Zuleme

The Monster

2006-12-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

This is the Fat Monster, Thin Monster exhibit we have just installed at the Children's Museum in North Conway. Children can choose food to put in the basket on one side and an activity on the other. Everything is weighted so if you give the monster a hamburger, and ice cream cone, a glass of milk, french fries and a piece of cake and then have him settle down in front of the TV, his belly pops out. If you just give him a sandwich and a glass of milk and then he goes snowboarding, he stays thin.

We hope the kids will get the idea.

The monster design is from Ed Emberly who has generously offered to let us use any of his designs for the museum. Ed's drawing books and monster books have been delighting children for years.

Big Green Book

2006-03-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

Olof works on the Big Green Monster book for the children's museum. It is a big replica of the book by Ed Emberley.

Big Yellow Skiddah (and Cat)

2006-02-08T07:35:00.000-08:00

This is the skiddah all painted. Olof has since added some neat lights, one that spins around on top and a headlight. All the lights work and there are dials too. The kids are going to love it. Next up is a model of the Great Green Monster by Ed Emberley. The book will be about three feet high and made of birch plywood.
I will be editing a family video for Camp Sunshine and producing an endowment piece for the Flying Yankee restoration. That is a unique train built in 1938 (I think that is the year)

The train was purchased from Edaville Railroad where it was sitting going to ruin, transported up here to NH and a group has been working to raise the millions to restore it and see it run again. Exciting project and one I am pleased to be involved in. I'll post some photos soon.

Skiddah

2006-01-30T06:37:00.000-08:00

Not painted yet, but here is the skidder Olof built for the Children's Museum. It is about eight feet long and I bet it will be a big hit.

The Children's Museum

2006-01-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

I haven't been writing here a lot mostly because of losing Fergus January 12th to heart failure. So I have just been trying to deal with that loss and writing on Caturday.
The last couple of days we have been working on projects for the Children's Museum and above are two samples of buildings for a townscape. They are made of lightweight MDF and will have velcro on the back so they can be placed on a carpet wall ( a big green mountain). When we are done the whole town will be represented there. The businesses are donating to help get this open.
Next up we are building a skidder. It will be about six feet long and bright yellow and black. I will post a photo when it is done. Then a three foot tall book of The Great Green Monster by Ed Emberley.

A Water Toy

2006-01-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

I don't know what we'll call this if it is built but for now it's just the Water Toy. This is a model for the children's museum we're involved in here. It's kind of a Rube Goldberg type thing with water coming down from the bottle and going up with an Archimedes screw. Also one of those Chinese things where the water flows in and then drops. There is a Loch Ness Monster you can't really see and kayaks and ducks that will swim down stream. Kids will be able to change the water flow.
Next to it is the puppet theater we are going to build as our donation.

I am re-writing Maggie by Moonlight for a workshop in Vermont in March. It is with Carolyn Coman, Norma Fox Mazer and an editor from Candlewick Press in Boston. Expensive, but limited to 20 people and you get a lot of critiques on your project. I looked at it and Olof agreed I should do it. If I don't get some real encouragement with the writing I won't pursue it the way I have in past years, except for client projects. But I am excited about going to this one. I haven't been into going to these kinds of things, for one thing, they are usually expensive and for the other, I figure if you are going to write then you might as well spend your time writing. But this one looked good.

Working on the children's museum we got to meet Ed Emberley who is a well known children's illustrator. It was funny because I knew I would like him and his wife as soon as we met and we ended up going to our house for lunch and talking about all sorts of possible projects. Ed and Barbara come up here to ski so I hope the skiing improves soon so we can hit the Ellis together.

Weather has been very very mild. That's a good thing for our heating bills and the fact that we haven't had a working furnace, but a bad thing for the skiing. Today the sky is grey and it looks like rain. Rain is predicted for the next few days. I think it's about 40F out and the snow has become soft. It really isn't that great to slouch through it. So we will probably have to hop on the exercise bike. Or, we can put on our back country skis and go up to Jeff the Neighbors, just to get out. But you can make a mess of your ski bottoms if you hit rock.

The furnace did arrive today and Olof will be finishing the duct work. Then it will get hooked up Monday. We haven't needed it so far. Unusual. But we could suddenly get a spell of 15 below with wind and that is when we do need it. The no skiing is making me a lilttle gloomy. I love blue winter skies and white snow. I hope we'll get more of that soon. The few days we have been out have been wonderful.

Home Improvement

2006-01-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

The sky feels like snow but we're not really supposed to get much. All week it's been rain and the valley is full of tourists trying to ski. It's funny living in a resort area, on bad weather days you can hear the traffic humming on the highway across the river and it sounds like a hive of angry bees. No cross country skiing, or rather, just not great skiing, nothing else to do but shop and eat and spend money. Especially when it's pouring rain.The mountains call it "frozen granular" the locals know it means crushed ice. Or what we call New England Hardpack.
So no skiing for us this lovely week before everyone decides to start on the video or web projects that we could have finished up nicely in November or December. There's something about the New Year, everyone hits the deck running as we say. We already had the first call for a project I thought was dead. There's about a dozen more lined up. Sigh. It's great to have work but boy, downtime is nice for learning new software and writing and we had time for the project pictured above. Or rather we had time to do it well.
Because the furnace decided to quit just before Christmas we went ahead with our plans to take down the old furnace room and move the location for the new one, which is smaller and more efficient. I didn't take a before picture but just as well. Friends know what it looked like, since it's the first thing you see coming into the house. It was what you could call the elephant in the room. And when it went on it sounded like a jet engine.
We were amazed at how big the room was with the furnace room gone. It's a nice, airy space with the high ceiling. My art room is off to the side (currently a mess with everything piled up because of the construction). Olof does his ski tuning here and he has his easel and there is a light table for looking at slides. We're going to move the washer drier down here too, we'll finally have a closet for towels in the bathroom. It will become the room for doing stuff in.
I've done so much home improvement over the last thirty years I don't know if I'd make it through building another house. We're finally getting to the point where this one will be finished off. Amazing.

Christmas Week

2005-12-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

Rain on the roof is a lovely sound in the spring but pretty sad in December. Especially if you live in a ski town and hundreds, if not thousands of skiers are pouring in.
We drove home from Portland Christmas night ( with all three cats, see Caturday.com) and heard it start that night as we were watching TV. Oboy. There goes our snow. It had been so beautiful skiing the Ellis and up at Eagle Mountain before we left. I was hoping to just hit the trails this week.
It is generally a quiet week work wise, then after New Year's everyone decides it is time to get going on their projects. I remember some winters we didn't even get out much to ski, though usually we would go down to the Saco below the house and do an hour through the woods. We've passed our darkest day of the year with the sun coming up around 7:18, I think and getting dark by 4PM. Now we start gaining and Olof says it is already lighter. By February it is very nice and we'll run up to Jackson at the end of the day for an hour.
I have the last of the Christmas ham on the stove turning into very hammy pea soup. I remember reading once that eternity is two people and a ham. They got that right! Good thing we have a friend working in the studio with a good appetite. He'll help finish it off. I'll make some corn muffins to go with it.
Today is my birthday and I got a card from my in-laws and Sally in Florida. It always surprises me when someone remembers it since I forgot until Olof remembered. And one of my sister's usually sends a card. My mother forgets! I guess with six kids it's hard to remember.
We tore out the old furnace room yesterday and the ductwork. Today Olof picked up the new ductwork though it looks like the furnace won't arrive until the second week in January. As long as we don't have any of those fifteen below nights we will be ok with the monitor heaters and the wood stove. Pretty cozy, actually.
It has been warm and is supposed to stay warmish with sadly. More rain on the way. I guess that is the downside of global warming. It's easier on your heating bills but rain instead of snow in the winter is lousy.
It will get better.

Skiing in Jackson

2005-12-23T11:33:00.000-08:00

I took this photo on the Wave in Jackson. You can see Olof is the first person down this, it is before they groomed. Jackson was just wonderful last week. Early snow, mild temperatures. It feels so great to be out there. We skied the fields, the Wave and then down the Yodel.
I'm lucky I married someone who was born with skis on. Babies come that way in Scandinavia. I didn't start skiing until we moved to New Hampshire. I was 24 and my first cross country skis were 215's made of wood we got at the Eastern Slope Ski Sale for 15.00. Including poles, I think. They were so long! Now I ski on 185's.
Back then there was itchy wool long underwear or cotton stuff. And we wore sweaters and jeans. You'd just get miserably wet. I remember skiing Doublehead with some friends and getting down hills on my rear end. Nowadays I am the Queen of Snowplow. I can snowplow almost anything. That is because I am a coward and I like to take hills slowly.
It looks like a great ski winter already.

Let it Snow

2005-12-16T05:12:00.000-08:00

It is snowing this morning as I write. Snowing like crazy. Silencing the valley, keeping the cats in, making it feel like Christmas all over the Great White North. And I have a garage this year and do not have to go out and shovel off cars. Yippee.
Our furnace decided to give it up yesterday. It's not an emergency since we have two kerosene heaters and a wood stove in the house and three heaters in the studio. But we have ducts throughout the house for the forced hot air and when we get those howling winds with a 25 below wind chill factor it's real nice to keep the pipes from freezing. So we are having to buy a new one. Not really what I wanted for Christmas!

We have been working on re-doing our studio web site. Olof did the design and it is very good, I think. I'll copy the nav bar design for Caturday if I can get it to work in Blogger. There's no reason it shouldn't. It will make it possible for me to start adding cat information to the blogging and link to static pages without cluttering up the blog. I want to start adding book reviews and health information.

We got invited to spend next New Year's in Rome where some friends have rented the Sistine Chapel for a private tour. That's just too intriguing to pass up. As our religious leader, Bokonon has said " Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." So we will plan on going. We're really not city people and we'd have a hard time in Rome on our own, or we just wouldn't have a good time. But with a guide and some city friends, it will be fun. And it would be wonderful to see the ancient parts of Rome.
But for now, it's skiing I am looking forward to.

The West Side Web Cam

2005-12-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Our Web Cam Looking at mount Washington
The text above is a link to our new web cam. Take a look!
We got our first snowstorm which changes everything. Snow makes the valley quiet and makes it feel peaceful and Christmassy. The village is decorated with little white lights. I'll have to take a few photos to post. It reminds me that even while the papers are talking of the new developments going in on the North South road, the main village is still kind of nice, even though it has become all gift shops and restaurants over the last thirty years, while the necessary shops have moved to the fringes. Still, there are farms on our road and the mountains are beautiful.
I don't know if there is enough for cross country skiing yet.We got maybe five inches so far. But soon.
Check out the web cam! It's the view out our studio window.

Alpen Glow

2005-12-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

That is what we see out our bedroom window early some mornings. If the sky is clear, Mount Washinton is visible. Today, we are getting a light snow but the ground is still clear since last weeks snowfall melted. The cats are running in and out as if they know the season is ending.
I have been working on Caturday quite a bit and now I'm trying to figure out how to make an extra column on Blogger's left side so I can add links to my favorite cat books. And I want to start adding my blogroll of friends here for Zuleme. There are people who encouraged me to start writing and people I want to encourage to keep going.
There are many times we stop and say how lucky we are to live where we do. From my kitchen where I sit I see hills and trees with the flakes of snow. Below me is a wet forest, not really a marsh, but flood plain. We ski down there and usually I walk down there in the fall but we had so much water this year it was always too wet. The Saco river is down there, through the woods and it is such a luxury to have a private place to walk in.
Winter is closing in, the fire wood is stacked in the garage and in the yard and next year's is along the driveway. Jeff the Neighbor and Sally, the Neighboress have left for the winter. We'll ski up into their land and into the National Forest. You can keep going for quite a ways if you have a mind to. Olof once skied all the way to Attitash and down the ski slope.
We're just waiting for enough snow to hit Jackson trails. The Ellis was gorgeous last year. I'll post some photos just to get ready. And there's nothing like going out and doing 20K and coming home to a woodstove and soup.
People who don't enjoy winter live in the wrong place. Snow! We want snow! And now that we have a garage it's really great.

Winter is here

2005-11-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

No good photo yet so I posting one from last winter. Olof always makes these faces along the driveway. I hope he'll get a chance this year too.
We got about four inches of snow and now it is raining. The temperature is predicted to go up to the fifties for the next couple of days but still wet. Not skiable yet but soon come.
I spent the weekend laid low with a bellyache and then heard from a friend that he had had it too. So did Olof. So I had no energy and lay around reading until my eyes were too tired to read.
I like winter. The valley gets quiet and I can't hear the cars on Route 16 across the river. There's less bustle except for Christmas and we don't make a big deal out of Christmas anyway, going for a peaceful celebration with Olof's folks and sometimes a visit to the Cape where everyone on my side gathers.
I am going to try to rewrite Maggie by Moonlight and get started on the Cape project, but I think video projects will start up soon too. I am running off 20 dvd's for Camp Sunshine today but am still feeling a bit out of sorts.
If you live in a cold winter place like New Hampshire I figure there are two ways to get through it. Our way is to keep in shape and get out there and enjoy it. The other way is to hibernate through it, keep a really warm house and stay in. That's not an option for us except for the luxury of working for ourselves and having a very short daily commute down the driveway. But winter does have this lovely feeling of peace up here.

Pouring Rain

2005-11-22T13:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted here in a while but I am working on the blogs, still trying to figure out some things like how to move the google ads on Caturday.com and why I can do some things in Firefox and not in Safari. But today I spent working on the family video for Camp Sunshine. The great thing is they like it a lot so there weren't many changes to get it ready.
I am posting a photo I took of the back yard just as we slipped from October's bright colors to November. We have had some incredible days of warmth and have been able to heat using mostly the wood stove. Any day now the world will change to white. We hope. Olof already has the ski bench set up.
I intend to work on the blog roll soon and list some of the great bloggers I have been reading. France, Zambia, New York, Virigina. Makes me connected to the wide world while reading in my corner of it here in the mountains.
I did put the mp3's of my Polar Express music on greenginger.com. That's a start.

Biking in the snow

2005-11-13T10:23:00.000-08:00

This is how the yard looked after the snow we got a few days ago. Today, snow is dripping off the roof but it still isn't that warm about, maybe 50 in the sun. Olof and the boys ( Jeff, the Neighbor and two others) have gone bicycling. Hmmm. Actually, I would consider it but, even though I do pretty well, keeping up with three full speed ahead guys would be too much. I biked on the indoor trainer this morning.
Brendan is almost completely recovered from the Upper Respiratory Infection and we are encouraging him to put some weight back on. For a while we really thought we'd be saying good by to him and all I can say is, it would be rough. I know he's sixteen but I hope he'll be one of those cats that make twenty. HIs secret is moderation in all things.
I am working on the cat blog but I really want to have categories on it so I am looking at setting up another piece of software on the server, possibly Movable Type. Olof says he can "just write it" for me but I don't see why he should take the time when there is perfectly good stuff available.

2005-11-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

Skiing

2005-11-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

One for Matt

2005-11-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from a friend in Iraq. Now that really brings the war home. He has been there for seven and a half months and writes that he hasn't seen his youngest son since he was six weeks old. He is in the thick of it and we will send him our thoughts everyday for his safe return.

Well Matt, here it is getting cold and yes, there was snow. We had four feet in Mount Washington and Wildcat opened for skiing in October. I have a photo and I will post that too. I missed getting the great photos, when all the Presidentals and the Moats were snow covered. I should have been running around with the camera then. Olof will be going over to Pinelands next week to talk about redoing that kiosk we built but he'll really miss seeing you.
We did some major clean up in the studio, in fact, it's so organized you'll be amazed. Except for my department, which I haven't done yet except for getting rid of a bunch of reel to reel tapes I recorded years ago.
We're using the wood stove as much as possible because heating fuel costs have doubled. I think everyone is doing this, luckily we have a huge pile of wood. Other than that, we have also built a new garden, looking forward to next year.
I hope you will be home soon.

Setting up Blogs

2005-11-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

I just wrote a post and lost it but I will learn. I can't upload photos using Safari the way Blogger tells you too, but being a web girl I can get around it. I am working on getting the other web writing sites set up using Blogger. Caturday for Friday mornings and my book, A Cape Cod Girl for another day this week.
Brendan is doing a little better. He is listening to Secret Garden in the sun room. I am working on my powerbook as much as possible to keep him company. We are hopeful he will get through this.

Posting Photos

2005-11-08T05:29:00.000-08:00

The new blog

2005-11-08T05:06:00.000-08:00

I am experiementing setting up the blog using Blogger. Since I am using my server and know some HTML, it could speed up doing some things I need to do, like setting up blogs for web clients. Olof is busy with his software program, they want to finish it up and get it ready to market. There is a company interested in it.

I will add in the links for my books and try to do more regular posts. I don't think there was anything worth reposting from the Zuleme web site, except for some neat photos but I will add to this blog soon.

Brendan has been quite sick with upper respiratory infection. He is resting by the woodstove but is very listless. I took him in yesterday and we took him off Clavamox since he doesn't seem to have a bacterial infection. The vet says he should make it. He is almost sixteen but still, it is hard to take the thought of losing him.

cats

2005-11-07T10:09:00.000-08:00