05.27.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:17 pm by admin
Hiking in the mountains is a special kind of misery.
A day of treking might include elevation gains of thousands of feet. Hikers will find themselves scrambling over boulders, hopping from rock to rock or climbing for hours on an ankle-twisting trail. The weather can go from a roasting sun to a bone-chilling hail storm in a matter of minutes and then end with icey winds as you sit perched on atop a snowfield after crossing an exhausting pass. And this is all going up — down is harder yet.
In fact if you divide a week-long mountain trek into days or even hours, you find yourself saying “that hour was awful” almost every hour. And at day’s end as your 70-pound pack is trying to fling you into an abyss at every opportunity — you may start questioning your rationale for the journey. “Let’s see, I was climbing the first two hours — that was hard, the third hour I got rained on (with hail) and then the last two hours the sun came out and baked me as I climbed another thousand feet”. If you look at it hour by hour — the day was awful, but if you look at it as a whole — it was a spectacular experience, a day that will always be remembered.
There seems to be a paradox here. A day broken into it’s constituents is awful, but when you stand back and look at the whole trip – -it’s fantastic. It’s sort of like crossing into a dimension where time doesn’t mean anything. All of those miserable hours add up to a wonderful whole.
In physics, there’s something called the observer principle which posits that an observer inevitable effects the outcome of an experiement — especially when it is measured. For instance, if you are measuring electrons with light (photons) you change the behavior of the electron. If you are measuring heat with a thermometer, the mercury in the thermometor absorbs some of the heat energy being measured lowering the temperature.
Nowhere is this more true then how we measure our life and experiences. Looking at it in hours and days is almost always a let down. Thomas Edison spend years testing 3000 different theories of how a light bulb might work and eventually he tested 6,000 different candidates for filament material. Measuring his life by the hours he spent on that endeavor would be truly depressing — sort of like measuring your mountain trip based on how many steps you took.
But there are other answers!
At Innsbrook’s Memorial Day Party this year, a couple who has spent many years at Innsbrook asked me to take their picture. I obliged and afterward the gentleman told me that the photograph was to celebrate their first Memorial Day together since his wife’s life-saving surgery.
All the steps that lead to that moment were uncounted for them, the days and weeks of worry were left unmeasured. But another Memorial Day together at Innsbrook was to be counted and celebrated.
Later that weekend I bought a canoe at Innsbrook’s boat auction that I intend to measure this summer with. I know of a family at Innsbrook who had a tradition of after dinner cruises in which they would read “My Side of the Mountain” together on the lake as the sun set.
Their kids are grown now, and those cruises are part of the way they remember their experiences at Innsbrook. And As I watch my three boys sprout up, I certainly don’t want my time with them measured in years and months. I would prefer our yard stick to be the number of evenings we spent together on a still lake sharing a great book.
When we talk about “keeping time,” too often we mean how we keep track of it. Perhaps a better way to think is how we keep it in our hearts.
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05.20.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:48 pm by admin
…and at Innsbrook we’re celebrating with a weekend of fun and festivities.
To start with, we have a nice evening at Hanneken’s planned for Friday night. We have live music planned, and Ken, the restaurant manager, does a phenomenal job of making everyone feel welcome. The Germans have a word for it I believe — gemutlichkeit.
Then Saturday we have a crazy stream of events including a community run/walk, a model airplane flight demonstration with gliders for the kids, then it’s off to our Memorial Day party complete with live music by Serapis.
If you haven’t heard them before, they’re a wonderful combination of a lot of things — but maybe Grateful Dead meets Steely Dan would be a good start – -with a little Eric Clapton thrown in for good measure. Innsbrook property owner Gene Carrol is the base player and Innsbrook favorite “Big music” Bob Gleason is the drummer (long white beard — you know the guy).
The kids will have an opportunity to tie–dye bandannas they can use all season and there will be tones of inflatable fun stuff, cotton candy and snow cones. There will be a lot more to see and do.
Then following that — meet us at 8:45 p.m. for the movie Mama Mia. Yes it’s a musical completely woven around Abba Songs — but it’s a great family flick and I dare you not to be humming all the way home. Also it’s great to see how well Meryl Streep can sing and how definitely Pierce Brosnan CAN NOT.
Mass and church services at Harmony open up Sunday morning. I’m not Catholic and I will tell you that mass at the Farmhouse is one of the most wonderful religious experience I have enjoyed — it’s a true “Innsbrook Moment”. I would recommend it to everyone (if you’re worried about not knowing the Mass rituals, just stand when the person next to you does).
The Concert Sunday night is “Seven Bridges” an Eagles Tribute Band. Any group that names themselves after one of the most harmonius moments in Rock music must be OK — you know “There are stars in the southern sky…”. The Eagles are such a quintessentially American sound. As a group — they pretty much cover it all Country, Rock, Blues…It should be a nice evening in the farmhouse pasture — “I have a peaceful easy feeling”. You can’t get any more Innsbrook than that.
Monday morning opens with a Tennis Tournament and the great boat auction. Auctions are funny things — you’ll find yourself getting drawn in to the frenzy — no matter if you need a boat or not. It’s fun to watch the bidding and all the excitement.
So that’s it – three great days at Innsbrook. But what is more important than how we are going to celebrate is what we will celebrate – the reason for the season. While you’re enjoying great music, great food and the freedom of the great outdoors, the ability to worship as you choose – remember the men and women who fought so we can enjoy this incredible weekend together at Innsbrook. Try to take a moment to give thanks and remember. It will make all the fun that much sweeter!
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05.14.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:29 am by admin
We had more than 220 Innsbrook Property Owners fill out the movie survey. It’s great to have such fantastic participation in choosing our summer outdoor movies at Innsbrook. So without further ado, here are the results:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – First place (46% of respondents)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (35% of respondents)
Mama Mia (35% of Respondents)
Wall-E (25% of Respondents)
Following those were Madagascar 2 (24%), Hotel for Dogs (22%), Paul Blart, Mall Cop (20%), Bolt (18%).
The low end of the poll was Fly me to the moon 1%, Fanboys 1%, The Long Shots 1% and Igor 0% (I saw Igor with our kids — it wasn’t THAT bad).
We also got a lot of great suggestions about what OTHER movies to program (not on the new releases list).
There were quite a few votes for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One person remembered the night we watched Harry Potter in the Farmhouse field under a full moon as a heavy fog rolled in. That was a magical night at the Innsbrook movies.
Other suggestions included a comedy night, Princess Bride, The Rookie and about 30 others.
So what will we program? That’s the hard part. Imagine a group of people coming to your house for a movie party that includes ages 4 – 84 and have a wide variety of tastes. Some people want to be assured that the movie will be G or PG. Others tell you they are tired of all kid movies.
The most vocal say they are tired of “Pixar-style” animation, but when you poll them, animated features are their fourth, fifth and with highest picks.
So in the end you try to choose several different types of movies so everyone gets to see something they are excited about — (as we do at Summer Breeze) and that way we present a good variety of things.
So, we’ll start the party with Mama Mia on Memorial Day Weekend and Indiana Jones on Labor Day weekend. The reason we skipped Benjamin Button is that it just isn’t that kid friendly — but we will add an adult night at the movies this summer where we will present it.
We will also try to do some spontaneous presentations if time and budget permits.
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05.07.09
Posted in The Woods at 10:12 pm by admin
Somebody recently sent me a news story about a Mississippi community that is embroiled in a fight over treehouses — that’s right, you read correctly, treehouses.
It seems that a family has built a rather large treehouse in their own back yard — in fact, it is so large that the town mayor as decided that it doesn’t meet local zoning codes and wants it removed. The fight has gone all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court and more than $50,000 in legal fees have been shelled out.
Clearly, this is a family that values their right to a treehouse. Wasn’t that in the Bill of Rights somewhere? I think it was right after “peacable assembly.” The family has started a grass roots (tree roots?) campaign to fight “the man” and keep their sylvan retreat.
But what, I wonder, is this strange attraction to an escape in the tree tops? Or is it more than that? Maybe it’s a playhouse or a fort mentality. Kids are always looking to create a home away from home. My son Dylan is constantly making structures in the back yard out of whatever he can find. And my other two boys aren’t far behind. Out at Innsbrook, they have created a fort in the woods across the creek from our A-frame.
Pattie and I will sit on the deck and listen to the sounds of the boys playing in the distance. There is something oddly wonderful about children’s voices echoing through the wooded valley beneath our deck. When their voices get deeper in a few years we may have to rent children to fulfill this need. Young voices have become as much a part of the woodland sounds to us as the whippoorwills or the spring frogs.
But while we’re happy that they are engaged building their own cabin, we wonder what the fascination is. I guess it’s a kid thing — to always want a getaway, a sanctuary, a place that is closer to nature to slip away to. “Thank goodness adults outgrow that need,” we say (irony alert).
William Butler Yeats wrote a great poem about this very topic (after reading about Thoreau’s fort in the woods). Here it is (enjoy it — but don’t ask me what a wattle is):
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
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