I Got Lucky

When I was young the term “I got lucky” had a whole different connotation and now when I say “I got lucky” I mean something like …I just won a pair of free tickets to see and hear some cool music in a really neat place…which is exactly what happened to me last week. You see I entered this contest on a radio station I like here in Maine known as WCLZ and about a week later they emailed me to say I had won a pair of tickets to see Carol Noonan at the Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine for January 20th. This really was a prize because Lauren and I have been talking about going to this place for the past 12 months. If you check out their website you will see why http://www.stonemountainartscenter.com/ArtsCenter/ .
What they do is they bring in amazing musicians and entertainers with some pretty well known names like Joan Baez, Robert Cray, and The Indigo Girls to a “beautiful- new” post and beam barn structure located out in the middle of nowhere to entertain you, me, and the locals. There was such a nice vibe at this place that words cannot explain it. The box office lobby is a “beautiful-old” post and beam barn that they had moved just a short distance on the site and rebuilt. The bartender was one of the people who helped to rebuild the lobby barn which brings me to another point. You really sense “community and love” here, from the people who work at multiple tasks, to the songs you hear, and from Carol’s desire to give back to the community. In fact this event was labeled as The Album Release for Waltzing’s for Dreamers by Carol Noonan who notes that the sale proceeds will be used to “To put on some free shows for our recession hard-hit community…”

Before I end let me say you can eat here before the show at the same table where you will then experience the show and the food is good and plenty. We had a delicious large salad with fruits, nuts, and cheese which we split and still brought home half. I then had the salmon chowder loaded with chunks of fish and other goodies which came in a bowl the size of a small bathtub. Okay I exaggerated here but not by much, you’ll see and yes I took at least half of that home too.

Carol Noonan and the Stone Mountain Band is so worth seeing if you can create the opportunity and I think you will feel lucky when you arrive at the Stone Mountain Arts Center even if you have to pay for the tickets

January Update

It is 2:45 now on a lazy Saturday afternoon and it looks like it may snow soon. Lauren and I just came back from the Transfer Station where we actually came back with nothing extra this time. Earlier today we took down our Christmas Trees, yes trees, we had two of them. Why, because….well why not? We certainly have enough decorations for two. Lauren deserves the credit for decorating them. My job was installation, keeping them watered, and then removal. I did enjoy them because they added a nice festive light and feeling to the home.

In other news, we had seen a raccoon at the side of barn the other day so I set the Hav-a-Hart trap inside the barn and on Thursday thought I had caught it when I saw the trap closed. But instead I had caught the neighbor’s cat that was very happy to be released. We haven’t heard the ruckus lately that we had been hearing under our kitchen floor which is a crawlspace that allows access and shelter for the raccoons, porcupines, and woodchucks. When these guys get going it can sound somewhere between a party and soccer match. They chatter loudly, run back and forth, bang into the floor, and chew the bottom of the floor joists. Because “we” don’t have access to this space our only solution currently is to take a block of wood, place it on the kitchen floor directly over where we hear the noise and then proceed to bang the daylights out of the wood with a hammer to try and scare them off. It seems to work but sometimes only temporarily. Recently someone told us to put a rag soaked with ammonia down there. I remembered this worked well when we were having raccoons get into our garbage barrels in Massachusetts years ago. The problem with this is our limited access to get the rag under there and then do we really want the aroma of ammonia wafting up through the kitchen floor? I don’t think so.

Thanks to this last snowstorm on Wednesday all the bare spots which were on the ground are now covered. Hopefully it will stay like this until spring so we can do more cross country skiing. We did our first cross country ski of the season a couple of weeks ago after the first big snow. It felt great to ski, yes and fall, along the trails at the Bethel Inn and at the end of a good workout I was able to take my skis off and walk 100 yards to my house. On Thursday I walked up to Suds Pub for Hoot Night and met up with our long time good neighbor from Magnolia, John O’Hara. We caught up in conversation while the local musicians played. I Love Hoot Nite at Suds. Tomorrow we’re going to watch the Patriots game with Matt and Sari Rochford who are other long time Magnolia neighbors of ours. They apparently come up with their kids most weekends now to go skiing at Sunday River. It’s uncanny just how many people from Gloucester and Cape Ann we keep bumping into here and how many have bought homes up here. Enjoy the cold…it was zero here last night. Hey, it’s snowing now.