Students, Family, Snow

Its been a great holiday season with getting to see students, friends ( I guess at least some students fit in this category), and family and SNOW. Here's a photo of our gathering in Basking Ridge. Thanks to Jared for taking a fine picture, although if he moved the camera a bit he could have left me out and included the much better looking Craig Hawkins.

 I also got the chance to eat too much at my great nephew's Bar Mitzvah. I'd post some family photos but our camera battery went dead sometime before Friday 12/21 and I couldn't recharge it 'til we got home.

We've had our son, Daniel, with us since Friday and we had  a nice Christmas eve and Christmas with my step son Chris and his family. Our good friend Megan was with us for a couple of days and brought bagels and lox, bless her.

We got 16" of snow on Wednesday night and Thursday so I got to shovel a lot and snowshoe a little. There are about 6'' more on the way today.

We had friends over yesterday and their two little boys got to sled in our backyard. Have you noticed that at least one kid cries during most sledding sessions and virtually all snowball fights but we all, including the kids, insist on them ( sledding sessions and snowball fights) anyway.

I hope the photos give you some idea of how pretty it is here. I just loving living in a Currier and Ives print.

I wish you all a great new year filled with happiness.

Visit

I am going to try to be at Ridge by about 2:30 this (12/21) afternoon. Since it's  1/2 day I'll be at the lobby or in the nearby parking lot if  506 is not reachable. Look for a newish red Volvo wagon with Massachusetts plates. Call me on 201 444 8206 if you want to get in touch.

Mid December Posts

Here are some posts in reverse chronological order for mid December.

12 /17

We returned from Portsmouth NH last night. We spent two and a half days there. It is a charming and very lively old seaport established in the first half of the 1600s. The old center of town has many colonial and early federal buildings and a sort of museum  district called Strawberry Banke.

We had a fine time seeing a dramatization of Dicken's  Christmas Carol and listening to Carolers ( not anywhere as talented as the A Cappella or other choral ensembles at Ridge) and an excellent folk singing  group called "Great Bay Sailor" singing some Celtic and seafaring at Strawberry Banke.

Lot's of craft and other shops and an extraordinary number of place to eat and drink. Portsmouth is now well known for microbrews including Smuttynose ales and lagers.

Coming home was slow going with icy roads and some overly cautious drivers ( and one not very cautious driver who went off the road and caused a minor traffic delay as he got hauled out of the woods). A stop at a friend's house for dinner was a very enjoyable break in the drive.

 all below from 12/ 13

1) Went to see Lincoln yesterday. It was a powerful movie with great performances, but the most powerful part of it to me was the conflict between the two seemingly irresistible choices , one ending a bloody war nearly immediately, the other: prolonging the war but ending the practice of slavery.

I hope none of us have to face choosing between two such compelling and conflicting alternatives.

Hope you all have great and joyous holidays. Spend time doing the important things with the people to whom you really matter.

2) We have been following our grand daughter's choral career. Last night was the seventh grade orchestra and choral concert. The Amherst Middle School auditorium can only accommodate one class at a time. They were not bad for seventh graders. I do miss the Ridge concerts and the wealth of talent they displayed.

3)  Almost another two weeks gone by, wow. We are in the middle of Hannukah and nearly into winter. My wife gave me a set of Vivaldi choral music CDs music that I first heard at a Ridge choral concert and sometimes sounds more angelic than human.

The weather has been mild by western Massachusetts hills standards. I don't think we've dipped into the teens yet and there have been fair number of bright

 sunny days along with some really dismal foggy ones.

I've been working on furniture, starting to build a mahogany china cabinet to replace the handy man style built-in in our dining room. I decided that the doors should have a bead molding around the panels. Then I decided the doors should have quarter circle internal corners. That meant figuring out how to make a bead on a quarter circle. It took me two days to figure how to do it and it still takes me nearly an hour to make one. I need eight. I'll post some photos as I progress.

Another week of music and projects

Two and half concerts this week. The first was by the University of Massachusetts Orchestra and was an excellent program of Beethoven's Coriolanus Overture ( one of the most dramatic and tragic pieces he wrote), Prokofiev's Lt. Kije Suite, and Bruckner's enormous Fourth Symphony, all performed very well.

Then it was the Hartford Symphony conducted by a member of the world famous Julliard String Quartet. We heard the Pachalbel Canon, a viola concerto by Telemann, Vaughn Williams' Fantasia on a them by Thomas Tallis, and Tchaikovsky's First Symphony. The first three pieces are for strings only and were played nearly perfectly. The Vaughn Williams was particularly beautiful. The conductor's rendition of the Tchaikovsky was very individualistic and even a bit jarring in the first two movements. While the sound from the instruments was beautiful and precise, the total result was not completely satisfying. On the bright side, the last movement was rendered superbly.

Yesterday, we collected our two grandsons and went over to Amherst to hear our granddaughter, Audrey, sing in the 7th grade chorus holiday performance on the town hall steps. It was cold, but they were worth hearing. Hearing them was difficult at times as the American public, even parents and grandparents, have so much to say that they cannot possibly be quiet during a performance. Rudeness and inattention are rife.  Too many people attend events at some cost or trouble and then treat them as background for their conversations or phone messaging.

I have been doing a lot of wiring, or at least spending a lot of time wiring, to replace some of the electrical madness in our house. I broke up one circuit that fed a microwave, thirteen light fixtures, and several outlets into three circuits.

Some Photos from late autumn

Here are some pictures of projects I worked on and our Thanksgiving.

The porch ceiling was delaminating plywood so I replaced it with a "beadboard" ceiling that I stained a sort of pumpkin pine. It took about fifty boards. I added the green trim to match the shutters.

The deck on the porch was painted battleship gray and had peeled badly. About 1/4 of the boards showed some rot, so I replaced the bad boards. I stripped and sanded the remainder 

 and stained them a redwood color. The boards are nice, tightly grained, and very hard, douglas fir.

I repaired the bases of the columns with treated wood, that I'll stain white or green next spring.

This is what the mudroom interior looked like at the end of June, after I replaced the studs, sheathing, and siding. I left it alone until November while the treated lumber dried and ( I hope) stabilized. Then I installed rigid foam insulation and reinstalled the old " rustic panelling." I spent a lot of time shimming and measuring but the panelling went in with little trouble. The doors were another matter, requiring lots of adjustment.  I have two four foot levels and they don't agree, which made matters a little trickier than they should have been.

I started getting back into woodworking with a gift for my wife and some some long overdue picture frames. Jean loved this picture, so I purchased it and made a walnut frame for it. It now hangs in our dining room.

Sarah Valente gave me this picture about 18 months ago and I knew I wanted to make a frame for it rather than purchase one. I finally got to it in November. I made the frame narrow so the picture would dominate. It is a real gem ( the picture not the frame) and it hangs over my desk, where I see it every day.

My last AP classes gave me this great montage and I feel much better now that I have framed and hung it. I can't quite make out a few of the signatures, so I have to rely on my old rosters to try to decipher them.

We bought this print from a real old fashioned printing shop in Assisi. The printer was nearly as old as the equipment and was extremely gracious.

We had fifteen people, including ourselves,  for Thanksgiving. It took two tables end to end and stretching from the dining room slightly into the back parlor to seat everyone at once.

My sisters and their families are harder to get all together these days and even our son Daniel couldn't make it back from Colorado. Still one sister and one of her daughters and her family combined with our son Chris and his family and some friends from a nearby town made for a very good time. There would be more smiles, but by the time  I remembered to take the picture two of the boys and a couple of adults were pretty tired.  The big hit of the night, aside from the great food, were a set of small magnetic balls that kept the kids and some of the adults busy for hours.