The wonder of creosote!

When we came home tonight from a movie, I stoked the fire in the wood stove and saw this amazing pattern formed by creosote on the inside of the glass door of the stove:

  

How and why did the creosote form these beautiful abstract patterns? 

The movie was The State of Marriage, a documentary in the Brattleboro Film Festival about how Vermont came to be the first state to legally allow same-sex civil unions in 2000, and then nine years later, in 2009, became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage by a vote of the legislature (not the action of a court, as was the case in Massachusetts). 

It was an inspiring film that made us proud to be Vermonters. 

Poster for The State of Marriage

Hard rain's gonna fall

It's raining pretty hard this evening and it looks like overnight it will rain even harder. This will bring down a lot of leaves and bring an end to our extended foliage season.

Earlier this evening we had a Concert Choir rehearsal. Very nice. The basses have some particularly beautiful passages in a couple of pieces we are doing.

Today I worked inside. I'm preaching this coming weekend in Guilford, and I had to get my information into the secretary today for the bulletin, which means choosing hymns, scripture readings, etc. It's All Saints Day, so that pretty well established the theme. There is more involved in putting together a service than you might imagine. I also started thinking about my sermon. When there is a clear theme like "saints," I often start with a word study, using a Concordance to the Bible, which is an absolutely indispensable tool for biblical study. It can be very interesting (believe it or not!) Here's a section from the concordance on "saints."

                        

     Some occurances of the word "saints" in the Bible. The full entry fills a couple of columns. If you look up each occurance, read the context and reflect on it, you get a sense of the diversity of meanings and connotations a single word can have, as well as getting a feel for what the core meaning is. 

Yesterday I brought in more wood, but I didn't feel all that great, so the exertion of sawing and pulling the cart sort of wore me out. We had a River Singers rehearsal last evening. Ellen had an alto sectional on Monday, so she had three consecutive evenings of singing! 

We thought this Roz Chast cartoon in the New Yorker was perfect for the market we shopped at in Boulder, where you get  the feeling that even the check-out clerks have advanced degrees! 

Late fall color, Malawi, and wood

We are having a remarkably extended foliage season this year, and beautiful days to enjoy it. Sunday, it did rain a bit, but there is still this beautiful red tree next to the Dummerston town office:

       

Today was a lovely, mild day. We had our OLLI classes again. Tom Toleno brought some artifacts from Malawi to the class: 

                                         A Gulimoto - a child's pull toy

                Carved wooden Malawian chair

            Bas relief showing everyday life scenes

The afternoon class was fascinating. Our friend, Kim Nace, and her colleague in the Rich Earth Institute, Abe, gave a very interesting presentation on the collection, pasteurization, and distribution of urine as a fertilizer. It is green in every way - and incredibly cost-saving. Go to <richearthinstitute.org> for all the details. Brattleboro is the first place to be doing this in the U.S. 

After class, we came home and I brought in more wood. Had to use the Impreza as a truck because the battery is dead in the old Subaru.

                               Impreza wood truck!

Good Saturday

We did quite a few things today with Katie, Savanna and Brendon. Brendon had a lot of interest in the wood-gathering process and he cut down a small sapling with a handsaw and then proceeded to cut it up into small chunks - a laborious task that he did by himself and didn't want anyone to watch. He also learned how to use a wedge and maul, and once he got the hang of it, split three fairly large butts into stove-sized chunks. Quite the worker! Meanwhile I cut up some old, dry wood lying around and brought it to the house in our garden cart. Ellen, K&S visited and then got involved in a Carl Larsson  jig-saw puzzle, 300 pieces, which kept them occupied for a while but not too long. We went out to eat Friday eve at Chelsea Royal Diner, but today we had all our meals at home, and good ones too, thanks to Ellen. K&S had brought a pumpkin pie, and Ellen had made a pumpkin cheesecake, so in addition to all the fresh fall vegetables, very fresh eggs from Amazing Planet Farm, and good Benny's bread, we were well supplied. Everyone had a good time, I think. K,S&B left early evening, I got organized for choir in the morning, Ellen almost went to see Steve Jobs at the movies, but it was a little late, so made a shopping trip instead, I went up to the church to scout out what we would need to do a music-filing job tomorrow after church, and now to bed. I'm hoping we'll have a visit from John tomorrow afternoon. 

                     Many hands make a puzzle! 

                         Brendon, Katie and Savanna

Family time

We got up very early this morning so that we could be at Tamar's school (Hilltown Charter School) to see her in a show that had many acts - acrobatics, singing, skits, violin, piano, etc. We got there just as the classes were filing into the auditorium. We watched the whole show, but no Tamar! We saw her briefly afterward and learned that somehow her skit didn't make it into the show because of some technicality. She was not a happy girl! But we got to see her school in action!

      The kids filing in

         A student violinist

        Tamar filing out. 

Afterward we went to the Haymarket coffee shop for a latte and scones. Nice ! 

Haymarket display of baked goods

They do patterns on lattes at Haymarket

Ellen also went to Webs Yarn Shop in Northhampton and a fabric store in Greenfield. Then we came home to get ready for the arrival of Katie, Savanna and Brendon. Ellen had earlier gotten a basket of heirloom apples at Scott Farm. They are beautiful in their colors. 

This evening we went out to Chelsea Diner for supper. Great food! Now it's time for Brendon to go to bed.

          Beautiful heirloom apples!

         Time for bed, Brendon !

The joy of bringing in wood

Today was a beautiful, mild day, perfect for working outdoors. I spent part of it doing late fall mowing (after finally getting the mower going - that's been a problem) and also working on wood. We had two cords delivered today - green wood for next year - and I'm still bringing in wood that's been down a while. I fully agree with Henry David Thoreau (despite the recent New Yorker article that trashed him) that a man looks at his woodpile with affection.

     Mary Azarian's rendering of Thoreau 

               My woodpile

Good grief!

Yikes! I stayed up until 2am last night watching a fascinating documentary on the history of Latinos in American culture which was on PBS, then had trouble getting to sleep (not surprisingly), then slept until almost noon! Made for a weird day! I did accomplish something - I selected music for the Dummerston choir for Oct. 25th, arranged our rehearsal place for Thursday, and got an email out to the choir. I also got almost all the dry wood moved to make room for a delivery of two green cords tomorrow - which will be for next fall. And of course tonight was River Singers rehearsal. We went early to have soup at the church where we rehearse - a little fundraiser for the church - and that was very nice. It's a chance to visit with friends we only see at rehearsals (usually). I had every intention of taking some photos but I forgot. That's getting more and more common, I'm afraid. 

Full Monday

Yesterday was a full day! There was morning and afternoon OLLI (Malawi and Water), a short walk at noon, and then after OLLI, a 2 1/2 session basting and pinning a quilt (I actually used a needle and thread!), and then a bass section rehearsal of Lauridsen and Gjello in the evening with Susan Dedell.

          Noon walk in what is still a fine foliage season. 

New Members

The Guilford church had a wonderful celebration today of a group of new members and the birthdays of two spry 85-year-olds. There were scores of young people in church today as well. The morning had a festive air. I read the scriptures during the service, and also had the satisfaction of seeing my history of the Guilford church, Safe Thus Far, given as a gift to the new members.

                     The new members and birthday honorees

After church we came home and rested. I for one had slept poorly, so I got a nap. But in the late afternoon, Ellen and I took a walk along the West River in the very bracing fall air - in the 30's- and enjoyed the late color.

                          Late fall along Quarry Road

                               The West River

The following mysteriously appeared as I was typing on my iPhone and it refuses to be deleted !! I'll have to see what I can do on my computer tomorrow

. 

MYSTÈRE MARKER. Pasajes en la obra de Chris Marker (Spanish Edition)

Feb 1, 2010

by María Luisa Ortega and Antonio Weinrichter

Kindle Edition

$24.55

Auto-delivered wirelessly

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MYSTÈRE MARKER. Pasajes en la obra de Chris Marker (Spanish Edition)

Feb 1, 2010

by María Luisa Ortega and Antonio Weinrichter

Kindle Edition

$24.55

Auto-delivered wirelessly

Kindle Store:See all 9 items

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated

                     Sign in front of the Dummerston Church

Someday this will be for me, but not this time. This time it was for Larry Lynch, a pillar of the Dummerston community, especially the Grange and the Fire Department. His funeral on Wednesday was attended by hundreds. 

There is a bit of irony in this sign for me because I wish I could rest in peace - i.e., sleep well. I've been having trouble with that lately. 

This week we had events in the evening on Tues-Fri. Rehearsals Tues., Wed. and Thurs., and Friday, a pot-luck supper meeting of the Dummerston choir to plan for the future. This evening, Ellen had supper with Julie and then they went to see Bridge of Spies. I stayed home and worked on the Tolles MS. 

Hallowell sing

Yesterday I finally made my re-entry into Hallowell as a singer - I hadn't gone on a sing since last June. This one was quite interesting and varied: we went to the hospital in Keene - the Cheshire Medical Center - where they were celebrating the Healing and the Arts. The chaplain at the hospital had arranged for us to sing, and we sang a set in the lobby, another in the cafeteria, yet another in the oncology chemo unit, and a final one in the Farnsworth Rehab unit. The one in the chemo unit touched me especially because Betsey had had her first infusion of Avastin last Thursday in a place which I'm sure was very like the place we were singing, and there were women there her age receiving their infusions. So I sang for Betsey. 

         Hallowell walking through the corridors at Cheshire Med  Center. 

Malawi and Water

The second session in the OLLI program was held Monday. Tom Toleno continued his presentation on Malawi, focusing this time on the educational system. He was involved in the teaching of high school teachers at Mzuzu University. One thing he discovered in Malawi is that there was a tradition of educating people in one skill for life, and he tried to introduce the idea of a diversity of skills that would allow people to have more than one career option during their lives. He had at least some success in this.

The afternoon Water session was taught by David Deen, who is a legislator in the Vermont Senate and has a decades-long commitment to water quality. His presentation emphasized both federal and state legislation which affects water rights and water quality, including the recently passed Clean Water Act in Vermont (H. 35).

One of David Deen's power point slides

We took our usual noon-time walk, this time enjoying the spectacular color!

                       Glabach Sugar House in full fall glory

Beauty in Abundance

Yesterday we drove to Marlboro College for a performance of Bach 's St. John Passion. It was a perfect fall day and the color was at its peak. We met John and Cynthia there. The music was glorious. A day of beauty!

 

                          View of a colorful hillside in Marlboro, VT

                               Another autumn scene

                               Taking a bow after the St. John

The week in review

Sunday: we went to church, then to Amherst for the opera Quatro Corridos with Susan Narucki, preceded by a panel on human trafficking. 

Monday: we went to classes at the  OLLI program on Africa and Water. 

Tuesday: we went to Bennington to join in a remembrance of John Nissen. 

Wednesday: we went to a rehearsal of the concert choir. 

Thursday: Ellen made pie crusts for the Guilford pie sale. 

Friday: we drove to Randolph, VT to hear the Blanche Moyse Chorale perform the St. John Passion of J. S.  Bach  at the Chandler Music Hall. 

Today: Ellen went to a Hallowell sing in Dover, went shopping, and is baking things for coffee hour at the Guilford church tomorrow; I stayed home and worked on wood. This evening we're going to Our Town at New England Youth Theater. Tomorrow after church we'll go to another St. John Passion performance at Marlboro College with John and  Cynthia. 

Works of art

Last Tuesday, we drove over to Bennington to the home of Mary Anderson for a little gathering to remember her husband and our friend, John Nissen, who died two years ago. Five of us had a simple meal and shared memories of John, with whom I had spent many, many memorable hours as a colleague and friend, including a great deal of laughter. Ellen brought two desserts for our meal, an apple pie and an almond hazel-nut cake. I thought they were works of art, and took a picture of them. They were also very delicious to eat and everyone enjoyed them. It was a lovely gathering. 

           Ellen's works of art

The beginning of OLLI

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI, which is a nationwide program of education for seniors, has a branch in Dummerston, and the 6-week fall session began last Monday. There is a morning and afternoon session, and this fall, the morning session is about Africa, and the afternoon is about water. Both promise to be very interesting. Prof. Tom Toleno of Marlboro College, a psychologist, has spent quite a bit of time in Malawi, on a Fulbright scholarship, teaching at a university in  the northern city of Mzuzu. This course is a very down-to-earth account of what it was like for him to go to Malawi with his family and live there, what cultural adjustments had to be made, and what he learned about Malawi, and Africa in general, from that experience. Since he is an entertaining speaker, and as he freely admits, something of a trouble-maker, this will be interesting.

The course on water is a comprehensive look at the whole range of issues relating to water, its nature, use, distribution, cost, etc., past, present and future. Six different people will lead the six sessions. The first session was led by Madeline Gotkowitz, a research hydrologist with the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey. She really knew her stuff and provided a huge amount of information about water - where it is found, how much is available for human use, how it is obtained, how it is used, etc. This is an extremely timely subject, especially in light of the drought in California, where pumping out deep ground water is causing the center of the state to sink at a rate of 1-2 inches per month! That is causing all kinds of havoc with roads and bridges, just for starters, and threatening huge problems for the future in flood conditions. 

Katie and Savanna are able to join us for the afternoon session, which is very nice. 

During the lunch break, we fit in a little walk in the neighborhood, and saw quite a few animals: e.g., sheep, llamas, chickens and dairy cattle. 

             Prof. Tom Toleno

           Fabric from Malawi

                Curious sheep

The Caring Manager

Last Saturday evening, while Ellen was attending events in the Brattleboro Literary Festival, I drove over to Bennington, to attend a reunion of students and staff of Southern Vermont College. I was on the faculty of SVC from 1981 to 1994.

Southern Vermont College

My experience there had a lot of positive aspects to it, but also some negative ones. On the positive side, I had the opportunity to develop a course which came to mean a great deal to me: Management Ethics. I taught it for over ten years, and in it,  I created the concept of "The Caring Manager."  I actually started writing a book on that idea, but events intervened and it never was finished. However, if you Google "The caring manager" and scroll down two or three items you'll find one with a URL of  "context.org" which is an article I published in 1985 on "Caring  Managers." The course was very much appreciated by adult students who came into it with some work experience and had seen things that had troubled them. Younger undergraduates had more ambivalent feelings about it - they wanted to make money, and they weren't sure they wanted to hear about concerns that might affect the bottom line negatively!

I won't go into the negative experiences at SVC now, but just say that my contract was not renewed before I had a chance to announce my retirement. That was in 1994. But I made many friends there, and one was Tom Gee, who was President of SVC in the earlier years that I was there, and had been the one to bring me there in the first place. I went to the reunion last Saturday primarily because it gave me an opportunity to see Tom again, after many, many years. And it was great to see him and his wife, Sue. I sang at their wedding some 25 years ago. We promised each other we would not let so much time go by before seeing each other again.

Tom Gee
(from his Facebook page) 

But there was an unexpected contact. A woman came up to me and introduced herself, Jeanne Sidell, and she told me right off that my course in Management Ethics had had a big influence on her life. "Wow!" I said. "Tell me about that." She said that one thing she had taken from my course was the importance of working for an organization that held values important to yourself. I had stressed that a satisfying, fulfilling work experience, especially if you hoped to become a "caring manager," really was contingent on working within an organization which shared your values. She and her husband had researched an organization that they felt expressed their values, and they found that organization in Ben and Jerry's. So they bought a franchise in Ben and Jerry's, and have run that franchise for 25 years, in Manchester, VT. And evidently very happily. So that was a very gratifying thing to hear. One rarely knows, as a teacher, just how you might have influenced someone's life.

                               Jeanne Sidell (on left) and her friend

Concert choir

Tonight, we are at a Brattleboro concert choir rehearsal. We are singing Lauridsen, Taverner and Gjello. Here we are:

   

                            Concert choir, Susan Dedell, Conductor

Where does the time go?

Gosh, here it is Tuesday already! These past few days have been pretty full and I haven't been a faithful blogger.

So I'll play catch-up a bit. 

Saturday, Ellen took in several events in the Brattleboro Literary Festival, which she discovered is really an amazing event which she wishes she had known of earlier. She got to hear some outstanding authors and readings. I stayed home and worked on bringing in wood from the trees that were cut down earlier when we took down the shed.

                                    Cutting up wood

                   Filling up my wood rack

Saturday evening Ellen went to see the movie Martian and I picked her up and got to see the final 15 minutes or so. 

Sunday we went to church at Guilford - the first time since earlier in June - and sang in the choir. A wonderful service with great music choices by Peter Amidon. 

After church, we went to Amherst to attend an opera performance by Ellen's friend Susan Narucki. The opera was Quatro Corridos, a "chamber opera" with Susan as solo soprano and three instruments: guitar, piano and percussion. The subject of the opera was four Mexican women scarred by human trafficking, and was based on true events. There were four movements, each by a different composer, but one author, Jorge Volpi, wrote the entire libretto. It was preceded by a panel discussion on "The Reality of Human Trafficking." This whole issue is a huge world-wide phenomenon, and the whole experience was both powerful and disturbing. Katie Tolles joined us for the opera and the reception afterward where Ellen had a chance to talk a bit with Susan. We also met a couple of Susan's high school friends, who were very interesting. 

                         The setting for Quatro Corridos

              Susan Narucki meeting Katie at the reception

The opera was held in Bowker Auditorium on the U Mass campus. It is in an older building that was the old Ag School. When I walked into the men's room, I felt I had walked back a hundred years, and was so struck by the odd beauty of it that I had to take a picture (after waiting a few minutes for it to clear out ):

                  The men's room in the old Ag Building at U Mass. 

More to tell, but it will have to wait. 

Eclipse of the moon

I didn't mention earlier that Sunday evening, Sept 27th, there was a lunar eclipse which we went outside several times to view. We had a set of binoculars which gave us a bit more detail, but it was pretty spectacular with the naked eye, especially as it approached the full eclipse and turned into the famous "blood moon." I didn't really have the equipment to take a photo - my iPhone was sort of useless in that respect - but Cynthia got a good shot with her camera back in Vermont and shared it.
Thanks Cynthia!

Near full eclipse of the moon

This event will next take place in 2033 - the year of my hundredth birthday! Something to look forward to!