HOP ! (Hands on Pianos) WARNING: lots of pianos

Judd discovered a scavenger hunt for our Vermont weekend:  50 pianos in the New Hampshire /Vermont areas.....  so we started at 8:00 this morning....and ended at 5:30pm.... and the event doesn't even start until July 1 -tomorrow!!

We played 33 of the 50 decorated pianos.......

Hilton Field Road golf course......

"Silence"  at Hood Museum, Hanover
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/silence-john-cage/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=silence

"Hands and Lands in Harmony"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/hands-and-lands-in-harmony/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=hands_lands

Nugget Theater - "Smile and the whole World Smiles with  You."

"The World in Song" at the Howe Library

The Montshire Museum- "Tree Songs"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/tree-songs/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=tree_songs

The Ledyard Bridge - "SHine"

  

Jammin' with a stranger at the "Blue Moon" piano at Storr's Pond
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/blue-moon/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=blue_moon

Tuck's School of Business-"College Knowledge Nap"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/college-knowledge-nap/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=college_knowledge

my repertoire: Bridge Over Troubled Waters....

.... and "Boogie Woogie...."

 

Maynard Street: "Interpolation and Interplay"

"WE ARE THE DINOSAURS...."

Want to live in Vermont?  "Well, they're kinda 'crunchy'."

Berry Library-Dartmouth

"Paisley Piano" at Dan & Whit's Norwich, VT

Liberace piano - King Arthur Bake Shop

Judd and Melanie at King Arthur's

Lebanon Co-OP "Whales"....

Hanover Co-OP - "Cowboys and Indians"

Hanover HIGH School

League of Craftsmen "Transformations" 

6 South Hotel - "Zen"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/zen-piano/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=zen_piano

"Truss branches"  at Alumni Gym
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/truss-branches/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=truss_branches

Life Science Building at Geisel Medical School
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/music-by-the-hands/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=music_by

Storr's Pond "In Rainbows"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/in-rainbows/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=in_rainbows

Lyme's Country Store

"Music Speaks louder than Words"
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/music-speaks-louder-than-words/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=music_speaks

picnic on the Lyme, NH green.....

We're FIRST at the "Breakfast on the Connecticut" B & B

http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/breakfast-on-the-connecticut/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=breakfast_on

covered bridge that doesn't register on our Tom Tom.....

Whippi Dip - famous ice cream

"Freaked Out Zebra"  at the Cedar  Circle Farm...
http://hop.dartmouth.edu/pianos/freaked-out-zebra/?utm_source=hop&utm_medium=piano&utm_campaign=freaked_zebra

whirlwind tour....Judd does Vermont and environs

Woodstock, VT

- best part was The Unicorn (shop with toys and retro stuff—good place to buy high quality rude birthday cards)

--town is cute but Main Street is a busy tourist trap

--where do the not-so-beautiful people live? --Judd and I tried to cruise the neighborhood but every side street ended up as a dead end in someone's driveway.

-my first covered bridge

Quechee, VT

--Sounds like a food (but probably because Judd has been mispronouncing quiche all these years--I hope the kids get it right.)

-Judd keeps claiming there are “Ought Dogs”  (Not dogs?) (a friend's mother's hot dog stand but it does not appear on restaurant guides OR in real life.)

--Noted for it's gorge and a beautiful glass-blowing factory/show room/restaurant.  I’ll tell you about the clover glass another time.

-While I’m trying to snap pics of  the waterfall and rocks, Judd is folded in half, peering under metal grates and into the engineering of dam

  

other random mechanics admired on the trip

Norwich, VT

-coffee and pastries at the newly renovated King Arthur Flour shop.

-just nano-seconds before a huge lightening storm, we accidentally catch the baking class putting their loaves into a portable bake oven outside. I asked if we could take their picture and the instructor said, "Don't talk to us now. We'll talk to you in a few minutes."  I obediently snapped silent pictures. Judd amused himself by continuing to ask interested questions.  The bake-master was not amused. 

 Hanover, NH

-I'm at the Dean's leadership conference at Dartmouth for 6 days and one of the instructors is the founder of  est.  ( i.e. the Mr. E in  E-S-T)        http://www.skepdic.com/est.html

More about that another time too....

I’m feeling I’ve "kept my integrity" by exercising (longer than I did last week—i.e. 20 min walk in stead of 10 and sweating more because of the heat-- that must count as extra.)   I’m wondering if it’s more inauthentic to worry about my “inauthenticity speech” in case I’m called on, or more inauthentic to blow-dry my hair because it will look like I care what people think.

This is the 51st hour where my cell phones do not work and by do not work I mean I can not call anyone or receive any calls. Even if one device (the b.berry /Verizon) shows 4 bars, I make a call and it drops after the first ring or the (AT&T/ iphone) it won’t let me accept a call. I thought it was just in the confines of my Residence Inn hotel, but the issue went on all through the green and white mountains of VT and NH this weekend…. Maybe the big storms took out “a tower” or something. Of course I can still text, but suddenly, my boys in Maine have gone incommunicado too….. They better be swimming in the pond, or walking the dog, or running the vacuum so loudly that they can’t respond…. 

Animals, real or imagined, this week

Sunset from the Residence Inn, Lebanon, NH parking lot (almost) every Sunday night

Spiderweb fireworks

     You know how when your windows are dirty (Gosh, I hope you do) and it distorts little details outside? So, I’m sitting at the dining room table Saturday morning, waiting for teenagers to awaken, looking over the kitchen bistro table out the window on the first morning’s light and there are little electrical bursts running from the deck to the pear tree…… By that I mean, I can see that spider web strands from the deck to the pear tree are catching the dew or the morning sunlight or both ---lights runs up the web like glitter…..that’s what I imagine electricity to “look” like.

Boat HERON

    It was a SUPER FATHER’S DAY with all three children home doting on their father (i.e. telling him how many lobsters to buy; asking him how many loads of laundry could get done in one weekend) and all consenting to go on a boat cruise on the Boston whaler with the Daisy dog, Sunchips and watermelon Sourpatch. Cruising the far cove on 3Mile Pond, we spotted a blue heron sitting in the marsh spotting us.  (Daisy was unable to spot the heron until it got up and flew away.) It was cool.

       

Free the Earthworms

   Seriously. I go to leave China for Lebanon (Maine for New Hampshire.) Packing up the car, I spot, in the one wet spot that is the bane of Judd’s “pave-the-driveway” project, a puddle that holds about 6 earthworms. [When we had the driveway paved, the “professional” pavers left a sort of divot in the middle of the pavement where water still accumulates. It really ticks Judd off.] We notice, together, that, where Judd has just removed a board under the boat, a puddle remains that holds 6 writhing earthworms between 1 and 4 millimeters in circumference, wiggling on the self-limited wet tar. I note out loud that they are going to fry and dessicate in the sunshine within the hour. Then I get in the car and start loading up books on CD for the 4 hour commute.  The children come out to hug, kiss an hail me farewell…….and Judd, we observe together, is over, scooping up earthworms with his bare fingers, to free into the moist grass/forest……

Whale tales

    On one weekend commute over the western Maine mountains to Burlington (for an early morning VA meeting up North….) I met a new sight in the sunset……..    Still don’t know what it means or who put them there…..

The Lupine Lady

When I used to summer in Caratunk, Maine, sometimes renting the house next to my Erika-friend, Erika told me about the Lupine Lady. In June in Maine, the roadsides are waves of purple because of the tall spiked flowers everywhere. Erika said there was a legend of a woman, like Johnny Appleseed, who traveled around spreading lupine seeds wherever she went. That the flowers were everywhere was evidence that this could not be a legend. But in researching the children’s book Miss Rumphius, it says it is a fictional story. Miss Rumphius is about a lady who travels the world, comes home to live by the sea and strives to make the world more beautiful by spreading lupine seeds along roadsides.  It is written by Barbara Cooney, the children’s author who moved from Brooklyn, traveled all over, and after raising her children, moved to Maine in a house overlooking the ocean. She died in Damariscotta in 2000. The Thompson family has had several of Barbara Cooney’s books over the years: Ox-Cart Man, Hattie and the Wild Waves, but my favorite is Miss Rumphius. And to prove it, I was able to go down in the cellar on our last shelf of kids’ books and retrieve the dog-earred, worn-torn paperbook copy of Miss Rumphius.  On the last page in the book, the narrator is telling of her great aunt Alice, the  “oldest woman in the world” who was the Lupine Lady. Alice told her niece to go out and travel to faraway places but to find a way to make the world more beautiful. The little girl says she "did not yet know what that would be. " I believe the little girl WAS Barbara Cooney and the way she found to leave beauty in the world was with the beautifully written and illustrated children’s books.  Part of me also believes that Barbara Cooney was also a lupine lady herself……and now, every end-of-summer, when the lupines in my garden have gone by, I take the seeds out of the little pods, and throw them everywhere I travel so I can be a Lupine Lady too.

Drive-by lupines at 60MPH