Washington Irving may be best-known for his classic tales of a horseman sans head and a guy who slept for 20 years - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, respectively - but he wrote a heck of a lot more than that, much of it quite worthy of 21^st-century minds.

That's why I'm excited to hear that the Metropolitan Playhouse is showcasing a production of Irving's The Devil and Tom Walker, conceived by Yvonne Conybeare. Opening night is tomorrow (Friday), and the play continues Thursdays through Sundays through May 18. Check out their web site for full details.

For those unfamiliar, TD&TW is Irving's version of a Faustian bargain - wealth for one's soul and the regret that follows such a momentous choice.

The Playhouse is a funky Alphabet City theater that "produces early American plays, new plays drawn from American culture and history, and plays from around the world that resonate with the American canon." Irving's work is certainly a sure fit.

Cute animals, scrappy border collies chasing geese and sheep every which way, wool shearing and spinning...what's not to love about Sheep-to-Shawl at Philipsburg Manor ? Well, if it rains the ground gets a bit soggy but other than that...

And of course, check out those newborn lambs. If that doesn't grab ya...

The big event is next weekend. So big Historic Hudson Valley has to host it over two days, April 26 and 27, cause there's a lot of sheep to be sheared and a lot of people that like watching that happen. Keeping with the historic nature of Philipsburg Manor, everything is done using 18^th-century techniques - no electric powered clippers here, the folks at Philipsburg leave that for the amateurs.

Besides the shearing, Sheep-to-Shawlers can see the entire process of making woolen cloth and participate in many stages of the process once the sheep are sheared: picking and carding the wool, spinning and dyeing the yarn, and weaving it into cloth. About the only thing you can't see is the final product being sold to a Bloomie's buyer. (Just kidding, no really.)

Please send me your cutest sheep-related photos from the event and we'll post the best ones here.

Electronic bugs be gone: Kykuit tour tickets are once again available online. The Rockefeller estate opens for the season on May 10 with a new, streamlined tour menu - Classic, Grand, Kids, Timesaver, and one the Kykuit gurus like to call "Selected Highlights." Pretty much everything up on that hill is a highlight, so I'm not sure how they select them. Good topic for a future entry. I'll track down the responsible party and find out.

In the meantime, you can read all about the various tours here. Slots for opening weekend, which coincides with Mother's Day, are already filling up, so if treating mom to a Kykuit jaunt is in your plans, you may want to solidify them now.

What's up there, you ask? Way too much to get into in one blog entry, but, for starters, a six-story stone mansion, formal gardens, classical art, modern art, and the valley's best views of the Hudson.

Historic Hudson Valley's kick-off event of the season, Hands-on Heritage Crafts at Van Cortlandt Manor , drew a big crowd April 5-6 looking to go to the work the old-fashioned way. And that they did. We had youngsters churning butter, breaking flax, even tin smithing! Adults got in on the acts, too, more images of that to follow.

That weekend's weather did a bit of a flip-flop. The forecast called for grey skies and general sadness on Saturday, with decent sun and warmth on Sunday. Ended up sorta the opposite. Oh well, either way it was a nice kick-off for the spring season. Were you at the event? Did you churn, smith, or sew anything? Let us know.