I am barely awake enough to write.. but I’ll try to get something down before falling asleep.   We woke to snow again this morning. Not that I’m complaining, I like it.. it’s another chance to write Sam’s name in the snow. Chai and I went for an early morning run. Chai’s not bee feeling that great.. she ate something bad.. we thought it might have been a rock.. and she’s been moping about for a few days. Diane took her to get x-rayed.. she has something in there.. but not a rock.  The vet said just to feed her very little and wait.. this too will pass…   Anyway, she seems to be on the mend so we had a great run. At the end she circled back to ‘talk’ to the Barlow’s dogs. They have a little dog, Cider..

Who always barks at me and tries to chase me away with her teeth barred… I don’t know what it was today, but I wasn’t in the mood to be bossed around by a 15 pound dog.. so I barred my teeth, got down on all fours and chased her across the lawn I think I even foamed at the mouth a little. Cider could tell that I was crazy. and  capable  of anything . I’ve never seen a dog run away that fast..  I felt guilty abut it all day.. but no one else messed with me all day… grrrrrrr

   Around lunchtime, I left work an headed up to South Hero to look at the computer controlled milling machine I mentioned in yesterday’s blog.  I net it’s current owner, T, and he gave me a quick tour. It’s a thing of beauty (to me at least).. it’s capable  of doing all sorts of cool stuff like sign making, engraving.. cutting, copying, even carving photographs into wood. Homer and I are trying to figure out how to make this work. It’s too big for our house, I’d love to buy it  for one  of our local schools (e.g. CHMS or MMU)  providing I could get access to it when I needed it.. If anyone out there thinks they know how to make that happen, please  let me know.   

   One of my main reasons for making the schlep to South Hero was to get a picture of the machine for Homer..  I whipped out my camera.. but it told me there was no memory card..  Sure enough the memory card was missing.. what a mystery.. Anyway, T offered to send me a picture.. which he did.. Here’s the Shopbot.. isn’t it beautiful ?

I got home on the early side to find Max asleep on the couch, Gabe ready to go to a friends house for a birthday and the memory card to my camera stuck in the computer.. I yanked it out and stuck it back n the camera.. and found the following pictures.. so it was worth it.. This is Max, Scott and Mason playing with a fresnel magnifying sheet.. strange boys

Diane and I headed to our friends Bill and Gina’s for a very nice dinner. Gina’s brother Kevin was there as were our good friends Keith and Ann .. Both family’s are great story tellers.. so it was a a really fun evening.

We spent a long time talking about the effect that Sam’s passing has had on the community. They showed us a wonderful writing piece that their son, Luke had written about Sam’s death and what Sam had meant to him. It was very nicely written and very moving. We’re going to post it on SamStones. Org when we get a soft copy . (please help us by posting you favorite Sam stories, poems, etc there)  

The conversation was good, the fire was cozy and before I knew it.. I was asleep on our hosts floor. Diane managed to wake me up enough to drive home and crawl into bed.. and hear I am.. Sam.. I don’t think I can stay awake for another seco…….

 -me

ps. Rememeber..to visit Micael Adams and Eddies Energy Bars at the beCause show at Grace Methodist in Essex tomorrow. Micahel is donating halfof his day’s take to Sam’s Fund.   Thanks you Michael !

Slow day. I decided to work at home because of the blizzard that kept threatening to happen. I worked solidly through the day but still managed not to finish the one thing I had set out for myself to do today….

    I had an interesting Karmic coincidence thing happen to me this morning . Last night my friend Homer and I were having dinner talking about how cool it would be to get a small computer controlled robotic 3D  milling machine (a ShopBot http://www.shopbottools.com/)  to use with kids and school groups to show them how they can  build things in wood and metal by drawing them on a computer. Early this  morning, Homer called me to tell me that there’s one in the Free Press classifieds this morning. You have to understand how rare these things are to understand just how weird  that was.. I suspect that there may only be a handful of these in the entire state.  Weirder still , the seller  turned out to be a friend of Homers from  Northern Vt that he’d lost track of about `1 years earlier. The seller, T, and his wife are retiring to live on a catamaran in the Caribbean. Before they do, they  wanted to find a good home for their ‘baby’.  I’m going to drive up to South Hero to take a look at it tomorrow.  Homer and I are trying to figure out some way of either affording it.. or resisting it.. Stay tuned…

   Anyway.. I passed most of the day pacing around in circles as I usually do when I’m on the phone.. I’ll bet I put in a couple of miles just walking around upstairs. Around five them members of Sam’s old band dropped by to practice.. Diane figured everyone was hungry.. so she did one  of those amazing snap her fingers thing and produced a feast for the ten of us.. (how does she do that)…

      It was fun having that many kids in the house.. though the discussion  with 8 teenaged boys at one table was anything but appetizing

Here’s Gabe pondering his next crude joke…

An Max trying to eat his spagetti off of a moving drink mixer

.. and Urion with a fork growing out of his shirt

Life is never dull around here.. it doesn’t always male sesnse.. but it’s never boring.

I spent a little time after dinner working on the SamStones website again. Again, we’re very eager to collect stories, poems, artwork, photos or anything you have to share bout Sam.. Please don’t be shy about giving us stuff. We really want to build up a collection.  I finally had had enough of computers (eeeek I’m on one again !) so I went up and tackled the huge basket of unmatched socks that had been collecting un top of our dryer… you probably have one of those too.. I spent a happy hour sorting and matching socks. As I did that.. I realized how many of these were once Sam’s socks which we all continue to wear..  You’re still all around us.. man..

-me

ps. Today is my baby  seeeeester Mary’s (SPG)  40^th birthday.. last time I remember her having a birthday she was 7.. time flies…  Everyone say ‘Happy Birthday SPG !  Here’s what she was doing about 4 weeks ago

Today was different than I expected. Yesterday I felt like I was over programmed and overwhelmed. Today I felt like I was almost back at full strength. It’s so strange not being able to predict how much energy or focus I’m going to have on a given day. It’s always an interesting surprise. Today I had several opportunities to express my opinion in front of large groups of people.. for some reason I was in the mood to do it.. and it felt good to talk passionately about technical stuff. I can feel myself getting a little more excited about my work each day. What was even better was that I managed to have several non-hurried deep personal conversations about family, about Sam and about how I was doing with friends from work. Each time I reminded myself to slow down and make the time to have the conversation I wanted.. not the conversation that my meeting schedule thought I could afford. . My work day was good partially because I was looking forward to what I was doing after work. I’d arraigned to meet my friend Homer at UVM to see a cool set of machines for scanning and ‘printing’ 3D objects. . Homer brought two of his buddies, Eben and Carter (who is a chimney sweep.. so very good luck !) .

We all met at UVM around 6:30. We tracked down my good friend Victor and he took us down to see the equipment. UVM has had the 3D printer for about 2 years.. it’s a very cool piece of equipment that can print and 3D solid object. The machine can convert anything you can draw on your computer in 3d inot a real live object in a few short hours.

The cool new addition is a 3D scanner that can take any small object and scan it into a 3D model on the computer. Victor just got the machine running and is still experimenting with it. . He wanted to give us a demo so I asked him to scan in a SamStone. First, I put the SamStone in the scanner..

then the thing scans it with several Laser beams..

Then it turns the object a little and scans the object again. In the end you have a 3D model that you can edit on your computer

 and eventually send to the 3D priner. In some ways it’s a very simple 3D copier.. After the demo… Homer and I headed over to India House for a very nice

dinner. I absolutely love talking to Homer.. he’s an artist, inventor and sign maker who has one of the most creative minds I’ve every encountered. He is both a wonderful storyteller and a wonderful listener.. a rare combination. We talked about our kids, our wives.. and about blowing stuff up.. which I what most guys talk about when they get together. Towards the end of the meal, Victor came and met us which was also very nice. It was a great guys night out….. I guess the 2nd in a week after yoga.. or I guess that was really a ‘guys night in’ since it happened at our house… I really appreciated that both Victor and Homer were so generous with their time. It was so fun talking to guys who really make things for a living.. hardware is so much more real than software !

    Speaking of generous.. I wanted to alert folks to an extreme act of generosity on the part of our friend Michael Adams. Michael is a freshman in college and has already started a company,, Eddie’s Energy Bars (www.eddiesenergy.com “The Best Handmade Energy Bar EVER!” , The company makes energy bars out of all natural ingredients. Michael is participating in an event called ‘beCause’ which brings together vendors of all sorts of items who will be donating 50% of their profits to worthy causes. Michael is donating 50 % of his profits for the day to Sam’s Foundation .. which is unbelievably generous. I encourage everyone to go check out the event… It’s this Saturday, April 14th from 9-4pm at the Grace United Methodist Church on Maple Street in Essex Junction….to the right of ADL Middle School. Admission is free, but donation of a canned good is appreciated.. Please show up and give Michael and the other vendors your support for this good set of causes. This community is full of really wonderful people Sam….. really wonderful.

-jc

Another busy day. I seemed to be running from the moment I woke up. First a real run with Diane and Chai.. then a mad dash for work when I realized that my 9:30 meeting actually started at 9: That first meeting was really a good one. A colleague of mine, J,  at work had set up the meeting to check in on me. He’d also suffered the loss of family members about 9 years ago and he wanted to talk to share some stories about our paths through healing. I did quite a bit of talking about Sam and my friend told me about his family’s experience.   It was particularly useful  to hear about some  of his struggles to get back to being effective at work. We had some similar stories relating to how difficult it is for your co-workers to gauge how ‘back at work’ you really are. He also observed that I appeared to be always ‘doing’ things around Sam’s memory.. He wondered if I was getting enough time to  think quietly. That really struck me as Diane had said a similar thing to me early this morning.. not that I was trying to ‘do’ to much.. but more that I need to take more time for myself to just ‘be’ .. I’m going to take both of these observations to heart and try to carve out some more quiet time for myself each week. .  It was really good talking to .J. it meant so much to me that he took the time to meet with me.

   From that point on the day was a swirl. I was double booked 2 to 3X at some times in the morning  and kept dragging myself from meeting to meeting late. I realized about lunch time that I was really not absorbing most of what I heard. The afternoon was considerably better. I was on a long conference call and had time to sit down and work on a work  project as I listened. Even there. I don’t seem to have the ability to multi-task as I once did. I really struggled to make progress  It really helps me understand what it must be like for Gabe and Max to try and get through a school day at this point.

   Before  I knew it It was 5:30 and I’d gotten a a fair amount of work done. not as much as I needed to get done.. but I had something to show for a day’s work.. I had to zoom to make it home by 6 because Diane had invited my Father’s group to the barn for a first-of-a-kind men’s’ yoga night. (Our slogan.. our schedules are flexible even if our bodies are not !) . It was a really nice evening. About 11 of us showed up.. Diane tailored the class perfectly to the group. It was a gentle class.. so gentle that I nearly dozed off twice.. It was so relaxing. It was so peaceful that no one wanted to get up after the class. Whene we were done, Diane invited everyone in for a really beautiful Greek dinner (Spanikopita, dolmari, hummus, olives, foccacia, feta, pita, salad.. yummy)  to thank them for all the help they and their families had given us over the last four and a half months. I know I’ve said it many times before.. Diane is wonderful. Anyway, we spent a good hour and a feasting and drinking beer. Way to much fun for a week night.      

   Everyone drifted off around 8:30 in time for the second night of family movie watching in a row. We spent this evening reviewing some of the finer dramatic moments of ‘Tenacious D – the pick of destiny’.. it is so stupid. Irreverent and downright idiotic  that it’s worth watching multiple times. I’ve decided in my next life I want to be Jack Black.

    I’m now too tired to keep my eyes open  now. I’m wondering how I’ll ever be prepared for my 7:30 AM conference call tomorrow morning.. or the 9:00 project presentation I’m supposed to  make tomorrow…   I am such a slacker.. I can’t figure out why that isn’t worrying me more…

   Anyway.. tiem for bed.. I love you family   I love you Sam.

-me…