What I've Learned So Far

Chef Tell used to come on the morning program (it would have been something like Good Morning America) that my mom and I watched when I was a little kid. I remember being amazed at how fast he could dice vegetables.

Chef Tell, Who Turned Kitchen Skill Into TV Fame, Dies at 63

His Times obituary includes his curious link to Richard Nixon. Worth a quick read if you ever saw Chef Tell on t.v.

I wanted to embed this in the post here so you could watch it here, but it looks like Universal has fixed it so that YouTube won’t allow it. So, if you want, you can go here to see the original video.

John Cougar/Mellencamp was a big favorite of mine when I was a kid. I think “Scarecrow” was the first album I bought with my own money. This song, I think, captures the best of him: celebration of small-town America/Americana, but with an element of understated social commentary to it. It’s been a while since he’s achieved that, but at his best Mellencamp was really something.

I spent a summer in the 1990s at the Middlebury German School. To my mind, Middlebury has the quintessential appearance of a New England town, and Middlebury College has the quintessential appearance of a New England liberals arts school. I learned loads of German there and had a wonderful time: it planted the dream in my mind of someday living — or at least summering — in rural New England.

The college has an outstanding art museum.

I can’t find good photos of the campus on the school’s site, but this campus map (PDF!) suggests the flavor of it in watercolors.

More information about the town and surroundings.

The Internet might have been made to revisit places from your childhood. When I was a boy, my family would travel from our home in Alabama to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Many of the years we went up, we stayed at the Crabtree Meadows campground. All of this came rushing back to me last weekend when my parents visited; we talked about those old family vacations–20 years ago, now–that were so much fun for us.

–An overview of hiking in the area.
–GORP’s guide for hiking to Crabtree Falls.
–A photo of the falls.

The nostalgia overwhelms me! Maybe one of these days I’ll take my own kids to the same campground . . .