Monday Sept 17th, Burlington: Northern Vermont SharePoint Users Group : “Cool Sh-t (SharePoint)"

Tuesday Sept 18th, Burlington: VT Functional Group: Eric Smith – Stepping Up to Haskell

Wednesday Sept 19th, Winooski: Vermont Technology Alliance Lunch & Learn (Topic: Innovation, Speed  & Risk)

Wednesday Sept 19th, Burlington: Burlington Ruby : Intro to Object Oriented Programming in Ruby

Friday Sept 21st, Burlington: The Windows 8 Game Dev Fest  (5pm – 10pm)

Saturday Sept 22nd, Burlington: Vermont Code Camp 4 (all day!)

Tuesday Sept 25th, Burlington: btvwag: Networking Refactored

Saturday Sept 29th: Shelburne: Champlain Maker Faire (all day)

Fri-Sat Oct 19-20: VTHack (24-hour hackathon with $10,000 in prizes)

Fri,Sat Oct 26 & 27: Vermont Tech Jam (Job Fair, Presentations & Panels, Networking)

Don’t forget the  Robots Rockets & Steampunk exhibit at Shelburne Museum through October 28th. Awesome geeky fun!

See the calendar on Vermont Coder’s Connection meetup site for new event listings!

The leaves are changing a little early this year where I live. Here are some pics I just took from my front yard. Too bad I waited until after all the clouds set in. It was a beautifully, sunny blue-sky morning a few hours ago.

This past week, my niece came to visit from Massachusetts and I had a mini-vacation. One of the many activities we did was take a hike and because it was cool-ish, we brought Sampson along. Here we are high up in the Green Mountains enjoying views of the Adirondacks. Mr. Muddy-Paws had found a nice cool pool of mud on the way up. Sampson has been with us for just over a year now. He’s 2 1/2 years old and turning into a wonderful dog.

The Lupine, Phlox & Rhodendron are already in full bloom. Usually that happens while I’m away at TechEd in mid-June so this is very early (lucky me I get to enjoy it this year). Considering that it was only a month ago that we had a spring snow storm, I would have expected things to be late, not early! (Compare the shrubs along the fence in the first picture here with what they looked like in the 2nd photo of the snow storm pics.)

Unfortunately, even though the lupine are early, the bumper crop of dandelions is still hanging in there so the field doesn’t look as nice as it could thanks to all of the dirty white dandelion fluff.

Yesterday morning it started snowing and didn’t stop until about 3pm this afternoon. Heavy wet spring snow that accumulated to about a foot where we live. Luckily we didn’t lose any trees but the power’s been out for quite some time.

Here are some pics from the crazy storm.

From the road. See those shrubs in front of the fence? I had just unburied them.

3 hours later, those same shrubs. They are okay now.

Our magnificent, gigantic pines

Sampson and his pal Sadie

After the storm

March 17th and spring sure seems to be here already!

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If you live in New England, you know we are getting lots of absolutely lovely soft fluffy snow. And it’s not finished yet. It hasn’t stopped snowing so we are expecting even more by the end of tomorrow.

Rich and I went skiing in our woods and up through our neighbor’s fields this afternoon.

Here are a few pictures to share.

Heading into the woods behind our house

 
Winter wonderland

Hey, where’d my skis go? And my boots? I’m standing where I skiid yesterday. So it’s a new foot of fluff on top of a packed trail.

   
Back up the series of hills of our neighbor’s fields after skiing down down down.

 
In the woods again, ready to make another loop.

The Rhodenendrons will be in full bloom this week and on their way out when I return. If we get a heavy rain, they’ll probably be gone.

The lupine are starting to bloom. This is just a tiny corner of the field (I think about 2 acres) in front of our house where there are literally hundreds.

The veggie garden needs watching, watering and weeding. I’m a little nervous about deer this year. Every morning I go out and count tomato plants, etc. Plus there’s a big hole (on the far right) in between the bush beans and zucchini that I still need to fill; but it will have to wait and therefore some late plantings. This ain’t no Bill McCarthy garden, but it’s what I can manage.

Well, not snakeS (pl.), just snake. I’m convinced that every time I see a snake around here, it’s just the same one.

So THE snake reappeared a few days ago in an interesting place.

We have something called a Doggie Dooley buried in our yard.

I went to make a “deposit” in it a few days ago, opened the lid, and much to my surprise, there was a snake curled up on top of the contents. And this Dooley was nearly full.

Now I’ll leave it to you to find out what a Doggie Dooley would be filled with and then you might understand why I found this a little surprising. I guess I have a lot to learn about snakes.

I did amuse myself for the rest of the day with a little song I made up dedicated to this snake that any five year old would have been proud of. But I’ll keep that to myself.

I took a much needed break (mental and physical) from sitting in front of my computer fighting with a chapter that has been a bit of a challenge for me, and cajoled my husband into taking me for a walk. It’s finally a beautiful day, about 70 degrees (F), sunny, light breeze. We have trails quite nearby our house that go up to the Long Trail, so went over to the one on the next road and hiked up to the shelter that is a stopping point along the trail, had a snack and hiked back down. It’s definitely the most bang for the buck we can get when we can’t spend a lot of time playing.

I brought my camera hoping that there would still be some spring flowers and boy were there a lot. I think because it’s been a cold spring, things are a bit delayed.

My neighbor said she saw a big patch of LadySlippers along this path. Didn’t see too many but looks like someone picked one from here.  

My hubby at his finest. 😉