maybe?'"

Crazy or not, Quinn has spent the past year painting one 4-inch by 4-inch cube each day and was scheduled to finish the project with a replication of van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows" Friday night.

"I was probably a month in when I realized I was hooked," Quinn said. "That's when it became a mission."

Nothing deterred him in his mission either, not even a near-fatal heart attack his mother suffered in October.

"She was rushed to the hospital, the whole nine yards," Quinn said. "I came home that night, totally drained but I was like, 'Where's my paints?'"

With his mother on the mend, Quinn has spent the spring and summer finishing up his work, painting Rockport, Gloucester, Newburyport, Salisbury and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, along the way.

"I want to get people involved in the process so I went to Facebook and told them to send me a photo, any photo at all," Quinn said. "I got a string of pets, not one landscape. So I painted a bunch of pets and I had a ball doing them. I really did."

Most of his paintings are local landscapes. Each cube is numbered, dated and signed on the back. Having covered every wall in his Fruit Place kitchen, now that his project is finished, Quinn is ready to find a suitable home for it.

"Ideally I'd like to get this to a museum," he said. "That would be my number one option. That way they are going to be seen as a group and will stay all together. A lot of museums buy collections and put them in their permanent collection. That is a possibility. Obviously, it is a long shot."

 Mayor Gove said that “I want to thank Interim Chief Nolan and Bill Shute for stepping up at this critical time,” Gove said in a statement. “Chief Nolan has demonstrated an incredible commitment to our city and Bill has tremendous experience to offer. Together, I am confident they will provide solid leadership for our staff, and I look forward to working with them.’

Shute will oversee day-to-day operations, including but not limited to budgeting, personnel and general administration, according to the city.

Nolan started with the Fire Department in 1995 as a part-time, call-in firefighter. He became a full-time firefighter/EMT in 1997, then held the role of acting lieutenant from 2012-13. In June 2014, he was promoted to lieutenant, and in July 2015 was promoted again to acting deputy chief. In 2019, Nolan was promoted to deputy fire chief and fire prevention officer.

In a written statement, Nolan said his goal was to continue providing a “high level of service excellence that the members of the Amesbury Fire Department provide to the citizens and visitors of Amesbury every day. “

“These are very difficult times in the post-COVID world that we live in, and together with Bill, the members of the Fire Department and I will continue to face these challenges head on,” Nolan said in the statement. “ I will work with the mayor and the City Council to keep the Fire Department in a forward motion during this transition. I would also like to thank Chief Berkenbush for his service to the Amesbury Fire Department.”

OUR MISSION: CI Works creates energetic work environments built on collaboration and open interaction to improve how we work and how we do business.

OUR CAMPUS: Our campus is an adaptive reuse building, leasing for manufacturing, office and co-working space that’s actually affordable. Address is 11 Chestnut Street, Amesbury, MA 01913

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To honor World Polio Day (10/24)