Things are hopping down at Shortt’s Organic Farm and Garden Center off Riverside Road in Sandy Hook, and it’s not just owners Sue and Jim who are tiptoeing through the baby lettuces and potted perennials. The hens are laying so fast that the Shortts are offering two for one on a dozen fresh eggs. And an exploding population of baby bunnies — offspring of an escaped pet that found a willing mate from a nearby yard — may be seen foraging among the nursery plants.

“We’ve been trying to catch them to spay or neuter them, but they’re pretty fast. We might be losing the bunny battle, since there seem to be more litters being born,” says Sue. “But the rabbits are good company,” she admits. And the relatively tame ones show up in the oddest places to entertain customers and workers alike. Then there are the giant bullfrogs that hop in and out of the two koi ponds. It seems the koi are not even tempted by those supersized frog legs.

All aboard, all you train buffs out there. Last seen at the Danbury Railroad Museum, rail trail advocate and trains historian Sue DelBianco will be making two more presentations of her slide show and talk on railroading history about the Berkshire and Housatonic lines in Western Connecticut. Her first stop will be next Friday, May 19, at 7:30 pm, at the Merwinsville Hotel in Gaylordsville, New Milford (call Jerry Nahley at 354-9902 for directions), and the second will be a month later on Monday, June 19, at 7:30 pm, in the Council Chambers of the Monroe Town Hall on the Monroe Green.

Newtown Bee education reporter Susan Coney has buzzed out of the hive and is headed for a new field of flowers in Indiana. The schools will miss Susan, but Laurie Borst has spread her wings and will be buzzing about town collecting news from all of our schools. It is sure to be sweet!

Last week’s warm and sunny weather must have finally encouraged a certain Ashford Lane resident to admit the holidays are over. Garbed in shorts, he was dutifully unwinding the holiday lights from his front yard pine tree when I strolled past. It’s never too late, I always say.

Sandy Hook resident Erica Cullen made a mint when she decided to open a lemonade stand on her road last weekend. Erica’s timing was perfect, too. Not only was Sunday one of the loveliest days of the year so far, her neighbors couldn’t leave the neighborhood for a few hours due to a tree that fell and pulled some wires along with it, effectively blocking the end of Great Quarter Road. With no other destinations ahead of them, neighbors stopped at Erica’s stand at drank up all the lemonade she was able to make. In the process the 9-year-old pulled in more than $7, which she turned around and donated to Canine Advocates of Newtown.

George Benson, the town’s land use enforcement officer, was among the many folks who attended the introductory meeting of the Pootatuck Watershed Association this week in the Alexandria Room at Edmond Town Hall. George and the several dozen others who attended the gathering were impressed by the many environmental displays that were set up in the room, describing the environmental challenges that the town faces. George, who is an expert on lakes and ponds, is a town representative to the organization, which seeks to safeguard the quality of local water supplies.

Town Police Youth Officer Dana Schubert has some taste in cars. Dana is the proud owner of a sparkling new bright red Mazda Miata. Talk about spiffy roadsters. Dana tells me that the car is as nimble as they come. With modifications that he is planning to make to the sports car to increase its power, the performance characteristics of the car should be indistinguishable for that of a fighter jet.

Before too long, The Shoppes at Church Hill and Queen, located at the corner of those two streets in the town center, should be open for business. With those commercial spaces in use for retail and office space, the town’s central business district will be denser and traffic will flow a little more heavily in the urbanized section of town.

Traffic flow on Meadow Brook Road was slowed to a crawl this week so motorists could have a look at an unusual sight in a field alongside the road. It was an intact deer skeleton, which had been largely unnoticed before. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to see on the parched floor of Death Valley, not in the lush spring fields of Botsford. Anyway, people were hitting the brakes to rubberneck as they passed by. Perhaps the residents of Queen Street should consider planting skeletons in various spots along their road to solve their problem with speeding traffic.

Edmond Town Hall building administrator Tom Mahoney was just waiting for a few last papers to be signed in the Building Department this week so he could start allowing people to ride up and down in Edmond Town Hall’s new elevator. The final approvals came on Wednesday. The elevator project was started way back in February of 2004. Obviously the project has had a lot of ups and downs. I’m told the elevator is not equipped with elevator music, but I suppose Tom might provide a stool if someone wants to volunteer to play their guitar or clarinet for passengers. How better to rise in the music business than by playing on an elevator?

I think I’ll end it here this week, before I hit bottom. But I will rise again next week at the same time and place, so be sure to…

Read me again.