Here at Hangman Hill

This past weekend was a Yoga Teacher Training weekend for Sheri at Blissworks Yoga and Healing Arts and marks her half-way point to completing a 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training Program.  As part of the curiculum Sheri has been learning the history of yoga, alignment principles, anatomy, the names of poses in Sankskrit, and the critical elements of a yoga class.  Last month Sheri taught for the first time with Kristin Price, who is also a Pfizer colleague.  Their theme was Superhero Yoga and had a lot of fun teaching their fellow teachers how to be super yogis.  They next teach a class together in September with a them that will be based in science, perhaps quantum mechanics or acid-base theory.

One requirement of the training is to complete a Seva project with her teaching team.   Seva in Sanskrit refers to a service which is performed without any expectation of result or award for the person performing it. Sheri, Kristin, Martin and Janet volunteered their time at Fiddleheads, a food coop in New London.  It was a lot of fun with the added benefit of Sheri discovering a host of treats including a locally made ginger beer.

Sheri and her 16 fellow students all passed their mid-term exam on Saturday and are well on their way to becoming yoga instructors.

We’ve been having an unusually rainy June, which is good for some parts of the garden and not others.  It certainly didn’t help the strawberries very much!

However….it has been a good test of our new wall and the dry stream bed that we had constructed to keep the wetlands out of our basement.  In the attached photos and Youtube movie you can see where the 6″ of rain that we received last week ended up.

Sheri celebrated her birthday in Waterville Valley, NH at the Gordon Conference.  It was a treat for Sheri and her friend Lynne to rent bikes and get off-road for a birthday bike-ride, just like the good ol’ days in Madison, WI.

We celebrated together at home on the weekend.  On Saturday the rains from Andrea subsided and the sun came out in time for a trip to Watch Hill, RI to the Olympia Tea Room in the evening.  It was our first trip for the season and we enjoyed a really nice dinner followed by Grilled Poundcake and Strawberries to complete the birthday festivities.

The winners of the best birthday cards for Sheri’s 2013 birthday are from Bruno (Uke can guess which one) and Dmitri, Julie, Bryony and  Kiera Hancock).  Many thanks to all for the cards, gifts, calls and messages.

It's June, so it must be fresh strawberries from the garden for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

This weekend we were happy to have a visit from DiAnn (Sheri’s mom).  The long Memorial Day weekend started off cold and rainy, but by Sunday it has cleared enough for us to venture out to the Westerly art fair in the park (aka the Virtu Art Fair).  Attendance by both the exhibitors and the customers was down from previous years, but we still had a good time looking around.

It's hopping at today's North Stonington Garden Club plant sale.

We just returned home from a spring trip to wonderful Copenhagen (the one in Denmark, not New York).  It started off with a short conference for Bruno in nearby Malmo (Sweden) and then Sheri, Nick and Pam (Bruno’s parents) joined him for the remainder of he week.

We rented an apartment just outside of the downtown, overlooking the water in a newly revived neighborhood.  It took us 24 hours to get acclimatized to city living, but we quickly managed to find all the nearby conveniences (commuter rail station, water taxi stop, local park, etc).

We spent the week exploring the city, with highlights including the fantastic palaces, gardens and city architecture.  One day we took a 45 minute train ride to Lund (Sweden) and enjoyed a different pace of life in this historic university town.  For the whole week we were blessed with fine weather and warm temperatures for the time of year.

We were so grateful to wander into the garden after work for the first official harvest of 2013! The first spear of asparagus, spinach, lettuce and arugula are featured in the April Face of Produce, with May just around the corner.  There is nothing like the first garden greens after a long winter.  The weekend looks good for getting the irrigation system in place and putting some plants in the beds.

This month we received our first negative electricity bill, thanks to the solar panels we had installed last year.   We generated 313kWh more than power than we used so we are gradually accumulating credit with our local power company.  Hoorah!