Address Sign

One of the things I have been doing is carving an address sign. Although it was my first real attempt at carving numbers, or anything else for that matter,I managed to do a decent enough job to hang it out, so I made a post and bracket, dug a hole and placed it. I attached a bird house we bought two years ago to the top of the post. All this made my wife pretty happy.

The address sign was kind of necessary, since the 1884 (presumably the date of construction) on the center of the house confused lots of folks. Like all projects, this one required a few preliminary projects, including repairing the post hole digger I bought last year. I'll paint the post white after the wood has a chance to dry out properly.

During the time I was working on the sign and installing shutters and some needed preliminary work for gutters, my neighbors managed to nearly complete a 36 foot long addition to their barn. You can see the addition in the  picture.

Company and Brownies

We had a great weekend with guests from our old neighborhood in Glen Rock. Not only did they provide lots of interesting conversation, they brought lots of food, including delicious brownies... did you hear that Ridge students?

Early August

Had a pleasant birthday on Monday. On Tuesday I tried to do an 84 mile ride into the southern Green Mountains, but after hitting a pothole at about 40 mph I had to "limp" home on two bent rims and an unglued spare front tire. Still, it was a pretty 37 mile ride.

We went to see Design for Living, a Noel Coward play about a triangle of sorts among two men and a woman.  It was hard to develop much interest in three characters who seemed much more concerned about their place in the world than the world.

Wednesday we volunteered  at Tanglewood where the Duetsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen ( try to say that three times fast) gave a great all Brahms concert. Paavo Jarvi, conducted and Lars Vogt was the pianist. The program included the Academic Festival Overture, the First Piano Concerto, the Second Symphony, and a Hungarian Dance as an encore.  The second piece is a difficult one with many beautiful ideas and themes, not always well integrated; how like much of life. It was played as well as I have ever heard with all the drama and melody one could ask for. The orchestral pieces were similarly well played with all their romantic and emotional facets well displayed.

Tanglewood Marathon Report .....plus

It's been busy here. Last weekend was our marathon of volunteering at Tanglewood: 4 concerts and one rehearsal, and yesterday we attended a picnic aimed at raising funds for students at Tanglewood. We followed the picnic with a play performed at the Mount, Edith Wharton's estate in Lenox.

All this was combined with some bike riding, some kayaking by Jean, and for the last three days, taking our youngest grandchild, Henry, to a kitchen chemistry "camp" at the Berkshire Museum.

One of the highlights of the past several days was  spending time with cousins, Tami and Aaron, and Susan and Edward. Hope to see more of them soon.

We stayed three nights at the very nice Howden Farm in Sheffield MA, a place famous for their pumpkins.

A not so quick summary of the music:
Friday we heard great performances of minor masterpieces. Mozart Piano Concerto Number 12 was beautifully performed by Paul Lewis, my favorite living classical pianist. Manfred Honeck did a superb job conducting this piece and Mendelsohn's 4th Symphony ( the Italian).

Saturday Honeck did a great job with the massive Mahler's Seond Symphony. Honeck is the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and organization known for under appreciated great conductors. I hope Honeck becomes a regular at Tanglewood. He served as a replacement for Von Dohnanyi who was ill.

Jacque Lacombe of the New Jersey Symphony  replaced the recently deceased Raphael Frubeck du Burgos ( who will be greatly missed) with a good, not great, performance of the Rachmaninoff  2nd Piano Concerto with Gabriela Montero, and very good job with the second act of Verdi's Aida.

This brings us [if you are still with me] to Monday's concert by the Tanglewood Music Center orchestra. The orchestra players are among the best "rising" musicians, and their performances are comparable to great orchestras despite their only playing together for a  few weeks. David Cohen did a magnificent job with the Beethoven's overture to Fidelio and another , more experienced conductor [ yes, I forgot his name] did a bout as  well with Beethoven's Sixth, the pastoral.

By the way, the play we saw last night was about Beethoven's unsuccessful search for a wife and included several of his works from the first few years of the nineteenth century.

A lost cause

Since Friday morning, I have ridden 130 miles, mostly hilly, I have installed shutters, I have built three bookcases, I have done some car repairs and bike repairs, I have perspired freely and eaten moderately AND GAINED 2 POUNDS. Phooey!

More of Summer Stuff

Got several small projects done in the past few days, and a few bike rides in, including a sixty ( well 59) miler. Trying to get tasks out of the way and body in shape for another birthday ride to Mount Greylock.

Reading Einstein on General Relativity ( a few pages at a time) and PG Wodehouse, whose way with words has produced some of the funniest literature in the English language.

With the help of my neighbor I picked up some steel I beams for the barn today. The steel only cost 85 cents a pound, cutting it into three pieces was only $12, but forty holes drilled cost $50. Now, to tear out the old bent beam, jack up the sagging joists, get the steel into place , reinstall  the sliding door and trim.... why do I ever start these things?

Nice Souvenir from Sarah V

Usually the place provides a souvenir to the visitor, but Sarah turned the tables; we got a great souvenir of Sarah Valente's visit: A small watercolor of our pond and what one of it's more vocal inhabitants might look like. Jean framed it immediately and it now graces our dining room. The photo is a bit dark, I tried to avoid too much flash reflection.

More Tanglewood and a little Cycling

Some more great music at Tanglewood. Last night heard an okay performance of Dvorak's Violin Concerto. I was somewhat disappointed in both Mutter's playing and Andris Nelsons' conducting. However Nelsons' then led a superb performance of Dvorak's very beautiful Symphony No. 8 .

This afternoon we hear the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, a program for high school musicians, students perform Dvorak's Carnival Overture, some pretty annoying noise by an Englsihman named Ades, and Beethoven's Seventh. The performances of the first and last pieces were great, just a notch below the Boston Symphony. The conductor, Tito Munoz, did an amazing job with high schoolers who had just started playing together two weeks earlier. The Ades piece sounded about right but with stuff like his who can tell.

I've done some group rides with a club based in The Berkshires. I might be getting a little faster... and then again maybe not. I seem to ride faster with the group but the rides are too short (20 to 28 miles).I need to do some long rides, in the 60 to 100 mile range, to get into real shape. Wish me luck.

Company and some local sights

We have had a lot a of company lately including a student a couple of weeks ago,  some friends from New Jersey who stayed the weekend to attend a Prairie Home Companion performance at Tanglewood,  some cousins from Florida who joined us for lunch on their way to Williamstown and Williams Colllege, friends from a nearby  town, and more friends, formerly from New Jersey, who joined us for a James Taylor concert at Tanglewood.

One of the place we visited around here was Tregelly's Fiber Farm which is replete with many breeds of sheep, a camel, some alpacas, peacocks, turkeys, a few yaks, some horses and seven dogs. It also offers the best views in our area. Here are some photos of some of this company and some of the places we went.
On the lawn at Tanglewood.

Our town has a small farmer's market every Saturday, it does get a bit larger as the season progresses and more produce comes in. Here are my wife Jean, and our friend, Diane contemplating a purchase.

On this particular Saturday our town band was playing.

On the following day we went to local lavender fair where we saw a young woman playing the bagpipes in an old cemetery...

....and a local church group had a raffle for a beautiful quilt.

Here are some pictures from Tregelly's.

The James Taylor concert was the usual sellout despite rain up until 7 o'clock. He is a very gracious performer, providing lots of music and staying on to sing encores and sign autographs until the staff just about had to drag him away. I later found out that over two hundred cars had to be towed out of the mud filled parking lots.

Two days later, when we attended an afternoon concert including a great performance of Brahm's second piano concerto,  the grounds were in pretty good shape.

Miscellany Late spring early summer

We live in Franklin County, which for the most part, is very pretty. Just to the west are the Berkshires, which are even prettier. Then there is Southwest Vermont, which is beautiful, especially if you throw in the Taconic Range which is in New York State. I was reminded of all this when I did a ride from Williamstown to Bennington on Friday. Hope to do some more in the very near future. Any cyclists out there can get some great riding in up in this part of the world. Visitors are welcome at the Cherdack house.

Did battle with some multiflora rose this morning. It's an invasive species that can take over whole hedgerows and large length of forest edge, roadsides, and trails. It has about a million thorns per yard of plant and I lost some  blood, but I think I won the fight, at least so far.

Some Physics

It's been a while since I wrote about physics. I have been reading some of Einstein's writings on General Relativity. I am sympathetic to the idea that space time  can be considered as only an interval between objects ( matter or energy) or more accurately events with no real presence of its own, but I'll have to look at more modern literature to see how this is reconciled with the properties of the vacuum.

Father'sDay Report and the rest of the week

Sunday was spent on a great bike ride, attending a concert at Tanglewood [all Dvorak] and walking around and having dinner in Sotckbridge, one of my favorite towns. This thanks to my wife treating me for Father's Day. I did get a call from Daniel in Colorado.

Took a ride on Tuesday 3500 feet of gain in about 44 mies round trip. It is hilly around here. Best part is I got to see a bear, they do seem larger when you are on a bike and not in a car. I also got to see a really large deer [nope, not a moose unfortunately], chased a garter snake off the road before it became a flat snake, and saw a couple of turtles sunning themselves. I mention this last item in part because I go past a couple of swamps regularly, which seem ideal turtle habitat, but this is the first time I've seen turtles at these places.

Oh well, the other three days of this week so far were spent repairing the porch, replacing a screen door and installing some high quality storm windows.

Trip to Britain Part 4: Wales

While it is always tough for me to leave the Scottish Highlands there was still a lot of beautiful countryside and interesting sites ahead. We went from Glen Nevis down to Chester to pick up Daniel, our younger son, who had been attending a conference on neutrino-nucleus interactions outside London. Chester is a charming town with Roman roots, famous for it's many quaint old half timbered houses. We only spent a few hours there walking about the central town and having dinner at an upscale inn. As we were heading back to our car, we saw lots of groups of three to five young women converging on the more popular pubs and clubs for an evening out, so Chester may be of interest to the younger set out there for more than it's historical sites.

From Chester we drove to Conwy in northern Wales. It is a walled city with a large castle, essentially founded by Edward I in the 1280s as an outpost to help secure his conquest of Wales. The town walls and castle are largely intact except for roofs and floor in the towers.  We toured the castle, walked through the town, and on the walls. The castle was home to  many very bold sea gulls and a few sea gull chicks. I can recommend the Albion Pub for beer and the Castle Hotel for dinners. The countryside around the town is gorgeous, including low mountains, fertile hillsides and the ocean, or at least a wide estuary.

On the second day in Wales, Daniel and I hiked up Moel Siabod outside Betwsy Coed. It was a great day, both for the company and the scenery. Here are some pictures:

Trip to Britain Part 3 Glen Nevis

From Kinlochleven, the village on Loch Leven, it was a short drive to Glen Nevis. Glen Nevis is about a dozen  miles long and bordered on one side by Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in Britain. While it is "only" 4300 feet high it starts at near sea level so it is about as prominent as Mount Elbert, the highest point in Colorado.  We only got to spend two nights here, at a charming place known as Achintee farm.

The Ben Nevis trail can attract hundreds of hikers per day on a weekend in the spring and summer, but many of the other mountains have just a few hikers on them. I climbed Sgur Na Mhaim [the name means beautifully rounded peak or something more directly connected with Mamores, the name of the range, depending on which guide book you use], a 3600 footer on the other side of the glen from Ben Nevis and met one other hiker at the top. It was a tough slog, gaining over 3000' in about 3 miles, but the path had few boggy spots and was generally in good shape. It was a little daunting to get to what one could expect to be the final stretch and see another 600 ' of scree (loose stone) above you, but the views were more than reward enough. From any of these peaks it easy to count a hundred and more peaks in view, even when visibility is merely okay. This trip to the Highlands was especially rewarding because so many of the peaks still had extensive snow fields adding to their beauty. From there I walked over the Devil's Ridge to Sgur nan Lubhar. The Devil's Ridge is  really narrow, sometimes less than a yard wide, with very steep slopes on either side.  While the path itself is not difficult , it's location makes it exciting. A step a bit off the trail will be your last step.

We had good dinners both nights at the nearby Nevis Inn, a place that caters to hikers and climbers.

Here are some pictures taken from Achintee in Glen Nevis.

This view shows the more austere character of the mountains. The peak on the left is Sgur Na Mhaim

Here they are in a less sober mood.

 The flowers in the gardens make a refreshing contrast to the great stone walls of the mountainsides.

Highland cattle are very picturesque, it's hard to believe that something so big, with such long and sharp horns, can be so cute.


Here is one of the waterfalls on the Water of Ness, the stream that flows through the glen.