There were three sales in February on Lake Winnipesaukee at an average of $1.26 million. That's down from last February when we had seven sales that were all below the million dollar mark resulting in an average price of just $606,429. While the total number of sales are down this year so far, at least a few high dollar properties are moving.
The largest sale in February is a brand spanking new Scott Fuller Development home at 34 Boathouse Road in Moultonborough. This 5,500-square-foot, high quality contemporary has all the features expected in a grand lake home on Winnipesaukee including a great room with soaring cathedral ceilings, massive stone fireplace, and a wall of windows facing the lake that opens out to a massive lakefront deck. There's a first floor master suite with a fireplace and private deck and a gourmet kitchen that is open to the great room and dining areas. Upstairs are three quest suites, a media, bonus room, and loft area from which you can view the stunning great room below. The walk out lower level has a large family room with a fireplace, billiard room, and home theater (of course!) This home sits on a private .89 acre lot with 180-feet of frontage, a sugar sand beach, and sunset views. The exterior is finished in cedar shingles and clapboards with a natural stain for that Adriondack feel. Sounds pretty spectacular to me! This home was listed at $2.5 million and sold for $2.35 million.
At the other end of the spectrum, the least expensive sale on the lake was at 40 Governor Wentworth Highway in Tuftonboro. This property consists of a 1960's vintage, year round 2/3 bedroom home and a Victorian era three bedroom guest cottage on a half acre lot with 91-feet of frontage on Winter Harbor. The main house has basic amenities including an eat in kitchen living room, den, one full bath, two beds down and a large room on the second floor for sleeping a herd of kids and will probably make way for a new waterfront home. The guest cottage looks more interesting with its wrap-around porch and would be a neat structure to keep as it is also located steps to the lake. This property was originally listed at $795,000, was reduced to $635,000, and sold for $585,000 after 469 days on the market. The current assessment is listed at $782,700 so whether the new owner is going to build new or use as is, I bet he is delighted with his purchase.
There were no sales in the month of February on Winnisquam or Squam! Ouch!
If you are a property owner on a lake I would highly encourage you to visit the Lake Winnipesaukee Watershed Association's website at www.winnipesaukee.org . This non-profit organization is dedicated to protecting and preserving the water quality in the Lake Winnipesaukee watershed area. Its ongoing activities include coordination and assistance to the UNH Lakes Lay Monitoring Program on Lake Winnipesaukee, educational outreach and awareness programs, assistance to communities in milfoil prevention activities, and development of the Lake Winnipesaukee Watershed Management Plan. There is a wealth of information here about how to do your part in keeping our lake pristine and they also post their newsletters on line that you will find extremely informative. Lake monitoring data can be found on www.winnipesaukeegateway.org along with recreation information, watershed maps, and info about the watershed management plans. These are two great sites that everyone who loves Winnipesaukee should visit!
As of this writing there were 176 homes for sale on Lake Winnipesaukee with 73 of those below the million dollar mark! You can get onto lake with an island property generally starting in the $200-400,000 range. There is a camp available right now on Bear Island for $169,900. I'm not saying it's great, but it is a buy at $100,000 below assessed value! There are 16 homes available on Winnisquam starting just under $300,000 and many, many homes on smaller lakes in the are starting perhaps for a little less. So, if you want your piece of waterfront heaven in the Lake Region this would be a great time of year to start your search.
Please feel free to visit www.lakesregionhome.com to learn more about the Lakes Region real estate market and comment on this article and others. Data was compiled as of 3/12/13 using the Northern New England Real Estate MLS System. Roy Sanborn is a REALTOR® at Roche Realty Group and can be reached at 603-677-8420

It was with a heavy heart I received the news that Mr. Sargent, my former English teacher from Gilford High School, had died. Memory and distance can trick the brain into freezing time altogether, and this can be particularly true when it comes to teachers and friends we leave behind after high school. I hadn't seen Mr. Sargent since my graduation decades ago, so in my head he's still the same as he was then, flattop haircut and short-sleeved dress shirts, a different striped tie for every day of the week.
Mr. Sargent didn't look like an English teacher, he looked like a math teacher or an engineer or like an actual military sergeant — the kind who would flip a quarter onto to your bunk and give you two weeks of latrine duty just because it didn't bounce high enough off the blanket.
If you didn't know him — and I definitely didn't that first day of 11th grade English — you'd expect him to be exacting and severe, the kind of guy who'd cut you no slack, no matter what.
It didn't help that while the other English teachers at Gilford got to serve up "The Great Gatsby" or "Catcher in the Rye" or "Lord of the Flies" — books with enough intrigue or violence or adolescent angst to make any lesson slightly more manageable — Mr. Sargent had the trying task of teaching early American Lit. The curriculum consisted of Pilgrim journals, Puritan sermons (mainly of the fire and brimstone variety), Emerson essays, and, worst of all, Henry Thoreau's "Walden", a book that seemed just as torturous to a 16-year-old as calculus or SATs or a gym class first thing in the morning.
And we didn't even have a proper classroom — we were shoehorned into a tiny, windowless space in a corner of the library that probably had been storage at some point or an office where the librarian hid to catch up on reading the Life or Outdoor magazines that never seemed to remain on the racks. There were no desks, so we all just sat on the floor in a semi-circle around Mr. Sargent, who sat in one of the only available chairs, crossed his legs, balanced whichever thankless text we currently had to read, and began to teach.
And we all know what happened next, right? Even Mr. Sargent would have to agree that this is one of the oldest stories in the book, whether it was part of his early American Lit curriculum or not. I know I wasn't the only one who ended up scrawling Emerson quotes on my notebook — the most popular was "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist" — or the only one who grudgingly admitted Thoreau had some pretty good points. (I was probably the only one who tacked a poem on my bedroom wall by the Puritan Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, but that's a story for another time.) Emerson and Thoreau were rebel punks and Wigglesworth was possibly the original Goth—as for the deceptively meek Emily Dickinson? She was easily the trickiest of the bunch.
I'm not sure how Mr. Sargent led us to a place where we could find value in what we read, where we could somehow connect words that were centuries old to our own world of Joe Strummer and John Hughes and the all-too enticing anti-Thoreau sentiment of "Greed is Good" from Wall Street. I think his gift had something to do with his sense of humor — this wry little smile he'd get once we wore ourselves out with complaints and finally happened upon the truth that he knew was there all along — but more to do with a deep and genuine kindness. His smile didn't mean he was laughing at us—though we sure deserved that more often than not—it was just benevolent amusement that it took us so darn long to figure everything out.
And I wonder now if we were shoehorned into that tiny room in Gilford High School by design rather than lack of space. It wasn't much smaller than Thoreau's cabin had been, and it certainly was spare. There was just us on the floor with our notebooks and pencils, and Mr. Sargent sitting in his chair, legs crossed, book on his lap.
I suppose you could say that in addition to having this frozen-in-time image of Mr. Sargent from my 11th grade English class so long ago, memory and distance also have allowed me to idealize his impact on me as a writer and teacher and an ever-evolving nonconformist, but I really don't think so. With that vintage flattop and a different striped tie for every day of the week, he was probably the first real nonconformist I ever knew; Emerson and Thoreau would be proud. I'm proud too, that I could call him my teacher.
(Kate Flaherty is a teacher and writer from Gilford.)

"It's a sign," exclaims a February Associated Press story — a sign that our economy is "healing." "It signals that things are getting back to normal," added a delighted market analyst. And a March 4 New York Times report heralded it as "a golden age."
The "it" they're hailing is the Dow, that mystical force believed by faithful Dowists to be "The Way" — the provider of good fortune, often bestowing its magical beneficence by magical means. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is the holy measure of corporate stock prices, and it is now smiling warmly on its acolytes.
Last week, the Dow Jones Average reached a new high, having regained every dime of the $11 trillion that Wall Street investors had lost in the 2007 crash. "Hallelujah," shout the devout. "All praise the Dow!"
Unless, of course, your wealth is dependent not on stock prices, but on wages. In that case, you're among the majority of Americans who're more concerned about the Doug Jones Average. Forget the buzz about "a golden age" — Doug, Darcy, Diego, Deewanna and all the other Joneses can't even afford to enter the Golden Arches, for they're still mired in the Great Job Depression that Wall Street's crash caused.
Washington rushed to the rescue of the financial elites, but the Joneses are still getting double-stiffed by Washington policymakers and by the very elites Washington continues to coddle. The GOP House refuses to talk about a minimal tax hike on the superrich, but members had no qualms about jacking up the payroll taxes on millions of workaday people.
Meanwhile, even as corporate profits have rocketed up by 20 percent a year since the end of 2008, the chieftains are still refusing to increase hiring and are holding down wages. As a result, the share of America's total income that goes to workers has now tumbled to the lowest level in nearly half a century.
United Technologies (one of the 30 corporations whose financial performances are measured to calculate the Dow Jones Averages) is a force in that knockdown. This industrial giant, fed a regular diet of fat government contracts, has enjoyed annual revenue increases of some $2 billion a year since 2005, yet rather than increasing its workforce, CEO Louis Chenevert is shedding workers.
Last month, only four days after announcing that United Tech's stock price had leaped to a record high, the corporation revealed that it will fire 3,000 employees this year, on top of the 4,000 dumped in 2012.
That is the harsh math behind such recent smiley-face headlines as this one: "Household wealth back at pre-recession levels." Oh, joy — we're all rich again!
Or not. The article attributes the gain in household wealth to "surging stock prices." But before you start ripping up your floorboards in hopes of finding your share of this bounty, read deeper into the article to learn that the Dow doesn't do much at all for the Doug. In fact, the wealthiest 10 percent of households own 80 percent of all corporate stocks.
Harsher yet is the way the corporate powers are treating those financially stretched Americans who're looking not for a bundle of wealth, but just a decent job. Today's massive backlog of unemployed and underemployed workers allows corporations to bring in hoards of top-quality applicants and literally toy with them. It's now common for a job-seeker to return five, seven, nine or more times to the same company hiring hall for senseless rounds of interviews — only to have the company whimsically decide not to fill the opening at all.
From Google to Starbucks, major corporations have roughly doubled the duration of their interview process in the last two years. The New York Times noted that one fellow seeking a video-editing job was run through a gauntlet of nine interviews and made to undergo a ridiculous battery of psychological and personality exams, along with a math quiz and a spelling test — after which the company simply closed the opening.
Insulting, yes, but expensive, too. The out-of-work interviewee has to pay for producing work samples and cover the cost of everything from dry cleaning to parking fees. The job-dangling corporation, on the other hand, can simply force existing employees to shoulder a heavier load, while it trifles with applicants looking for what is laughingly referred to in CorporateSpeak as "the purple squirrel" — an applicant too qualified to exist.
Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over ... and kicked. The way workaday Americans are being kicked around today is revolting — both in the sense of being abhorrent and inevitably inducing a revolt.
(Jim Hightower has been called American's most popular populist. The radio commentator and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture is author of seven books, including "There's Nothing In the Middle of Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos" and his new work, "Swim Against the Current: Even Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow".)

If you drove to work today, did you worry about too few cars on the road? Do you wish more people were waiting in line at the public tennis courts? Are you eager to see new housing developments replace your favorite truck farm?
If your answer to all three questions is "no," you're like most people. And America's falling fertility rate would seem to have its benefits. But if you're scraping for new ways to undermine Social Security and Medicare, portraying this demographic reality as a major disaster offers new opportunity to stampede the public into turning against these entitlements.
Here's the argument: In 1950, we had almost 17 workers for every retiree. Now the ratio is 2.8 workers for every beneficiary. By 2030, it will be only 2.0 workers for every retiree. Social Security and Medicare are doomed, so let's pull the plug now.
Let's not. Why will follow, but first some background. The fertility rate is the number of children women bear over their lifetime. Rates are falling almost everywhere. They're down in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Mexico is now at the replacement level.
How do you keep programs like Social Security going when the ratio of workers to beneficiaries keeps dropping? Productivity. Productivity measures a worker's output in a unit of time. If computers help a worker produce four car batteries in the time it took to make two, that worker's productivity has doubled.
Productivity gains traditionally result in higher pay for workers (though workers have seen little of those benefits recently). This is why Social Security remains afloat as the ratio of workers to retirees continues downward. Also helping, Social Security payroll taxes were raised in the early 1980s to provide a cushion of savings for now, when the baby boomers start retiring.
As for the future, Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research supplies the math. If productivity grows at an average rate of 1.5 percent a year, as it has over the last two decades, productivity will be almost 40 percent higher in 2035 than it is today. Thus, workers in 2035 will be spending only about a quarter of their productivity-driven pay increases on retirees and keeping the rest. Not a bad situation.
Baker also reminds us that the ratio of workers to retirees is expected to stabilize around then for the rest of the century, while productivity will continue to grow. So the demographic heavens are not crashing down on Social Security.
Medicare is a somewhat different story. Its rising costs need curbing. But even here, there are many ways to cut waste. We don't have to eviscerate the program with voucher schemes or turn it into welfare through means-testing.
Scaremongering over demographics is a divide-and-conquer strategy: Convince younger workers that they are paying for plush programs sure to collapse by the time they get old, and they'll bring them down. And as a double-scoop, say that these programs make the "demographic winter" worse by having government replace the children who traditionally supported their elders. For example:
"The most insidious effect of the Social Security and Medicare regimes is that they actually (SET ITAL) shift (END ITAL) economic incentives (SET ITAL) away (END ITAL) from having children," Jonathan V. Last, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, says in his book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster."
Here's a counter-argument: These programs reassure parents bearing the considerable expense of raising children that they won't be destitute if they can't save enough for their old age.
But love or hate these programs, setting off false alarms is not an honest way to win converts. Today's demographic changes require adjustment, not running-in-the streets panic.
(A member of the Providence Journal editorial board, Froma Harrop writes a nationally syndicated column from that city. She has written for such diverse publications as The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Institutional Investor.)