Last week Eric’s soccer team finally won a game. He is the youngest player on his U8 team. The U8 team plays 5 vs 5 with 3 upfield offensive players and 2 defensive players. At this stage Eric is more comfortable playing defense, but he gets moved around like all the AYSO players. Below Cory tries to steal the ball while ‘Big Josh’ and Eric guard the goal.
This was a good year for our garden. Other than the dogs eating a row of peas things worked out well. This weekend I made the last harvest: a shopping bag of green beans, 3 nearly ripe tomatoes and a dozen cherry tomatoes. A few lesson’s learned are worth noting:
Next year I want to try planting a small area of Indian Corn with pumpkins and gourds interspersed.
Eric has been showing in the Barneveld Horsemen’s Association (BHA) lead line classes all summer. Sunday they had the last show - the make-up of the make-up Hunter Show. Eric shows courtesy of his buddy Trevor and Trevor’s mom Ellen. Ellen lets Eric use Onyx, a 16 year old mare who is bomb proof.
In the equitation class the judge asked Eric for his age (5), how long he had been riding (just starting), his horse’s name (Onyx) and if he planned to do jumping (when he grows up). In this class the judge decided to give all 5 lead-liners a blue ribbon and their choice of a toy or sticker book. In the lead-line suitability class, judging the ‘worthiness of the mount’ the participants got a blue ribbon, a chocolate candy bar and a carrot. If I was judging I would award all blue ribbons too. All the horses are dead quiet and great started animals for the kids. But it did throw a wrench in calculating year end awards as everyone got an equal number of points.
Since Eric and Trevor have been showing all year they were in the running for a year end award and somehow Trevor knew that. What Trevor knows, Eric knows and the two boys were walking around saying that Eric is close to a champion and Trevor is close to a championship.
After the show Trevor came over to our house to play with Eric and when Ellen picked him up she confirmed that Trevor won the year end lead-line championship and Eric was reserve by 4 points.
That means the camping trip with the local ADK Chapter that I was tentatively planning to attend on Saturday Oct 25 will be pre-empted by attendance at the BHA Annual Banquet so I can see Eric and Trevor get their awards. It should be fun.
At the end of August I received an invitation to the SUNY Oneonta Geography Department touting a picnic for Faculty, students and alumni. It advertised an opportunity to meet with past faculty including Paul Baumann, Martha Corry and Tom Gergel.
When I attended (71-75) Dr. Martha Corry was the head of the department teaching primarily Economic Geography. She had a large, rather pampered black Labrador retriever that I took care of at times when she was out of town. I remember feeding the dog 1/2 of condensed sweeten milk with it’s food. I can’t remember it’s name, but it was overweight had the slickest black coat you could imagine. It was also quite strong and not exactly leash trained. I am not sure who was leading whom along Main St, Oneonta on the Sunday walk. Martha is now approaching 90 years of age, mentally sharp and in good shape.
Tom Gergel was one of my favorite teachers. He used to live on East St or vicinity - it was within walking distance and I remember him arriving in his office huffing and puffing from his frantic hike up the hill. One of my scariest memories was riding in a car with Tom driving. We were destined for a field trip to some bog and Tom was quite the sight see-er. We would bomb along within the speed limit with Tom checking out all the scenery and pointing out and describing interesting geomorphologic features while infrequently making casually glances at the road. It was a miracle to behold. Tom was also always reading horticulture articles about growing apples. If I remember correctly he had started an apple orchard before I left. I learned that Tom lost a thumb cutting wood in his orchard and it prevented him from another passion - playing violin.
After graduating in 1975 I worked for two years within the Geography Department in a cooperative project between Schoharie County (where I lived) and the Geography Dept. We were building an early Geographic Information System under the guidance of Paul Baumann. Paul set up the whole arrangement and gave me my 1st professional job. Back then everything was programmed using FORTRAN and COBOL on Burroughs mainframe computers. Card punch units and manual data entry ruled our project. We had boxes and boxes of computer cards stacked in rows 12 wide by 4-5 boxes high. After awhile we transitioned to computer tapes. During my stint at graduate school at University of Washington I returned to Oneonta for a summer job - again arranged by Paul - whereby we conducted a study of emergency services for the City of Oneonta. We lived in Paul’s house for the summer as he and his family were away vacationing for the summer. Paul was a valuable professional reference for my 1st jobs. He was an important mentor for many, many years and a good friend.
Friday I drove to Oneonta in the rain to attend the picnic. It was a nice low key affair. I got to meet the new department chair - Dr. Tracy Allen, and current faculty Ben Dixon, Jim Greenberg and Wendy Mitteager. Below I pose between Paul Baumann and Martha Corry.
Skip & I went to St Regis Canoe Wilderness area on Saturday AM. We launched from Hoel Pond, hopped over the RR into Turtle Pond and Slang Pond. We did the short portage into Long Pond and set up camp on the north shore across from the portage as it started to sprinkle rain. We no sooner than got our tent and a rain fly set up and it came down in bucket loads.
We sat under the rain fly, drank coffee, read maps and watched other canoers exit the pond.
Later the rain stopped and we decided to take the short paddle to check out the next day’s portage. We hiked to the Dave Cilly’s CanoeOutfitters outpost and met Dave ( he wrote the ADK Paddler’s map & recent guidebook ). We talked about a friend of mine, John (Jay) Baumann, that used to guide for Dave in the ’80s when he was starting his outfitting service. Unfortunately, Jay Baumann passed away due to colin cancer, but he was a nice person and good outdoors man.
On our walk back to our canoe the skies unloaded and we got drenched as we had left our rain coats back at the canoe! Returning to camp we changed into dry clothes, huddled under the rain fly and cooked our one pot meal of rice and BBQ porkand ate sliced peaches and chocolate chip bars. We heard loons through the night.
The next morning we were paddling at 8:30 and across the portage by 9am. We traversed Floodwood Pond to Square Pond; portaged to Follensby Clear Pond and again portaged to Polliwog and we were back to our car at Hoel Pond at noon. Since we were out so early we decided to grab burger for lunch and head to Round Lake to spend Sunday night.
We found 3 cars in the parking lot and set out around the lake in late afternoon. We checked out the new campsites along the western side of the lake ( which are poor) and finally settled on the bluff at site #3. We sat out on the large rock as the evening set in.
The temperatures dropped after sunset and a decent breeze came in so we turned in at 8:30 for a nice 10 hour snooze. We awoke at 6:30, packed up, paddled out, and had breakfast at the Long Lake Diner by 8:30.It was nice heading out in September - after the crowds had left.
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