Mark Bartlett pianist

So what’s a cycling fan to do, when the winner of the Tour de France, and an American at that, gets a positive drug test, especially after an epic stage like Floyd had a few short weeks ago? If you’re a regular person, or Greg Lemond, you just assume he cheated and he’s guilty and…

Timeout from reviews to note that today is the 15th anniversary of our ascendancy to homeownership in this very house. That’s not very exciting, I know, but who would have expected we’d be here 15 years later? Well, I would, since it was a traumatizing experience and not one to be immediately repeated, plus we’ve…

This evening we had our first round of auditions for new chorus members, in anticipation of rehearsals starting up right after Labor Day. We’ve never done a midsummer audition before, but Steven’s idea was to see how many people would sign up, and if we found some good ones we could get them to accept…

One more post about the TdF and then I’ll shut up about cycling for a while. After 7 years of American domination in the person of Lance Armstrong, the assumption this would be a wide-open tour, which would make it a lot more interesting, not just because you knew someone besides Lance would win, but…

One humorous aspect to Floyd’s miracle comeback has been the fact that he said after his terrible performance on La Toussuire that he was going to go have a beer. Then after his incredible victory in Morzine, he mentioned beer again. This was picked up by Patrick O’Grady, one of the columnists on velonews.com in…

Sure there’s all this stuff going on in the world, what with that crazy guy in the White House and the Israelis bombing everything in sight and Mitt staying in Massachusetts for more than a day, but the real story has got to be Floyd Landis’s spectacular win at today’s stage of the Tour. One…

The first Sunday in May seemed like a good weekend to drive down to New York City and ride 42 miles through the city streets with 35,000 of my closest friends. I’ve been hearing about this Five Boro Bike Tour for several years, and it turned out that Jee had done it several times when…

Our chorus has a new conductor after 52 years under the previous administration. Allen retired at the end of the ’05 season, so during the last year we auditioned three candidates who did one concert each. Two of them were neck and neck as far as their musicianship, personality, and enthusiasm. The other exceeded them…

I’m always finding some new artifact of pop culture to become a fan of, it’s my curse, I suppose, and one that I’ve acquired over the last several months is the cartoon “Family Guy”. I’ve never gotten into the Simpsons, and while I’d watch King of the Hill, it wasn’t deserving of cult status. Probably…

Justin turns 8 next month and this past Wednesday he had his first official piano lesson, making him almost exactly the same age as I was in I had my first piano lesson in December 1970. I haven’t ever given the kids formal piano lessons, my feeling is if they want to learn they need…