Eye on the Sky

I am an NPR junkie. If I’m home or in the car, NPR is pretty much always on. In San Francisco, I lived and died for KALW. Joe Burke is the best morning newscaster ever and he does a daily almanac that I love. I actually got to meet him when I volunteered at the KALW pledge drive this summer and I was a bit starstruck. We are such KALW fans that if you tune to 91.7 on Sunday nights at 7:00, you may hear your very own Tom Taylor calling in to “Minds over Matter”. “Then and Now” and “Hearts of Space” (the BEST public radio music show EVER!) broadcasts that night too, and listening to those programs and relaxing on the couch is a great way to spend a Sunday evening.

Since moving to Vermont I’ve been resisting the temptation to listen to KALW online because I want to support my new public radio station, VPR. I miss Joe terribly, but VPR is growing on me and each day they have a really great feature in which a local Vermonter talks about what they like about living in Vermont and also what challenges they face as Vermonters. Plus, I can still hear Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and it is at 8:35 instead of 9:03 so I don’t have to make myself late to work in order to hear it.

One thing that has come as a bit of a surprise to me is the amount of weather reporting that goes on here, especially in the Montpelier area. The weather update has a very special name in Central Vermont. It is called the “Eye on the Sky”, but it should be called “8 Million Eyes on the Sky” because there is a break about every five or ten minutes for a weather report. At first I couldn’t believe how frequently I was hearing about cold fronts and high pressure zones. These reports are no joke! It’s almost like listening to an audio farmer’s almanac. And somehow each new report is different from the last! Now it’s become something that just sort of fades into the background. Joe Burke always just says the temperature and whether or not their is any precipitation in the forecast, and that is pretty fine with me. Living in the Bay Area you get used to ever-changing weather and you just carry layers and waterproof items with you. You expect fog in the morning that burns off right as you are getting to work and rolls back in right when you are leaving. You can rely on it being sunny and 60 in the Mission and foggy and 48 in the Sunset.

Well, from what I can tell, Vermont also has it’s fair share of micro-climatic action. It seems like it’s always about 10 degrees colder in Cabot than in Montpelier and someone at work told me about this one spot just north of Cabot that gets more snow than any surrounding area. It often happens that it is snowing in that one spot of about a .25 mile radius and nowhere else. There are little spots like that all over San Francisco, but there the snow is fog. At our old place in Noe Valley we would always feel blessed because the fog would often form a fortress in the sky about 3 blocks west of us and leave us standing in the sun. Now, that doesn’t mean the wind didn’t kick us in the pants.

The interesting thing about the “Eye on the Sky” is that it broadcasts from a place called the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, which is about 20 minutes northeast of Cabot. It turns out that this is where Zutano did a little retreat in honor of mud season this year and fortunately it happened my first week so that I got to go. Another interesting tidbit is that Tom’s middle name happens to be “Fairbanks” and it turns out that, indeed, these are the Fairbanks he is related to Mr. Thaddeus Fairbanks invented some sort of scale that he is very well known for and you can read below a little bit about him in the photos below. On a side note, I’m going to try to convince Tom to name our future son and/or farm animal Thaddeus because I have fallen in love with that name.

I cannot wait to take Tom to this place. It is an amazing treasure trove of taxidermied animals set up in various dioramic displays in addition to artifacts collected from all over the world including something as crazy as “bug art”. Yes, art made out of thousands of small bugs. There is a sweet little planetarium upstairs and all the Zutano employees got to experience a show about the night sky that brought all of us back to 3rd grade. The Eye on the Sky guy is in the basement of this museum. Sadly, I did not have enough time to go down there and introduce myself but I feel I know him already now that his voice has become a steady part of my morning and evening. I leave you with some photos of from the museum.