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Okay, a little more on my weekend
So, Lis came home on Friday, fell on the bed, and fell asleep for a couple hours. So we got on the road a bit later than we intended. I'd rather hoped to be in Ludlow, VT by around 9 at night, but we actually got there closer to 11 pm. On the drive up, Lis read to me to keep me entertained while I was driving. It was the sixth book in the Princess Diaries series, Princess in Training. I like those books. They're much, much better than the movies. Actually, in this book, Mia takes a couple jabs at the movies. . .(yeah, in the world of the Princess Diaries, the movies have been made. It's just that they're fictionalized versions of a real person rather than a book.)
This was, in large part, an anniversary celebration for my parents. My folks have been married for 35 years. They've been together for 37. And they've also been married for about five years, since they got married after Dad converted. But this one was for their thirty-fifth anniversary.
What Mom and Dad wanted to do to celebrate was to go up to Ludlow with their parents and us, and the eight of us would go to the Ludlow Zucchini Festival.
What is a zucchini festival, you ask? Well, as far as we can guess, about nine years ago, someone realized that EVERYONE hates zucchini, and thought that a festival to help celebrate how much everyone is sick of zucchini would be a good idea. There are zucchini baked goods (e.g. zucchini muffins, breads, and cookies), zucchini fries (which are actually really good), a prize for the largest zucchini, Mr Zucchini-Head contests, zucchini carving contests, zucchini races, and so forth.
And the centerpiece of the whole thing: the Zucchapult Contest!
More about that later.
So, we got in about 11 pm. Mom was waiting up for us.
Well, actually, Mom was THIS CLOSE to the end of her book, and was reading in the front room when we showed up.
But both my grandfathers were waiting up for us.
Well, actually, both my grandfathers were sacked out on the sofa, side-by-side, gently snoring with the baseball game on TV in front of them.
One of my grandmothers did wake up and come down to welcome us there, and we said hi to the folks that were awake, and talked a bit, and brushed out teeth and went to bed.
My grandparents' cottage in Ludlow is a really nice size for a ski/vacation cottage. It's got three proper bedrooms, two and a half baths, a nice formal front sitting room that nobody has ever gone in except to go through it to go up the stairs, a formal dining room that nobody's ever used, a big eat-in kitchen with a table large enough to seat all eight of us which is where we were all generally hanging out, a back family room which has the TV in it and a bunch of comfy sofas, and a loft above the family room which has two kinda crappy air-mattressy-type beds in it. And a room which is technically a mudroom, but which is actually an overflow family room.
The cottage sleeps six comfortably, or eight if you stick two people in the loft. That's without people sleeping on the sofas, or spreading out sleeping bags in the mudroom, which are also options.
So, if any of y'all wanna go skiing this winter, the cottage is in Ludlow, pretty much at the base of Mt Okemo, and not that far from Killington. I don't use it as a ski lodge, myself, because I don't own ski boots, and my feet are too weirdly shaped for me to be comfortable in any rented ski boots. But I'd be happy to take people up.
Anyway, in the morning, we said hi to Dad and to my other grandmother, who'd slept for like 12 hours, which is REALLY good. Nana Barbara has some early stage senility, which is really tough on everybody. Both of my sets of grandparents have been best friends since my parents started dating, thirty-seven years ago. I mean, once, when my folks had been dating about a month, they decided to phone up Mom's folks to say hi. Mom's folks weren't there. So they decided to call up Dad's folks to chat, who also weren't there. They later found out that both sets of parents had taken off for the weekend to go skiing without telling them. So, now that Nana Barbara is starting to lose it, that's not only tough on Papa Tuny, it's also hard on Nonnie Grace and Papa Ralph. And Mom and Dad, and Lis and me, too.
The paper that was there had a Sudoku puzzle in it, which we showed Dad how to do. He started solving it, with a little help from us, then erased all the work we'd done and tried to come up with an algorithm to solve Sudoku in the general case rather than the specific case. Which he puttered on happily all through breakfast and for a while afterward. ("Hey, Dad? Lis wants you to know that Sudoku is an NP-complete problem. . . .")
Anyway, eventually, Lis and I showered and dressed and we headed down to the Zucchini Festival.
It was on the common in the center of town, just about four blocks from the house. 'Course, none of us KNEW where it was, so we'd piled into two cars to drive to the festival, and, eventually, found it by accident while driving from one guess of where it might be to another. That's how my family does things. It works, as long as you've got the patience of Job.
The common in the center of town is one of those town squares that every small New England town has. If you aren't familiar with small New England towns, well, first, you should go visit one, and second, I'll describe it.
It's a little green space, maybe a quarter-acre or so, with a gazebo or bandstand in the approximate center of it, mostly covered in grass, with a couple trees here and there, maybe some benches, and a path or two. The main roads in town go on all sides of it.
A bunch of little tents were set up all around the perimeter, in which various local crafty-types were selling things. There was a bigger tent in which you could buy baked zucchini goods, hot dogs, Zee Fries, sodas, and so forth. A couple of kiddie rides were set up on one end of the common, and there was a moderately big tent towards the center, which had a few carny-type games, like "throw darts at the balloons", "throw baseballs at the stacked-up bottles". As well as a big slanted track for the zucchini races: take a zucchini, stick wheels and stuff on it, and race 'em.
Across the street from the Zucchini Festival, there was a tag sale for the library. Which included a whole bunch of old books.
Surprisingly, we got out of there with relatively little pocketbook damage.
Eventually, we wandered back home for more of the afternoon. I finished reading Princess in Training, Dad finished brute-forcing his way through the Sudoku puzzle, and, in general, we all spent a relaxing several hours sitting around the kitchen table or on the sofas, reading various things and chatting. Doing nothing in particular with family members that you actually love and like and enjoy being with is among the best ways to spend time that there is.
Then we headed out again for the Zuchapult contest, which was to start at 5 pm.
It took a bit more driving around in the wrong direction to find it, but we did find it. On a field just outside of town, there were a number of impressive-looking machines. They were "The Viking", a trebuchet with a sixteen-foot throwing arm (which is the maximum length allowed for the contest); "Death to Vegetables", a Dodge leaf spring with a cradle on the end, pulled back by an electric winch, "Ba-Zuch-ka", eight feet of PVC sewer-pipe with a couple lengths of heavy-gauge surgical tubing attached to a platform which dropped inside to tube and was cranked back, "Baby Onager", powered by a twisted-skein springarm, and an unnamed entry, thrown together in half an hour that day by a father and his two elementary-school daughters, which basically consisted of a couple of sticks of bamboo as a springarm, with a basket duct-taped to them to hold the zucchini.
Turns out, the folks who made that last minute entry are friends of my parents. The girls were a bit distraught when they saw the other entries, as they realized that the competition was a bit more than they were expecting. . . Didn't matter, though: they got plenty of applause. It's something I've noticed from the Arisia costume competition: the audience oohs and ahhs over the really, really impressive costumes, but if you go up there in something that they know that they could possibly have made themselves, the audience will generally be very supportive of your efforts.
So, normally, they have two classes: trebuchets, and everything else. But as there was only one trebuchet, the competitors all decided to compete together.
The winner would be the one with the greatest combined distance on three shots. Every competitor brought five zucchini. All of the ammunition was placed in the bed of the organizer's pickup truck. Then each team drew numbers, and could choose three rounds of ammunition in the order picked.
We were all expecting the trebuchet to mop the field with the other machines. Especially the crew of The Viking, who, while not being OVER-confident, were certainly confident.
My predictions, before the event, were that the standings were going to be 1) Viking, 2) Death to Vegetables, 3) Baby Onager, 4) Ba-Zuch-ka, 5) unnamed entry.
Boy, was I wrong.
The Onager shot first, and the zucchini shattered on launch from the launching forces, leading to cries from the crowd of, "It slices! It dices! It jullienes!" Yet, with the biggest piece landing 109 feet away, it was clear that this was a machine to watch.
Death to Vegetables also threw a zucchini 109 feet.
Then the trebuchet, The Viking, was up. And it threw a disappointing 95 feet. Zucchini are not terribly aerodynamic, and while trebuchets can deliver a vast amount of kinetic energy to their projectile, they don't actually deliver all that much impulse, which, with a projectile as small and light as a zucchini, is perhaps more relevant. Of course, when you deliver too much impulse, as Baby Onager does, well, you get the pinwheeling piles of zucchini soup effect. Which is truly a crowd pleaser, don't get me wrong.
The unnamed entry was up next. They pulled their basket back, back, way back, and it snapped, for an estimated distance of approximately -2 feet, and they chose to drop out and not participate in the next two rounds.
So, finally, Ba-Zuch-ka was up. And it dropped its zucchini 125 feet.
The other two rounds went pretty much like that. Except, on their final shot, Ba-Zuch-ka decided to actually fire on close to full power.
199 feet. And, apparently, that STILL wasn't full power: it was just as far as they dared take it for fear of pureeing the zucchini.
Anyway, after the zuchapult contest, we went out to dinner at a local restaurant. Which was FANTASTIC. I got the duckling with plum sauce, and Lis got the roast venison. We traded plates halfway through the meal, so we could both have both.
After dinner, we went back to the cottage, and Mom and Dad and I watched a couple episodes of the Muppet Show on DVD, which I'd brought with us. The TV there doesn't have a DVD player, so we watched it on Dad's laptop.
Mom was trying to get her mother to watch with us, "Come on, Ma, it's Juliet Prowse as the guest star!" Papa Tuny did watch some with us, but fell asleep in the middle. But Mom and Dad and I watched the Juliet Prowse, Connie Stevens, and Rita Mareno episodes.
And then we went to sleep, and that's a good spot to end a LJ entry.
This was, in large part, an anniversary celebration for my parents. My folks have been married for 35 years. They've been together for 37. And they've also been married for about five years, since they got married after Dad converted. But this one was for their thirty-fifth anniversary.
What Mom and Dad wanted to do to celebrate was to go up to Ludlow with their parents and us, and the eight of us would go to the Ludlow Zucchini Festival.
What is a zucchini festival, you ask? Well, as far as we can guess, about nine years ago, someone realized that EVERYONE hates zucchini, and thought that a festival to help celebrate how much everyone is sick of zucchini would be a good idea. There are zucchini baked goods (e.g. zucchini muffins, breads, and cookies), zucchini fries (which are actually really good), a prize for the largest zucchini, Mr Zucchini-Head contests, zucchini carving contests, zucchini races, and so forth.
And the centerpiece of the whole thing: the Zucchapult Contest!
More about that later.
So, we got in about 11 pm. Mom was waiting up for us.
Well, actually, Mom was THIS CLOSE to the end of her book, and was reading in the front room when we showed up.
But both my grandfathers were waiting up for us.
Well, actually, both my grandfathers were sacked out on the sofa, side-by-side, gently snoring with the baseball game on TV in front of them.
One of my grandmothers did wake up and come down to welcome us there, and we said hi to the folks that were awake, and talked a bit, and brushed out teeth and went to bed.
My grandparents' cottage in Ludlow is a really nice size for a ski/vacation cottage. It's got three proper bedrooms, two and a half baths, a nice formal front sitting room that nobody has ever gone in except to go through it to go up the stairs, a formal dining room that nobody's ever used, a big eat-in kitchen with a table large enough to seat all eight of us which is where we were all generally hanging out, a back family room which has the TV in it and a bunch of comfy sofas, and a loft above the family room which has two kinda crappy air-mattressy-type beds in it. And a room which is technically a mudroom, but which is actually an overflow family room.
The cottage sleeps six comfortably, or eight if you stick two people in the loft. That's without people sleeping on the sofas, or spreading out sleeping bags in the mudroom, which are also options.
So, if any of y'all wanna go skiing this winter, the cottage is in Ludlow, pretty much at the base of Mt Okemo, and not that far from Killington. I don't use it as a ski lodge, myself, because I don't own ski boots, and my feet are too weirdly shaped for me to be comfortable in any rented ski boots. But I'd be happy to take people up.
Anyway, in the morning, we said hi to Dad and to my other grandmother, who'd slept for like 12 hours, which is REALLY good. Nana Barbara has some early stage senility, which is really tough on everybody. Both of my sets of grandparents have been best friends since my parents started dating, thirty-seven years ago. I mean, once, when my folks had been dating about a month, they decided to phone up Mom's folks to say hi. Mom's folks weren't there. So they decided to call up Dad's folks to chat, who also weren't there. They later found out that both sets of parents had taken off for the weekend to go skiing without telling them. So, now that Nana Barbara is starting to lose it, that's not only tough on Papa Tuny, it's also hard on Nonnie Grace and Papa Ralph. And Mom and Dad, and Lis and me, too.
The paper that was there had a Sudoku puzzle in it, which we showed Dad how to do. He started solving it, with a little help from us, then erased all the work we'd done and tried to come up with an algorithm to solve Sudoku in the general case rather than the specific case. Which he puttered on happily all through breakfast and for a while afterward. ("Hey, Dad? Lis wants you to know that Sudoku is an NP-complete problem. . . .")
Anyway, eventually, Lis and I showered and dressed and we headed down to the Zucchini Festival.
It was on the common in the center of town, just about four blocks from the house. 'Course, none of us KNEW where it was, so we'd piled into two cars to drive to the festival, and, eventually, found it by accident while driving from one guess of where it might be to another. That's how my family does things. It works, as long as you've got the patience of Job.
The common in the center of town is one of those town squares that every small New England town has. If you aren't familiar with small New England towns, well, first, you should go visit one, and second, I'll describe it.
It's a little green space, maybe a quarter-acre or so, with a gazebo or bandstand in the approximate center of it, mostly covered in grass, with a couple trees here and there, maybe some benches, and a path or two. The main roads in town go on all sides of it.
A bunch of little tents were set up all around the perimeter, in which various local crafty-types were selling things. There was a bigger tent in which you could buy baked zucchini goods, hot dogs, Zee Fries, sodas, and so forth. A couple of kiddie rides were set up on one end of the common, and there was a moderately big tent towards the center, which had a few carny-type games, like "throw darts at the balloons", "throw baseballs at the stacked-up bottles". As well as a big slanted track for the zucchini races: take a zucchini, stick wheels and stuff on it, and race 'em.
Across the street from the Zucchini Festival, there was a tag sale for the library. Which included a whole bunch of old books.
Surprisingly, we got out of there with relatively little pocketbook damage.
Eventually, we wandered back home for more of the afternoon. I finished reading Princess in Training, Dad finished brute-forcing his way through the Sudoku puzzle, and, in general, we all spent a relaxing several hours sitting around the kitchen table or on the sofas, reading various things and chatting. Doing nothing in particular with family members that you actually love and like and enjoy being with is among the best ways to spend time that there is.
Then we headed out again for the Zuchapult contest, which was to start at 5 pm.
It took a bit more driving around in the wrong direction to find it, but we did find it. On a field just outside of town, there were a number of impressive-looking machines. They were "The Viking", a trebuchet with a sixteen-foot throwing arm (which is the maximum length allowed for the contest); "Death to Vegetables", a Dodge leaf spring with a cradle on the end, pulled back by an electric winch, "Ba-Zuch-ka", eight feet of PVC sewer-pipe with a couple lengths of heavy-gauge surgical tubing attached to a platform which dropped inside to tube and was cranked back, "Baby Onager", powered by a twisted-skein springarm, and an unnamed entry, thrown together in half an hour that day by a father and his two elementary-school daughters, which basically consisted of a couple of sticks of bamboo as a springarm, with a basket duct-taped to them to hold the zucchini.
Turns out, the folks who made that last minute entry are friends of my parents. The girls were a bit distraught when they saw the other entries, as they realized that the competition was a bit more than they were expecting. . . Didn't matter, though: they got plenty of applause. It's something I've noticed from the Arisia costume competition: the audience oohs and ahhs over the really, really impressive costumes, but if you go up there in something that they know that they could possibly have made themselves, the audience will generally be very supportive of your efforts.
So, normally, they have two classes: trebuchets, and everything else. But as there was only one trebuchet, the competitors all decided to compete together.
The winner would be the one with the greatest combined distance on three shots. Every competitor brought five zucchini. All of the ammunition was placed in the bed of the organizer's pickup truck. Then each team drew numbers, and could choose three rounds of ammunition in the order picked.
We were all expecting the trebuchet to mop the field with the other machines. Especially the crew of The Viking, who, while not being OVER-confident, were certainly confident.
My predictions, before the event, were that the standings were going to be 1) Viking, 2) Death to Vegetables, 3) Baby Onager, 4) Ba-Zuch-ka, 5) unnamed entry.
Boy, was I wrong.
The Onager shot first, and the zucchini shattered on launch from the launching forces, leading to cries from the crowd of, "It slices! It dices! It jullienes!" Yet, with the biggest piece landing 109 feet away, it was clear that this was a machine to watch.
Death to Vegetables also threw a zucchini 109 feet.
Then the trebuchet, The Viking, was up. And it threw a disappointing 95 feet. Zucchini are not terribly aerodynamic, and while trebuchets can deliver a vast amount of kinetic energy to their projectile, they don't actually deliver all that much impulse, which, with a projectile as small and light as a zucchini, is perhaps more relevant. Of course, when you deliver too much impulse, as Baby Onager does, well, you get the pinwheeling piles of zucchini soup effect. Which is truly a crowd pleaser, don't get me wrong.
The unnamed entry was up next. They pulled their basket back, back, way back, and it snapped, for an estimated distance of approximately -2 feet, and they chose to drop out and not participate in the next two rounds.
So, finally, Ba-Zuch-ka was up. And it dropped its zucchini 125 feet.
The other two rounds went pretty much like that. Except, on their final shot, Ba-Zuch-ka decided to actually fire on close to full power.
199 feet. And, apparently, that STILL wasn't full power: it was just as far as they dared take it for fear of pureeing the zucchini.
Anyway, after the zuchapult contest, we went out to dinner at a local restaurant. Which was FANTASTIC. I got the duckling with plum sauce, and Lis got the roast venison. We traded plates halfway through the meal, so we could both have both.
After dinner, we went back to the cottage, and Mom and Dad and I watched a couple episodes of the Muppet Show on DVD, which I'd brought with us. The TV there doesn't have a DVD player, so we watched it on Dad's laptop.
Mom was trying to get her mother to watch with us, "Come on, Ma, it's Juliet Prowse as the guest star!" Papa Tuny did watch some with us, but fell asleep in the middle. But Mom and Dad and I watched the Juliet Prowse, Connie Stevens, and Rita Mareno episodes.
And then we went to sleep, and that's a good spot to end a LJ entry.
no subject
Sounds like the cottage is right near the "diet camp" I went to a couple of years back. (Yes, in Ludlow, at the base of Okemo. Right off that highway that goes through Ludlow and up to Rutland and I don't know where after that and I'm forgetting its number too.)
no subject
no subject
you wrote it up good!
Correction first: dad and I got married under the huppah *seven* years ago - on August 23rd / 1 Elul - the year before your wedding. Don't shortchange us on married years. Every year counts. So, if you count 35 years from our secular marriage by the JP and 7 years from our Jewish wedding under the huppah, then we have been married 42 years. Add in the two years we lived together before getting married the first time (oops - did I just give away a family secret? are you surprised and shocked?) then we have been married 44 years. At this rate, we will celebrate our golden wedding anniversary before my 60th birthday. I like this way of counting.
Now the addition to your account. You forgot to mention one of my favorite parts of Shabbat - singing with you in the mudroom. We came up with a new musical style: jazz gospel. I'd forgotten what a good guitarist you are. You've inherited my musical talent for improv - so glad it won't go to waste. I loved singing and playing with you, especially when dad joined us and we tried three-part harmony. Bring Tracy with you when Leila comes to visit and we'll have a real family hootenanny.
It was a great, wonderfully fun weekend. And I like being able to tell people that we celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary by squashing zucchinis.