■The 7 inches of snow that was dropped rather unexpectedly on Thursday, plus the cool temperatures broken only by the rain Sunday afternoon, have made for good skiing conditions at the Mount Tom ski resort. At Mount Tom there is anywhere from 7 to 14 inches of snow, depending on how much the snow-making machines were able to deposit atop the amount dropped by Thursday’s storm.
■Miss America of 1972, Laurie Lee Shaefer, will be in Northampton March 3 for the Hampshire County scholarship pageant to be sponsored by the Northampton Kiwanis, part of the preliminary competition leading to the Miss America pageant.
■The city schools’ early childhood coordinator says she hopes a new survey of parent interest in full-day kindergarten will keep the issue alive. School officials, though, say prospects for funding full-day kindergarten in the city schools next year are almost nil.
■A suspected sewage leak in the food court closed the Hampshire Mall for nearly four hours Friday afternoon. Janitors have drained, then sanitized the lower area of Café Square. The area, formerly the site of a fountain, was filled with several inches of standing water when mall employees came to work Friday morning.
■For the first time in a dozen years, Northampton officially has a new leader. David J. Narkewicz, 45, took the oath of office Tuesday morning in an inauguration ceremony before an enthusiastic crowd of about 200 people, saying he is “honored and humbled to stand before you as the 44th mayor of the city of Northampton.”
■At the end of her debut appearance Monday night on ABC’s reality show “The Bachelor,” 27-year-old Southampton native Rachel Truehart got her wish: she was presented with a long-stemmed rose. The rose signaled that Truehart remains in the running in her bid for the affection of this season’s bachelor, Ben Flajnik, a 28-year-old winemaker from Sonoma, Calif.