Livingston Manor is celebrating this week, freelance sports reporter Richard Ross writes: 

I can’t even imagine the rapture and pride being felt by the ladies of the Livingston Manor softball team as their eyes fly open this morning to the realization that they are New York State Class D Softball Champions.

The Lady Wildcats' big game, which happened on Saturday, got the kind of play-by-play coverage in the Times Herald-Record on Sunday that other papers were giving a certain soccer game:

Livingston Manor catcher Victoria Taggart gripped her bat probably as hard as she ever has as she stepped into the batter's box.

Just make contact, Taggart thought to herself, in the biggest spot of her life. Put the ball in play and, somehow, get a run across the plate.

The bases were loaded with no outs in the seventh inning of the Class D state championship.

The Daily Freeman talks to a Phoenicia-based fishing tackle company which has lost big time because of the oil spill:

Owner Scott Greenberg said the full impact on his business, from sales to fishing in the five-state Gulf Coast region, won’t been known for a full year, but he has already calculated that accounts worth between $3,000 and $30,000 each were affected when the oil giant’s rig began spewing oil thousands of feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico from miles off shore.

You've got to hand it to Washington County farmers Jen Small and Mike Yezzi: they're marketing geniuses. This morning, the New York Times had a big, splashy article about "Farm Camp," a program invented by Small and Yezzi in which they invite city chefs up to their farm to learn how to slaughter a chicken and look a doomed lamb in the eye. Not only do Small and Yezzi get good press out of it, but they also charge the flatlanders $195 apiece for the weekend experience. And the flatlanders love it:

Heather Rubi, a 29-year-old market manager at Greenmarket, said the camp had taught her a lot about production costs. “Customers are always asking why things are so expensive,” Ms. Rubi said. “I don’t think they understand the time and work farmers put in. But when you visit a farm and see something like the size of a piglet and how much it takes to get them grown, you get a lot of perspective.”