Archive - Mar 2010 - Staff Blog

After a mile of muddy ruts, the dirt road opened out onto a foggy clearing. There, in front of a small stream, sat the sugarhouse where all of the maple syrup for Steve’s Park Diner on Merchant’s Row in Middlebury is boiled down.

By Monday evening, last week’s sun and unseasonable warmth seemed like it had all been a dream, and after a day bundled in extra layers at the office, it was hard to think about going back outside.

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As the earlier than usual Spring seems to have arrived, the warm weather has cleared the snow off of the paths around town and opened up opportunities for the first trail runs of the season. Mud will be a fact of life for the next few months, but some routes tend to dry out earlier than others. With this in mind, I chose Chipman Hill for my first trail run of the season. The primary trail over the summit was clearly open to vehicular traffic at some point in the not-too-distant past, but predates my arrival in Middlebury in 1986.

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“Where are your kids from?”

When you are a pale-skinned mom with two brown-skinned children, you get asked this question on a surprisingly frequent basis in casual conversations in all kinds of settings. In adoption circles, we refer to these people as “supermarket strangers,” people who don’t know us or our children but ask rather invasive and personal questions without much preamble.

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Jeff Stauch began baking bread two years ago with his girlfriend, Ashley. At first it was just a fun project — Ashley had grown up with fresh, home-baked bread around the house, and the two wanted to see if they could learn the skill.

“I was frankly surprised that we didn’t get discouraged,” he said. “The first several tries were definitely something you wouldn’t want to present at a party. It was just by accident, but we stuck with it until something turned out perfect.”

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While the snow cover is much improved from my last posting, the gorgeous spring-like weather could bring the ski season to an early close, so I had to get out over the weekend and enjoy the deep, but increasingly slushy snow. You will also notice something very different about this post. As a rule of thumb, I am usually a purist in that I earn my descents by putting out the effort to gain altitude first. But today, I felt that a lobster analogy was quite appropriate.

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PANTHER MEN TO HOST PLATTSBURGH IN NCAA TOURNEY

The Panther men’s hockey team’s roll continues. Middlebury made it 12 wins in 13 games and improved to 19-4-4 with a 3-2 win at Bowdoin in the NESCAC playoff final on Sunday. Mathieu Dubuc (he’s been hot) scored twice to give the Panthers a 2-0 first period lead, and after the Polar Bears tied it in the third, Charlie Townsend scored the tie-breaker on a breakaway in the final two minutes.

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PANTHER MEN’S HOOP RIDES DEFENSE TO NCAA WIN

The Panther defense did not rest.

And that was a good thing, because the Middlebury men’s basketball team shot only 34.4 percent in the Panthers’ 64-57 win over Gordon at the now-customary loud, packed house at Pepin Gymnasium for a playoff game.

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So far, March has proven to be springlike in name but not in weather, and winter no longer holds the excitement that came with the first snow of the season. This is the time when I always find I need a little help to get through the final stretch before spring sets in for good.

This week, that help came in the form of chili (necessitating a little detour from the bread series, which will return next week).

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