76 seconds of tickling and growling with June

This baby likes to laugh! In the past, our experience with babies is that they like to shriek at ear-piercing levels most of the time. Not Juniper, though. It’s a rare occasion when she refuses to smile.

There are a bunch of videos on YouTube that play gross, saccharine recordings of “Wheels on the Bus” (with surreal, 3D animations) over and over for hours at a time. We call these videos “baby/toddler crack,” because if you turn them on with kids nearby all chaos underway comes to a halt and wide eyes get glued to the screen. Well, getting June to laugh is “adult crack.”

(Also audible: our humming furnace and a jingle or two from our departed friend Brooke.)

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311 seconds of Otis reading Dick and Jane

When Otis turned four we went on a little family trip to Burlington to celebrate. The most exciting part of this trip, if you were to ask Otis, was the fact that we stayed in a hotel. We went out to dinner, walked around Church St., and went to the ECHO Center, but the best part was the hotel room. One of the things we did in the hotel room, aside from jumping on the beds, was open presents. Pops and Oma gave Otis a copy of Dick and Jane, Away We Go since Otis was just learning to read at the time and Pops had grown up on Dick and Jane.  Here’s Otis reading the first chapter.

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33 seconds of a coin being funneled into oblivion at the Sci Tech Museum in Watertown

There’s a dinky little science museum in Watertown. We’d seen it, but we hadn’t been inside until recently. Turns out that although the whole think is pretty low-budget, they have some neat exhibits. Otis’s favorites: a regular old checkboard and this coin funnel. (You know, the kind of funnel they have in airports and museums where you slip a coin down a slot on the side and watch your money go down the tube?)

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70 seconds of an echo dome in the Logan Hyatt Regency lobby

We got held up on our way back to Potsdam. First, the oil pressure warning light came on and our JetBlue flight had to make an emergency landing in Charleston. (When it turned out that we were going to be stuck there for 5+ hours, they placated us passengers by ordering Jimmy Johns from a place near the airport. Cute and effective.) This caused us to miss our Cape Air flight to Saranac, so they put us up in the Logan Hyatt Regency. After a week of surfing, I was totally mellow. And the killer view of the Boston skyline was an added bonus!

Next morning, while June and Sarah caught up on their sleep, Otis and I explored the hotel. We saw planes taking off, watched boats in the harbor, and snuck into a secret staircase, but the best part was the domed ceiling above the lobby next to the front desk. It was perfectly shaped to echo any sounds made under it. (Amazingly, if you stood just a few feet outside of the dome, you couldn’t hear the echos at all!)

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31 seconds of fire crackle at Mt. Macco Christmas

We outgrew Pops and Oma’s house. All four of us kids (and our families) head to Elizabethtown sometime around Christmas every year, and now with all the babies/kids we have to rent a house nearby. The venue this last Christmas was a big old house right on the Boquet River. It had a big fireplace in the living room and we kept it roaring most of the time.

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60 seconds of a tour of Trapper Nelsons camp

In Jonathan Dickinson State Park, you can take a boat tour up the Loxahatchee River to the old Trapper Nelson camp. (We saw a gator!) I’m not usually one for tours, but the guide this particular day was outstanding. Or maybe I just really liked his accent.

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77 seconds of counterpoint chatter

When I teach freshmen theory, I like to spend quite a bit of time on two-part counterpoint. I print out copies of Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum and we read through the Platonic dialog in class. The whole thing is full of stuff like this:

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87 seconds of riding the rental car shuttle in Sacramento

Last fall we took a trip out to California for our friend Chelsea’s wedding and to visit some other friends back in Berkeley. At the end of the trip, on the way back to the Sacramento airport (and after the requisite stop at In-N-Out), it was getting a little late and close to our flight departure time. We figured we ought to drop Sarah and June off at the terminal to check in while Otis and I returned the rental car. The rental lot was a fair distance from the main terminal, so Otis and I had plenty of time to record some of the “scary” shuttle bus sounds on the way back.

(I record most of these things on my phone. Listen for the text message Sarah sent me at 0:35.)

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