The Vermont Muench Family Blog

After some studio fun we are done! Check out the final version of Marie!
Marie
Rachel Carter is singing, I am playing guitar, Neil is playing piano and his wife Julie is singing backing vocals.

When my father (seen here dunking a basketball in Fla.) asked me to write a song as a Christmas present for his friend Marie I was not feeling very creative. Thanks to one of my students, Rachel Carter, I remembered how much fun song writing is. Rachel helped with lyrics and her voice is so wonderful that I was glad to have her sing it. Within a week, we wrote and recorded "Marie." Neil Freeburn, the music teacher at Burr and Burton Academy, was a lot of help during the recording process. Listen to the rough demo ofMarie recorded with just my guitar and Rachel's vocals. It is rough, but fun to see where things started.

Gary Flandro spoke to the Space and Time class. He was the navigator and inspiration behind the Voyager project. Voyager was the first probe to visit and photograph the large outer planets. Read the article about his talk to our class. Geoff Marcy also spoke to the class via videoconference. Dr. Marcy's team has discovered over 120 planets around stars in our galaxy! His videoconference answered many questions that the students had about the techniques that his team uses to find planets. This is the second year that both men have talked to our class and I can't wait until next year! Check out the video tribute to Dr. Marcy, Dr. Flandro and the astronauts of Apollo 1. Marcy/Flandro video
(In the video you will see the men speaking to us and you will see photos of the work that they are doing). Here are clips of the two men actutually speaking to our class! Each clip is around five minutes, but it is worth the look. These were videoconferences so the quality is not perfect. Geoff Marcy. Gary Flandro.

What a wonderful time we had with our good friend Rich Millet as our host! Here are pictures of the view from our hotel, a picture from Ground Zero and pictures of us in front of the big Christmas tree. We had late dinner in Little Italy, went to a planetarium, saw FIDDLER, went to a piano concert, walked Times Square at midnight and even hit the ESPN zone! It was a great weekend!

17th Annual Mickey Mantle's Community Service Award Dinner & Auction this year benefiting The SAMFund. The SAMFund honored Ed Kranepool & Cal Ramsey for their outstanding community service and raised $110,000 for the SAMFund Grants & Scholarships Program. I was honored to be a guest of Sam Eisenstein for the premier of the SAMFund video that Brian Gawlik and I have been working on. It was an amazing night and I am glad that I made the trip down! Check out the video -- it is 12 minutes and very powerful. This is a wonderful cause to support!

It was certainly one of the most emotionally charged moments of a class that has many high points. Al Bean, the 4th man to walk on the moon, spoke to the Space and Time class in a phone call that I am sure none of us will forget. Captain Bean is an artist who paints Apollo missions. Check out the video that shows the landing on the moon (listen to the comments between Al and his good friend Pete Conrad. You will also see his wonderful paintings in the video. Al Bean video.

Andy Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon, spoke to our class. Here he is pictured with Al Bean, the 4th man to walk on the moon. His book is "based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with each of the twenty- three surviving moon voyagers, as well as those who contributed their brain power, training and teamwork on Earth." Andy has been an incredible resource and a lot of help making this class so special. Andy is a big-time author and one of the few people who has had access to all of the Apollo astronauts and people behind the scenes! I am really lucky to have Andy working with the class and the kids just love him! Check out the video tribute to Andy's visit.