Tough night. I’m sitting on the bed with Gabe who has some sort of stomach bug, poor guy. He has been  pretty miserable for the last hour or so, poor kid.  He seems to be sleeping now which is good. We’re supposed to be leaving tomorrow morning for a 3 day trip with friends to Killington.. But we’ll have to see how he feels in the morning. Gabe getting sick is only part of our trouble for tonight. Shortly before nine Gabe called us from Bolton to tell us his snowboard had been stolen ! What a bummer ! We’d just heard that there were 5 boards stolen yesterday. Gabe’s board is white with skulls on the bottom and is covered with ‘Sam Cohn’ and ‘Sam Forever’ stickers. It’s got to be pretty recognizable. It makes us really sad that someone would take a kids board, especially with the sentimental attachment of the stickers..  Even so.. it’s really no big deal in the cosmic order of things. Things are just things. Our resistance to stuff like this is pretty high at this point. (Gabe just woke up again.. it’s going to be a long night. It’s hard to seem him feeling so crummy).

It’s funny how good stuff comes in with the bad stuff. As we were waiting for Gabe to come down from the mountain with Jen, the members of Sam’s old band, Black Night Vengeance, came by. They’d spent the whole day in a studio recording some songs. The first thing they did after getting out of the studio was to come by to let us hear one of the cuts.. a song about Sam. It sounded phenomenal. . (I’ll  post it and the lyrics as soon as they get a mixed version. ) The guys said they definitely felt Sam there with them while they were recording.. it meant so much to us that they’d make the trip out here at 10PM on a Saturday night to share that with us.

  Speaking of sharing.. Max called tonight from NYC. He was watching the lunar eclipse tonight. We couldn’t see it up here.. I’m glad that he was able to watch it. I think he may even have gotten a picture of it. Max said he’s having a good time being back at Pratt. I know he misses his friends there. Having Max back in NYC even for the week makes me realize how much I would have missed him if he’d gone back to Pratt full time this semester. None of us was ready for him to have done that.

As eventful as the evening has been, the day was pretty quiet.   Four or five kids spent the night here last night after gymnastics.  They all hung out here most of the day which was fun. Around 12, Avery came over with idea of something she wanted to weld.. She’s seen a metal tree sculpture when she and her family were in NYC this week. She brought over a drawing she’d made of it. She and I spent several hours figuring out how make it. We cut 12 18″ lengths of 6mm rod stock and bent them using a torch. We then used the wood stove to anneal part of the wire so we could bend them into branchy looking shapes. We then bundled them all together and Avery welded them together. She’s a better welder than me at this point.  The final product looks a lot like her drawing.   I like making stuff with Sam’s friends.. When I’m doing it.. I think about making stuff with Sam. My workshop is full of projects we started together.  Somehow working with his friends feels like an extension of working with him.

   The last project we were working on was the wall of flattened Red Bull cans.. I’m going to finish that project for you Sam. Want to help ?

-jc

ps. The bread at breakfast yesterday had a hole in the shape of an ‘S’ .. Strange but true….