06.04.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:07 pm by admin
To listen to the news of the day (I wouldn’t recommend it), it is beginning to feel like everything is gloom and despair, that the world’s economies are sinking into an intractable mire. And what’s more, it seems economics has become the ultimate measure of worth.
But there’s a reason that economics is known as the “dismal science”. The measure of wealth really has very little to do with the measure of meaning. That is why taking time to create music in the midst of such economically challenging times seems to be such an act of optimism.
It is a statement that although the world’s economy is in recession and we are all feeling it at some level, we continue to create beautiful music together at Innsbrook. We are all cutting back to the bare necessities. and what is so wonderful is that music turns out to be one of them.
I can’t imagine a more optimistic message than that.
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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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04.29.09
Posted in Things to do at 4:29 pm by admin
INSIDER’S PICK: Don’t miss this wonderful event on Saturday, May 2 from 1 – 4 p.m. at the Innsbrook Farmhouse Area. There will be a little bit of everything to do and see this season at Innsbrook.
There will be several fun presentations including a kids’ magic act on the topic of reading, a fantastic snake presentation, and a cooking show-style grilling presentation by the conference center’s Executive Chef Dan Thomas.
We will also have a golf chipping competition with prizes, a fly fishing area, remote-controlled airplane demonstrations, a honey bee demonstration, wine tasting and much more. We will also be introducing our new bocce ball courts and pickleball courts.
Here’s a schedule:
- 1:30 p.m. Snake Presentation
- 3 p.m. Grilling Class
- 3 p.m. Magic Show
Hope to see you there!
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Posted in The Woods at 4:11 pm by admin
“Wow” is all I can say. Whether it has been the ideal combination of sun and rain this year, or the cool spring, or the deference to the newly titled Innsbrook Blog, the dogwoods are putting on a spectacular show at Innsbrook this year.
They have been very cunning and have staged their appearance perfectly. These are some trees with a plan.
First, they waited until all the competing flowering trees had done their things. The red bud is done, the service berry is finished, and the blackberries haven’t started yet. So there is no competition for the triumphant return of the dogwood.
Second, they all flowered in the same five minutes in a perfectly synchronized explosion of white blossoms so the effect has been remarkable. The woods went from no dogwoods to being absolutely laced with blooms.
There are a few “don’t miss” natural events at Innsbrook and this is definitely one of them. For a taste of the full effect — take a drive (or walk) around Lake Alpine, though I’m sure they are also awesome in your neck of the woods. I haven’t found information on how long they bloom except for “they have a short blooming period.” I’m sure May 2 and 3 will be the “peak weekend.”
Now for a Cliff Clavin minute. Every wonder why they’re called dogwood? Well I did, and here’s the Wikipedia take on it:
“The word dogwood comes from dagwood, from the use of the slender stems of very hard wood for making ‘dags’ (daggers, skewers). The wood was also highly prized for making loom shuttles, arrows, tool handles, and other small items that required a very hard and strong wood.
“Larger items were also made of dogwood such as the screw in basket-style wine or fruit presses, also made were the first styles of tennis rackets made out of the bark cut in thin strips.”
And finally, in stumbling around Google looking for the bloom duration for dogwoods, I came across a good NPR essay on what music to listen to while viewing dogwoods. For that story click here.
So there you go — come out to Innsbrook this weekend, sit on your deck with a glass of wine (made with the help of a dagwood wine screw) and listen to the Benny Goodman Mozart Clarinet Concerto recommended in the NPR essay…or even better, invent your own dogwood tradition. It’s an event worth celebrating!
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04.21.09
Posted in Things to do at 3:16 pm by admin
In planning Innsbrook’s events, we are never sure which ones will become truly magical.
Sure, with enough planning, a good staff and a little help from the weather, most events will be good. But the participants are what make them magical.
Take Easter weekend for example. If someone had asked me to predict which of the events would be good and which would be magical — and I had to choose between Big Trash Day and the Easter Egg Hunt — I probably would have guessed that couches in dumpsters would place second to kids dressed in their Easter clothes hunting colored eggs. But I would have been mistaken.
Don’t get me wrong. The kids were cute as can be, the hunt went well and quickly (it took the kids a combined four minutes to clear almost an acre of grass of more than 4,000 eggs). Parents stood, mouths agape, thinking, “If only my kids would clean their rooms that fast!” The bunny made an appearance, the food was wonderful, and everyone seemed to be in good spirits celebrating the birth of spring.
But Big Trash Day took the cake. As always there were deck chairs, couches, lamps, beach stuff, grills and much more. But this time, there was a steady stream of Innsbrookers taking the trash out of the dumpsters, looking it over and saying, “I think I can make this work” or “With a little paint, this will look great” or the most common, “This would be a great planter.”
The three Rs of green living are: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The Innsbrook crowd has gotten pretty darn good at recycling. We’ve got some good plans for Reduce this year, but Reuse? That one has been a little more difficult, but based on the crowd at the dumpsters, it is coming on strong.
Calling someone a dumpster diver used to be an insult, but now it’s green chic. At one point the event magic reached its height as a group of Innsbrookers arranged a sofa, coffee table and chairs in a fashionable conversational setting next to the dumpsters. There they enjoyed the afternoon as their neigbors came in with trash and others left with treasures. Word is that a certain white-jeep-driving Innsbrook celeb spent considerable time chatting it up with the dumpers and the divers. If ever anyone can sniff out a good time and genuine Innsbrook magic, that man can.
Did I find a treasure you wonder? But of course. I was diving in dumpsters before green was The New Black. I got a great pine coffee table with painted red legs that would have been right at home in a Pottery Barn catalogue, a planter that my wife Pattie swears we left at Big Trash Day last year, and my most-treasured discovery, a highly polished chrome toaster that may well be the most beautiful man-made thing that I have ever seen.
It is a Sunbeam model AT-W. It was built in the early ’70s and features a beautiful chrome body with incised art deco design and Bacolite base. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t work, but we can rebuild it (apologies to Steve Austin). In fact, there seems to be a movement toward rescuing and rebuilding old, beautiful things — this same toaster can be purchased on E-bay for $50. My toaster even has a website…it’s Automaticbeyondbelief.org.
As soon as I got it back to the A-frame I took the toaster out in the woods for a photo shoot — and act that engendered amusement in my boys and some concern in my wife. But the effect was amazing. Anywhere I set it, it perfectly reflected the surrounding nature so it almost seemed to dissapear — to become part of nature. I took a picture of our A-frame reflected in it. It seemed appropriate to see Innsbrook pictured in that toaster – they’re both created in the early 70′s, beautiful and a little old fashioned.
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04.13.09
Posted in The Woods at 11:15 pm by admin
Saturday was the first official deck day for the James family — that’s not really a word we use, but I can’t think of another.
Personally, I’m not one for “relaxing” vacations. I can’t stand lying on the beach for more than a few minutes — and sitting watching the mountains makes me itch to hike. I have been diagnosed with chronic relaxation aversion. The second opinion concurred and all treatment has been to no avail. I just get antsy.
Our deck is completely surrounded by trees (and every Innsbrooker reading this is saying, “Ours too!”).
For our family, a deck day means we are holed up in the treetops. It’s too cool to go to the beach, but the sun and temperature are perfect for wiling away the day surrounded by trees. I tend to find a book to read or deck to sweep, anything to keep from falling into an actual state of rest.
Saturday was such a day. The boys dragged their collection of polar fleece blankets out and covered a sunlit patch of the deck. The blankets are their strategy for keeping toys from falling though the cracks — though sometimes the toys are intentionally sacrificed to the great underneath. Then out came the action figures and Legos. With that, a day of deck play commenced (relaxation isn’t really an option for them).
Redbud at Innsbrook, a wonderful color combination
I, on the other hand, decided to be productive and take some pictures of the red bud for this blog…which, by the way, proved that my earlier statements about red bud being a misnomer was…well…incorrect. The flowers are lilac, but the buds are indeed red. Actually the contrast lends to the effect. Good design! Whoever thought up that color scheme definitely went the extra mile.
After putting in a hard 15 minutes of work photographing red bud and trying to make sure I got the contrasting blue sky, I decided to take a well-deserved break. Alright — it wasn’t 15 minutes — I got the picture on the first try.
The deck was waiting and so was a hammock that a fellow Innsbrooker gave me last year. She got it as a gift in South America — apparently it was hand woven and colored. It may be the gaudiest hammock I have ever seen. But I love the colors. The nice thing about Innsbrook A-frames is you don’t have to worry about what anyone else thinks. You can have stuff you love around you — it can be silly or “in poor taste” or sentimental. But if it makes you happy, hang it up. I sometimes wonder why we don’t take the same lighthearted approach in our “real” house.
Perhaps the world's most comfortable -- and colorful -- hammock
So out came the world’s gaudiest hammock. I strung it between two trees and quickly found out it may also be the world’s most comfortable hammock — the yarn is soft and the shape wraps around you allowing in the sun’s warmth. I laid back and listened to the kids playing, aware that this would only last a couple minutes and then my relaxation aversion would send me off on another mission. But oddly, that didn’t happen — well not exactly.
I looked up and realized that the view above might actually be even nicer than the view off the side of the deck toward Lake Innsbrook. The trees do some really amazing things as they arch away from the hammock — things that you don’t see when the leaves are on. The bare limbs look like black lightning against the deep blue sky. Or maybe they resemble aerial images of rivers just before they reach the sea or veins in a leaf or perhaps pictures I’ve seen of the human nervous system. I had an odd moment as I thought about one tree-like pattern (my nervous system) in the act of contemplating another one.
I think those patterns that are repeated throughout nature are called fractals. They are a reminder that everything is connected — that the beauty we see all around us makes sense and is repeated throughout nature, that there is order and like the color coordination of the red buds, the design is a good one.
“I guess I’m busy enough,” I thought as the breeze blew through my hammock while the sun gently warmed me and overhead, paterns of gently swaying limbs assured me that we are all part of the same design. And I felt connected.
The view from the hammock
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04.07.09
Posted in Experiences and reflections at 8:54 pm by admin
Welcome to the first chronicle of life at Innsbrook .
For the millions and millions of Internet users reading this that don’t know what Innsbrook is… it’s a 7,400-acre community in eastern Missouri. Most of the folks at Innsbrook are second-home owners and, for the most part, they live in St. Louis (regarding the millions and millions of readers, most “How to Blog” articles recommend that you write like no one’s reading — because they aren’t… I guess that’s reassuring, but we can pretend).
So, as I was saying, there are also about 300 families that live at Innsbrook “full time”, although some make their way to Florida and other warmer climes in the winter months.
The geography of Innsbrook is spectacular. We are blessed with rolling wooded hills and mature hardwood forests. Because of the abundance of clay in the area, we were able to build about a hundred lakes which dot our community making it look more like the Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota than Missouri. And the developers treated the land gently, keeping the building density very low so there is lots and lots of forest surrounding those beautiful lakes.
Most of the second homes here are some version of A-frames — we call them chalets. They have lots of glass so being in one is a lot like being in a tree house — leaves everywhere and every shade of green one can imagine. In fact, as the sunlight filters through the branches, and leaves — it can feel like you are surrounded by stained glass windows, but the only colors the artist had to work with were green and blue.
The exception to the prevalence of green is this time of year. Now the woods are laced with the white of Service Berry and the lilac of Red Bud (sort of a misnomer there). And we are awaiting the Dogwood that will absolutely fill the woods with clouds of white that blaze as the sunlight breaks through the forest canopy — sunlight can do some wonderful things in the woods but I don’t think anything compares to a dogwood lit in all it’s glory.
So, that’s why we named our blog the Dogwood Journal? Ahhh…no. The reason is not so much what Innsbrook Villagers find in the woods when they arrive at their home or chalet, but why they came in the first place. That is not a simple thing to explain, but Ann Morrow Lindberg did a pretty good job of it when she said, “After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.”
Folks at Innsbrook come here in search of those kind of miracles…the things that the wilderness, the woods and nature give us that we can’t find anywhere else. They experience them with their families and friends, and when the go back to the paved streets, strip malls and big box stores, some of the Dogwood, or the oaks or the wildflowers stay with them.
That is what we hope this blog will be about — the things that folks come to Innsbrook to find.
The colors of the sunset are bouncing off the waters of 150-acre Lake Aspen at Innsbrook Resort.
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