DA Boys Lax Update...

Top-ranked Deerfield Academy boys lacrosse team runs record to 9-0 with 12-0 win over Andover (MassLive.com)

It's Official...and sweet!

Monica Youn and Whitney Armstrong

By ROSALIE R. RADOMSKY
Published: April 15, 2010 - New York Times

Monica Youngna Youn and Whitney Brewster Armstrong were married Saturday evening at St. Thomas Church in New York. The Rev. Jonathan M. Erdman, an Episcopal priest and the church’s curate and youth minister, performed the ceremony.

Ms. Youn, 38, is keeping her name. She is a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, where she works on campaign finance reform and election law issues. She also wrote two books of poetry, “Barter” and “Ignatz.” She graduated cum laude from Princeton, and received a Master of Philosophy in English literature from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She also holds a law degree from Yale.

She is the daughter of Chan Ju Youn and Kun Chee Youn of Houston. The bride’s father is the president of Weeco International Corporation, an environmental engineering firm there. Her mother is the owner of the Gulfland Real Estate Company, a residential and commercial agency, also in Houston.

Mr. Armstrong, 44, is a landscape designer for Katie Winter Architecture, which focuses on renovation projects for the Archdiocese of New York. With his father and a sister, Amory Spizzirri, he is a founding partner in a consultancy in decorative and fine arts in Greenwich, Conn., and New York.

The bridegroom graduated cum laude from Yale and received a master’s in landscape architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

He is a son of Bunty Armstrong and Tom Armstrong of New York. His mother is a director of the Women’s Prison Association, which runs a halfway house and provides counseling to recently released female inmates in New York. From 1974 to 1990, the bridegroom’s father was the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Until 1995, he was the founding director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He is now the chairman of the board of the Garden Conservancy in Cold Spring, N.Y., a nonprofit preservation organization that opens private gardens to the public.

The couple met in February 2008 at the party of a mutual friend. Mr. Armstrong noticed Ms. Youn as soon as she walked in, but he had to leave very early the following morning for Wyoming.

“I was clearly looking at her,” he remembered. “Staring, I guess. I didn’t know I was doing it. I was torn between leaving the next day and engaging in a potentially new adventure.”

After 90 minutes, Ms. Youn finally approached him. “He had a good-humored twinkle in his eyes, and was very knowledgeable without taking himself too seriously, ” she said. Their conversation, she recalled, included politics, her forte, and art, which is his.

Mr. Armstrong soon resigned himself to sleeping on the plane. Before leaving the party, he got Ms. Youn’s two e-mail addresses, but he could make out only one when he got home, and sent her a note saying “I’m asking you out” in the subject line.

The next morning he slept through the alarm, and missed his flight to Jackson Hole. When he finally arrived, he checked his e-mail and found there was no response from Ms. Youn.
“I was perplexed,” he recalled thinking. “I thought it was real.”

He e-mailed their mutual friend to see if he had the right address. She told him that the first address was a work address, and steered him to the other one; he promptly forwarded his original message.

“How magical it was,” Ms. Youn remembered thinking when she saw it.

Mr. Armstrong received her response minutes later, and they arranged to meet the day he returned to New York.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18, 2010, on page ST13 of the New York edition.

Another one bites the dust...

Happy Birthday Chris Davey! :)

Warm weather wisdom..

CBS3 News in Springfield, MA ran a story on how the warm weather is affecting local farmers. The go to guys? Our own Nate Nourse and Ryan Voiland '96!

The story and video with Nate and Ryan is here.

Story Updated: Apr 19, 2010 at 7:08 PM EDT

Two weeks ago, temperatures reached new record highs in western Massachusetts. Local farmers have taken advantage. Asparagus, beets, and peas are getting ready earlier than usual, with apples and peaches blooming early as well.

"Right now we're probably two to three weeks ahead of the last two years.” said Nate Nourse, sales director of Nourse Farms in South Deerfield.

While many farmers markets do not start until May, such as the Springfield Farmers Market at Forest Park on May 4, many local farms across the region are ready to go. Ryan Voiland, owner of Red Fire Farm in Granby, said they’ll have much more to offer at the start of the season than years past.

"Because we've had better weather, we will be able to begin offering salad mix, spinach, and peas sooner.” said Voiland. “We will jump into the season where we have a lot of good stuff to eat that much more quickly."

However, there are still some worries if the warm trend suddenly ends.
“It's basically created a lot of anxiety about the earliness and how the cold weather that could come up and impact us negatively." said Nourse.

The National Weather Service says the growing season will not officially start here until the beginning of May, and a harmful frost or freeze cannot be ruled out just yet.

"When it's April you can't put out tomatoes, you can't put pepper plants out because it’s just expected there is going to be another frost." said Voiland

Oh, now I get it...

Am I the only one who has wondered about Jon Bernstein's obsession with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival? I mean every week there's a Facebook post about the upcoming or just finished festival...All year long! The fest starts this Friday and I know JB is in a frenzy and then it hit me. Happy Birthday on Tuesday Jon!!! What an awesome way to celebrate! While my own filet mignon, whipped sweet potato and boston cream pie (from scratch) birthday dinner yesterday will linger with me a few more days - I think the Neville Brothers, a po-boy, a beer, and then a beignet sounds like just the thing! Send pictures! And here's a little something to get us all in the mood.

Fancy footwork by fast-stepping kids