For many Charlotters, yoga is an important component to everyday life here. From meditation at the beach, to classes at the Berry Farm and with studios just over town lines, yoga has touched all corners of Charlotte. Spending my first summer here in three years, I felt drawn to learn more about the yoga community while also exploring my own practice.
So I recently walked into the barn and counted the number of internal combustion engines thereby residing therein: eleven. How is this possible, you ask? Well, a man has certain needs, and these often revolve around the urge to cut, hew, chop, mow, and otherwise vanquish the greenery of Vermont. (Yes, I know I said “man.” Just let this one go, please—it’s a narrative thing.)
A light rain was falling early on Saturday, August 18, as boats and sailors gathered at Point Bay Marina in Charlotte for the sixth annual Diamond Island Regatta. It was a cool, overcast, blustery morning, with a stiff wind from the north blowing down Lake Champlain.
Charlotte Selectboard members returned to the subject of affordable housing on Monday, August 13 with a continued review of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund’s grant policies and procedures.
In Vermont we are blessed to have amazing forests and many people that value them. For most Vermonters, hiking, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, rock climbing and other forms of recreation are the primary ways that they appreciate these resources. While our forests can support these uses, the interactions between them and forest ecology can sometimes get complicated.
to Deb Smith of Charlotte who participated in a workshop at Dartmouth College titled “The School of Ice: Ice Cores and Climate Change” that ran from July 29 through August 2. The program was developed by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program Office, a part of the National Science Foundation, which provides oversight of U.S. scientific drilling efforts in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Deb spent two summers in Antarctica in the early 2000s. The four-day residential course focused on the role of proxy records to help expand current understanding of Earth’s climate, with a special focus on ice-core data.
Strange memories drive your mind, don’t they? My wife, Beth, has been going through items from my parents’ house in order to figure out what she might want to sell in her antique booth in Burlington. Today’s items are pictures that covered the walls of many rooms there. A good number of them are pictures of ducks and other game. They are usually groups of fowl setting their wings to land or flying over a blind, settling in a marsh, reminding me once again that my dad’s major sideline was hunting and our neighbor was a duck-stamp artist. When the duck, goose and pheasant seasons ended, Dad turned to trap and skeet. Guns ended up being year-round features in our house.
These were the words told to 19-year-old Charlotter Kyle Jaunich by his doctors a few weeks after what was supposed to be a simple foot surgery in January 2017. A few days later, Jaunich walked out of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with a cane and several teary-eyed doctors.
I just returned from a week in London where I visited my daughter, who had a summer internship there. We got around quite a bit in seven days: saw two plays, went to the Tate, the National Gallery, took a boat trip up the Thames and, a few days later, a train out to Brighton Beach, which doesn’t have sand but, rather, small round stones.
Now in its sixth season, the Diamond Island Regatta, hosted by the Royal Savage Yacht Club (RSYC) and Point Bay Marina, will for the first time be a certified Clean Regatta, helping educate and mobilize sailors to protect the world’s lakes and oceans.
Having just completed the efforts of preparing the garden for hundreds of visitors (that is not a typo; we, along with other local gardeners, hosted hundreds of visitors for the recent Flynn Garden Tour), I am painfully aware of all that can go wrong, even when we are responsible and diligent planners. Having a year’s notice helps, and one would think that gives one a wide window to prepare. Well, stuff happens.
Charlotte Democrats met on July 26 to nominate candidates for Justice of the Peace in Charlotte. The nominees will appear on the ballot for the November general election.
Saturday I came back to the farm after the farmers market feeling pretty whooped. It had been unexpectedly hot, and standing behind a grill for four hours had made it even more so. It’s been a hot stretch of weather (hottest July on record, in fact), and rain has been hard to come by. August had started off similarly. And while the forecast has been regularly calling for rain, we have regularly been left high and dry.
William Shakespeare captured the combined feeling of opportunity and gumption when Pistol, in Act 2 of The Merry Wives of Windsor, declared “The world is mine oyster!” Opportunity and gumption are just what it takes for a student to alter the predetermined plan to go straight from high school to college and instead add a self-designed gap year.
The Rotary Club of Charlotte-Shelburne-Hinesburg was recently entertained and informed by its own small version of a TED Talk. The talk was given by Dr. John MacKay, a consulting chemist, who helps cannabis extraction companies test and optimize their product. This report is based on his 30-minute presentation and subsequent correspondence.
August 12 Rokeby Museum pie and ice cream social. Having a great day is as easy as pie at…
Carbs get a bad rap these days. Carbohydrates are our energy source. Not all carbs are created equally. When you eat whole grain carbohydrates, such as bulgur, brown rice, quinoa and kasha (also known as buckwheat groats), you stay satisfied much longer because whole grains take longer to break down in the body and thus provide energy longer.
Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi—all old men with wrinkles—and magical powers. So, the magic makes the wrinkles acceptable? Interesting that the magic does not make them go away. Hmm. Perhaps they are (rightly) seen as a badge of honor.
Full Belly Farm is a very important place to Becca Von Trapp. She has been farming there for the past seven years. Full Belly is a 400-acre, certified organic farm in the Capay Valley in Northern California (not to be confused with a farm with the same name in Hinesburg) that has produced organic fruits, vegetables, nuts and a variety of meats for over 30 years.
On the first day of August, campers from Kids Cook VT ran a Kids Cook pop-up cafe at the Charlotte Congregational Church. Kids Cook VT is a summer camp where kids donate what they cook to various service organizations that support people who are food insecure.