Author: stumberry

Good Yontif Fellow Travelers:     (Please note- the blog will not be available this week on my website , as we are moving to another domain host (Whatever that is). Once the transfer is established, I will post this on the website retroactively…so for now…this is it)

“It is the greatest manifestation of power to be calm” Swami Vivekananda

Calm- schmalm….where is the rain? Every day it starts out looking like rain and by noon it is 75 and sunny…blah, blah, blah…the POND continues to look like the Grand Canyon. We had a few days where we had highs in the mid-60s, which seemed like the true Fall arrival, but then back up to the temps that have created record highs here every day for a month. Global warming-schmobal warming…

Despite the warmth- the subtle changes are abounding. See the very unusual early morning mist and the fine late afternoon fall light. See the leaves turning rust and gold at every bend in the road. Feel the brisk night air as the harvest moon rises. But, I digress……..

This week was Jennifer’s’ birthday week- a big one, not in years, but as her first brunette birthday. We celebrated with a dinner on the town, at the fabulous Roots in Rutland and then to the very cool Paramount theater to see the everlasting Robert Cray band…a man who has not aged an iota in 35 years .Max and Tess very thoughtfully got Jenn an inversion table, so she could hang upside down while picking organic vegetables….which arrived in a massive box in front of our door several days early. I rushed out to cover up the box as it had its content labeled everywhere and then had to ask her to help me schlep it in. All good- until a second box arrived the next day (Amazon must like Jenn-they sent her two) and had to repeat the whole adventure…running out of big enough sheets….We celebrated her birthday when I got home from traveling on Thursday night. She loved her gifts but would not agree to keep the Donald bobble head I had gleefully gotten her (“get that out of my house”)..so I guess I have to find a Bernie one.

My overnight trip to DC was quite an adventure. To get there I drove 2 ½ hours to Hartford, ,flew to Baltimore, took a train to DC, and walked a mile and half with my luggage (in 95 degree swelter) to my hotel…then repeated it backward the next day. Left DC in heat of 94-arrived back in mountains at night to 42…apparently global warming misses us at night.

Got out for a hike on the Appalachian trail this week with Lucy- quite the serene place …and then hit the Chester autumn fest on Saturday, where we found the beer garden away from the leaf people, and Lucy found Ms. Indy to romp with.

Just said bon voyage to our guests from the south of France. Toe-mah and Ludie (maybe not their real names) who were delightful. She is a “chiropractie”- but we could not convince her to fix us up. They said the stay was plus-perfect (got to hear the pronunciation to appreciate that). Night before we had Gigi; a Jersey girl here to be a fanatic and run the annual Spartan race at Killington.

Now everyone is gone and Lucy and I are recovering. Trying to catch our fourth movie in 3 weeks this afternoon, if we get motivated to drive down to the Bellows Falls Opery house…only one hour drive to see a movie.

And, that’s all she wrote…for now

Au revoir, mes amis.

Monsieur Stuard

 

 

 

 

Beloved earthlings and flatlanders:

“I am the grapevine, you are the grapes”   Western Koan

See THE Pond………it rained hard this morning…for the first time in six weeks, which might possibly relieve me from pumping water (with three 100 foot hoses, which leads to no water in the house0 )down to the pond to try and fill up the dry canyon….we will need rain for seven days and seven nights if it is going to fill up before next spring…friend Phil says that I am Captain Ahab and THE POND is my WHALE…….

See the Barn Roof…who came up with this color shingles…let me search around the house and find the project-maven………

See Jenn’s hair…and then send her a sympathy card with deep thoughts …she is traumatized by her brazen switch to being brunette…

See our new favorite secret hiking place-…..just down the road a bit, but I can’t tell you where, or I’d have to kill you …short hike down to a magnificent gorge….nude swimming possibilities…warm rocks to sit on for lunch….only crawfish in Vermont!

See bad music fest and good music fest…we did the haul up to charming Randolph last Sunday for their “New World” music fest…turned out to be confined to a small tent with lots of daytime  drinking, people were not friendly, and they did not care for Lucy…NOT…so back down route 100 we buzzed to catch tail end of the Blues and Folk Fest at Calvin Coolidge birthplace in Plymouth (learned that CC was the first hang glider!) ……..gorgeous setting, God-like day, great acoustic blues, folk and jazz,,,…and a good place to hide out from the Labor Day tourist blitz

See Stu and Jenn go to find a movie…an hour an ten minutes each way to the  grand old hamlet of Brattleboro to see the new Woody Allen movie, Café Society…not complaining, absolutely worth the drive (see the review)..and had Thai dinner in the bargain…but still, can’t we have adult movies and ethnic food in the mountains?

See Lucy swim…the girl hates the water, but she hates it much more to be separated from her pack…so we spent an incredible early fall day kayaking at nearby Lake Nineveh with no one else there (got to love post Labor Day mountain life), with the little beast hurtling herself into the water each time one of our kayaks drifted away from the other one. She wound up swimming the entire lake in her littler orange life vest…….her tiny legs churning, nose snorting, head proudly and barely above the surface….that was Friday and she has been sleeping ever since……

Jen is outside scouting out more projects for the day (yesterday we cut down, cut up and removed a massive dead tree)- so I have to finish this and go hide for when she comes searching for me…heading to Dartmouth this afternoon for a bit more culture…

Enjoy the coming of the leaves and spread peace and love…..and register to vote in multiple states.

 

Stuber

 

PS- check out photo #1- it is the shot that was featured on front page the statewide newspaper from our participation in THE Garden tour…The Inn at Scum Pond is quite impressive, no?

 

Happy Labor Day weekend to all:

“You shall LOVE your crooked neighbor, With your crooked heart”  WB Auden

We’ve had a busy week in Mt. Holly, our home town. Summer is rapidly turning into autumn…see the leaf changes in the pix. The weather here has been Vermont perfect- with days around 75 and nights around 50…which is great, except we’ve had no rain for two weeks now, and the Dam POND is not making much progress in its return…see the discouraging photos. Stu has taken to running 10,000 feet of hose down there to try and fill it up for an hour day, which A- is like eating crumbs for dinner and B- takes all our water pressure to get down there, leaving us with no water in the house. Guess, we’ll have to wait for a good tropical storm to come through.

After my last dispatch last Sunday, we spent nine hours cleaning up the post excavation mess. Bob the Pond guy is a true excavating artist/fool, but he does not seem to have a watch and he does not really clean up…so we schlepped and dug and cut our way into semi-permanent stooped positions, until it looked back to semi-normal. Of course, we have put down a half acre of grass seed and mulch whim is undoubtedly wilting due to lack of rain. We may not really have THE POND until the spring! And, we did not account for enlarging the POND, with a huge apple tree that now hangs over it and is dropping its fruit into the limited waters. We cut it back as much as we can for this time of year, but more will have to wait until spring…in the meantime the returning frogs are delighted with the green balls ever falling into the murk.

On the ever present projects front, we had a surprise visit form Brian, the hippie electrician, who showed up unannounced after four weeks of trying to get him here. Like many Vermont, tradesman, he applied his Zen to our barn breaker box which had previously had a swarm of wires hanging every which direction and now we have a much improved system, which will only result in electrocution of you get within a foot of it. And yesterday, Jay and the Americans, our ADHD roofers show up to put in the barn roof, which is halfway done as we speak- see photos of backside. I’m hoping this will be our last home improvement project of the year…though Jenn is out  there  making lists and thinking about more gardens, paint and bedding.

By the way, on the topic of the joys of country living, our tractor has not started without a jump all summer and the deck has been mowing rocks more than grass- so we finally got around to that issue this week. Got the beast miraculously starting and ordered a bracket, which might keep the deck off the ground. Said bracket was three inches large and nine bucks an then took around seventeen hours to get on…but voila, Jenn is now a mowing fool.

We had two sets of BnB guests this week. Tom and Jerry (no shit) from New Jersey, who we spent a manic evening and morning talking to and around. She is nice Jewish girl from the burbs and he an Italian plumber whose dad was  a painter for the Mob. They liked it so well here, they are now looking to buy a house down the road. Last night we had a couple an their aunt form The Netherlands. It was Marlene’s’ 30^th birthday –and Jenn baked her a cake. We worked the community supper last night, so they arrived after we got home, and we spent a few very nice hours mulling about American work permits, living in greater Boston and why the Trumpster might be the end of the world as we know it. They went to bed, they got up, they left…the perfect guests…we love the Europeans…and especially those who don’t really speak any English. You can see the birthday pix and in the photo show.

Amidst all the projects, deadlines for a manual I am writing, side trips for work and day to day bedding decisions, we have been pretty house bound for weeks (more prisoners to the POND GUY)- so took of mid-week for a trek up to Middlebury. Another perfect day found us haunting Costello’s’ most famous Italian deli (mama looks like Mama Corleone and cooks like her). We found a walking tour of Middlebury which led us around in circles for two hours ..the chamber of commerce probably needs to hire someone new to do their tourist brochures…….and then headed up into eh mountain pass to the wonderful Robert Frost nature trail, whir we romped for a couple of hours and Stu recited “Stopping by Woods on a snowy Evening”, in fifth grade recital mode, at least six times. The drive back at dusk was illuminated by the wonder of leaves changing as we watched them.

So- we are in getting ready to leave Jay and  the Americans to finish the barn roof today and we head up to Randolph for their annual Arcadian music festival. We are trying to find every opportunity to make nice with our Canadian neighbors, so when they build a wall to keep all of the trump-ites out, they will let us come live there.

Hope you are all having fun  and thinking about us…..a lot…..

 

The Stu

Bonjour mes amis:     https://vermontrambles.com/2016/08/28/the-mountains-the-pond-the-leaves/

“It’s been a long time coming…it’s been a long time gone”   David Crosby

Lots and lot of mountain movement, (not the bowel kind) in the last week…so let me simply  present the Zen and LOTS of photos:

THE POND is on the brink of completion. Bob the Pond guy is a magician with the excavator, albeit one without a watch…..he appears- he disappears. Arriving at 8:30 means maybe arriving at 11, thus, we have been Pond prisoners for most of the last two weeks, but the damn thing now resembles a massive archeological dig- we are now in search of wooly mammoths. The whole thing is now amazingly larger with rock gardens and steps and we have a new secret area, which was once woods, that is a primeval graded pit of fertile life-filled soil. Jen spends her days out there consulting with Bob, cleaning rocks and ledges with a broom and scrubber (really) and saving the water lilies. The frogs have started to come back from vacation. We will be done today and then wait for the rainmakers to do their thing. The photo display of the process is sacrosanct. Check out the collection of long buried kitchen strainers from my years of futile skimming in the kayak.

The exercise machine extravaganza is now fully erect, though we are less than erect as a result – more like orangutans, once we finished the assembly. One can now never leave the barn and be fit as a fiddle.

Like Bob the Pond Guy, Steve the Mower Goy (should be guy, but it fits and WORD recognizes the double entendre), is equally reliable (not) and works on VSCT- Vermont Standard Contractor Time. We have been jump starting the tractor all spring and summer and waiting for Steve TMG to show up and fix it, but, alas, waiting is the Devil’s idle time, so last weekend we got the damn thing started and wired the dragging deck into a position that will now mow grass instead of rocks, so another contractor-less job completed with smoke and mirrors. All of this completed during my extended break from last week’s Blog……

Made a visit to the metropolis this week to see family and deal with the nursing home bureaucracy. Spent the night in faulty towers with cousins Sherry and Joel (without Jenn and Lucy, who stayed home to excavate with Bob), had a second reunion dinner with the extended Paul tribe (Chinese dinner for eight, of course)- these are  50 year lost and re-found cousins-  and then spent a sidewalk steaming NYC day in the horrors of my childhood friend and mentors, Bob’s nursing home captivity. After a year of trying , got them to take him to look at a possible assisted living home placement in the Bronx, which he rejected before we even arrived…there is no future in being a do-gooder.

Given all the erecting and digging and stone cleaning, not a lot of time for recreating in the mountains this week, but my music club did our annual performance on the town Green music series in the midst of thunderstorms and Stu and Lucy wandered around checking out the rapidly expanding fall colors…global warming/schmobal warming- so what if the leaves start to change at the end of July. We finished the week with the last major show of the season at the Weston Playhouse –an intense presentation of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons….I think it is safe to say Miller had some issues with his pop…which obviously led him into the waiting arms of Marilyn Monroe…..maybe she also was  able to, say, dig ponds, fix tractors or assemble workout machines?

Well, Jenn just came in covered with mud and smelling of pond waste…so I better go out there and advise. Till we meet again,

Stu- Bear

 

 

Greetings Earth- mates:

“And at the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair messy, and your eyes sparkling”    Shanti

We made it back to the mountains after our harrowing ten day adventure in the flatlands. Got back to cool weather (under 50 our first night), no earth movers, no rodents and full communication access to the world….this is all for the good. The Inn at Scum Pond had its own set of overgrown hassles…the delight of living in two places.

Getting back had its own set of adventures with a dead battery at a gas stop, voluminous wee-wee stops (Jenn refuses to adhere to the “It Can Wait” signs)……and a visit with the state police along route 86 in central NY state (turned out to be a forgiving sort of guy and rather than citing us for almost 90 in a 65 zone, he cited us for dirty license plate….really!)

So got back mid-day Monday…it has been short week – so this will be short blog……

Bob, the pond guy showed up Monday afternoon to start draining the bugger (see pix) and tossed his pump into the morass, where it basically emptied the pond overnight. Mr. Bob was supposed to then start around (around is the operative word) Wednesday on the dredging and beautifying….but as of today, we are still waiting for him to show up (have I mentioned contractor time zone in Vermont?). Jenn is taking this with aplomb; Stu is  out with his shotgun looking for Bob (and maybe get a few squirrels for amusement along the way). So now we have to estimate how long we have to live with a drained pond and lots of insects, while the frogs are off at the local Holiday Inn.

Burger and Beer night in Vermont…is a frequent occurrence. Ten bucks gets you’re a craft beer ( whatever that means) and local grass fed- Yoga burger. This week we went down to Londonderry and up Magic Mountain to the Red Slate Lodge for the ritual. Five stars on the food, minus six stars on the service. .

We hit the ski resort at Okemo for the their free concerts on Friday night, where it turned dark by 7:30 and was down into the 40s when we left in our shorts and tee-shirts….but got to see all the usual suspects there and Lucy made the rounds of dog sniffing at least seven times.

Had overnight BnB guests last night who had the eerie qualities of being doppelgangers for my late in-laws, Helen and Zaner..…checking on me I presume…

And…as of the fifth of August… the leaves are starting to change…

Since I spent two of the last six days in the vapid heat of inner Baltimore (good Turkish food, Orioles win, streets steaming at 8 in the morning) it was indeed a short week…so will leave it at that and go stare at the empty pond, the half built exercise machine monstrosity and the tractor that won’t start…..plus track down my lost credit card…an eventful day in the mountains if there ever was one.

Peace out…..

 

Man of the Greens

Greetings fellow travelers:

“What a long strange trip it’s been”   Jerry Garcia

What were we thinking? We went back to the heartland in mid-August which usually may be the absolute worst tome of the year in the Midwest. and…it did not fail to measure up to that standard; in fact it far, far surpassed it. I know you don’t really want to read an “Ohio Blog”- so I’ll keep it short and illustrate with photos.

THE GOOD- we got to see our kids and our friends. Stu got to catch up with work in Toledo. All the usual familiar places abounded. We got to to have some relief driven medical appointments- back adjustments, earl unplugging, dental cleaning)…and we got to play the annual Pelatonia benefit show with the Bunty boys, which was great despite several rounds of pouring rain, equipment issues, and a relatively small (but very enthusiastic) crowd. Marcus and Jeff came out and we whipped the property into shape, and Lucy got to see all her best friends…Jackson, Zoe, Rosie and Big Lucy.

THE BAD- It was fucking HOT!!!!!!We don’t have AC. the house had been closed up for three months. The yard was a cornucopia of weeds and bushes. It was fucking HOT!!!! We have no internet, cable or much phone service at the house right now. The dam gym had its pool area closed the whole time for its annual “spruce up” (what a crock of spruce).

THE UGLY- well, it was really ugly. We arrived to find the construction of Sawmill Parkway in full bloom; like we came the worst week and the worst day of the year. We could not get to our house and had to wait while the road builders extraordinaire carved out a way for us to get through the cornfield just to get home after 12 hours driving. We then had ten days of having our yard and driveway torn up and massive earth movers outside our door every day from 7 to 6 p.m. Every getting in and out was an adventure…the noise… the dust…the destruction. Soon  we will be the proud owners of a roundabout outside our kitchen window.

And that was only on the outside. On the inside, we walked in to our 100 plus degree shut up house to find the thrilling signs and smells of total squirrel invasion. Fuckin’ Heat…Fucking Squirrels. …everywhere we looked was squirrel poop and pee, picture frames broken, books chewed up and the band of critters having a party inside the walls and attic. Needless to say, we decided we did not want to share our space with them and spent ten days trying to get them out and keep them out. Apparently the squirrel who has lived in our attic on and off the last few years, and whom we tolerated, went and got married and had children while we were gone and found themselves a nice home in the country. Triple UGGHHH…

Ok- I’m bitched out. Pictures tell the story of the road and the music. We’re now safely back in Vermont where it was 55 degree last night, no unwanted animals living with us and no earth movers… and starting the excavation of our beloved POND today…the frogs are a jumpin’.

Back to the mountain story next week.

From the burnt out Midwestern expat,  Stu/Da/Cuz