Rich and I work way too much and sometimes forget why we moved to Vermont. But we had a perfect Vermont summer weekend this weekend.

On Saturday, the lake was calm and we kayaked a 4 mile stretch from a put-in near Button Bay State Park across to Westport NY where they were having a heritage day festival. The wind picked up after lunch and we had a fun paddle against the wind on the return trip.(Yes, that is fun. I’m not being facetious.)

Yesterday we went on a beautiful bike ride in Addison County – lots of rolling hills, beautiful old farmhouses, long stretches through flat farmland and then riding up along the lake.

We ate lots of sweet summertime corn, blueberries, raspberries from around our property, and tomatoes & basil out of our garden. We swam in an amazing local swimming hole and laid out on the lawn under an amazing blanket of stars to watch a bit of the Persied Meteor shower.

It doesn’t get much better than this!

This is a big source of pride for many Vermonters.

It’s amazing what goes into the process. The trees are selected many years in advance by local foresters and nurtured.

But there’s more: fundraising, promotion, etc. THere is a whole website devoted to this cause: http://www.capitolchristmastree2007.org.

While today was a perfect summer day and I not only got to go for a great bike ride, but I was introduced to a fantastic swimming hole, tomorrow is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

I am on a team of 20 women who are paddling a Dragonboat, along with 75 other teams, in the DragonFest.

I have never witnessed this event, but seen articles and videos and promised myself that I would go watch this year, but I was lucky enough to be invited to be on a boat filled with mostly women from my town.

You can learn all about the Dragon Boat Festival on this website.

In my peripheral vision yesterday, I noticed something trotting by my office window. Looking up I discovered that those long legs belonged to a deer. Then along came her babies. I was able to click this through the screen before they ran off. I immediately went out to my veggie garden (the direction they had come from) to make sure they hadn’t just had a little feast! All was in tact, though I wouldn’t have minded if they had eaten the mustard greens which have bolted and are even more bitter than normal.

From the VTRails user group:

Meeting – July 25th at 6:00pm – Pub and Brewery in Burlington Downtown

We picked Pub and Brewery for the meeting, for it’s friendly atmosphere, location and good tasting beer. The plan is to meet everybody in person and shake hands and see what topics are attracting most of the interest.

We are going to raffle Rails Cookbook we received from O’Reilly.

See everybody there!

USA Today held a contest between towns named Springfield all over the country to host the premiere of the Simpsons movie. Springfield, Vermont had not been included and brought it to the attention of the organizers so they got on the list. Springfield, VT, like the state, is a small town with a population of only 9000 and a movie theater with only 100 seats. The other 13 towns were much larger… some are cities.

But tiny Springfield, VT actually won the contest with the most votes — over 15,000. There have been a lot of complaints, mostly among the 21,000 comments to the above USA Today online article. Even an Oregon congressman got in on it although apparently he was just joking around.  Springfield, OR was one of the entrants and most likely the true inspiration for the Simpson’s town.

So how did Springfield win with so many more votes than their population?

Even though I have only lived in Vermont for 8 years and will never be considered a true Vermonter (5+ generations required :-)), I can tell you why.

In many ways, Vermont is one big home town. Phish is the “local band” to many. Ben & Jerry’s is “our ice cream” and there are Vermonters who are known to carry a small supply of the “only true” Maple Syrup with them when they travel. Most people who live in Vermont take pride in anything that hails from anywhere in our state. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everything. You’ll find lots of people who are dead-set against Civil Unions, Howard Dean and many other things deemed as the evils of the flatlander infiltration.

But on a different level, this “state spirit” really exists. It was quickly apparent to me after I moved from New York to Vermont. In New York state, it was hard enough to keep up with the entire county that you lived in, much less what was going on elsewhere in the state. 

And while I have never been to Springfield VT and had to look on a map to see where it was, I eagerly voted for it because I was voting for Vermont.

That is likely how Springfield got over 15,000 votes. The local daily newspaper in Burlington (Vermont’s biggest city and over 100 miles away) treated this as front page news. The t.v. stations all had stories about it. So people all over Vermont became aware of the competition and many, like me, were proud to put their vote behind our little town. Vermont’s entire population is somewhere around 600,00. Springfield, IL came in second with a little under 15,000 votes. If the same 2.5% of the state of Illinois had voted for their Springfield, they would have had 325,000 votes. If 100% of the residents of Springfield, IL had voted, that would have been over 100,000 votes.

So I am confident that it was state pride that won Springfield, VT this big spotlight of hosting the premiere. I have no idea how they will handle the potential number of people coming into the town  for the event. This is probably why they weren’t in the original list. But that will be another story and it will be headline news all over Vermont for days and days.

 The town of Springfield Vermont participated in a competition with 13 other Springfields around the country to host the premier of the Simpsons movie and won! Each town submitted a video to prove why they were the real Springfield for the Simpsons. The Springfield VT video was pretty professional and silly, of course. You can see the videos by going to the USA Today Contest page.

It rained for over 24 hours. Now things are clearing out. I looked out the window of my office to see this thick fog cloud that had settled in the valley that is the road between the hill I live on and the next hill over. Since the sun had already set, even though it looked amazing in real life, it was hard to capture so, you’ll have to live with my usual crappy photographic skills.

We’ve had weird weather all week. Constant forecasts of thunderstorms that never come and the air and sky is filled and ready to go for it constantly.It has made for some great sunsets. We saw an amazing one while at the Bob Dylan concert on July 1st thanks to a big cloud that was stuck on Mt. Mansfield.

There was another great one tonight that we saw from a friends house up on a hill.

I took this one from our front balcony earlier this week.

It was cool on Saturday so Rich & I decided to go for a hike on the Long Trail. We drove to the top of the App Gap (which is near our home) and hiked south on the LT. This crosses over the top of the Mad River Glen trails, so we had lunch at the top of the double chair, looking out over the White Mountains in New Hampsire and then went on to to top of the Single Chair. There was some stuff that was pretty daunting to me in between those two spots, so rather than turn around and do them going back down, we hiked back down the ski trails and cut over to the road. Here are some pictures I took along the way.

There was a lot of Trillium  (will look through my wildflower books this weekend to try to see what the heck these are! They looked like a cross between a trillium family and wild orchid family to me..) along the way which was suprising to see in late June.