Monthly Archives: March 2008

Saturday night – cutting

I had a cool productive day.. lots of different low key stuff. Before I described it.. I  had a few pictures from Thursday and Friday that I just found on my camera.. Figure I’ll drop them in just to catch up..    Here’s Thursday’s breakfast. I woke up dreaming about the guacamole that Ann Marie had given me.. Diane had made waffles.. so I made a waffle/guacamole sandwich , yum..

.. and washed it down with a favorite concoction from my youth.  Orange juice and grape juice mixed. I think I’ve descried that in my blog before.. My brother and I were sure that drinking orange juice and grape juice mixed with a green tinker toy would give you super strength. I think it worked on Thursday.. The day was good.

A high point was lunch with friend Mark.. We had a ton of work stuff to talk about.. but it turns out we spent most of our sushi time talking about Eckhardt Tolle’s ’A New Earth’ book.

The rest of Thursday was pretty low key.. Gabe and I worked together to mount a different set of bindings on his newish board. He really managed to shred his old board this year. I  remember I just put the SamStone map as a blog entry that night.  

Friday was also pretty nice.. I had an early meeting.. I had to leave while Diane was out wiht the dogs so I left her a message with a cut up strawberry.

My meeting was with my good friend Jolly and his co-worker/friend Scott.   Jolly and I went to grad school together.. which we realized to our mutual amazement was 20 years ago !!!!!!!!.  He’s such a great guy.   It was my first time meeting his friend Scott..   also a very nice guy. Scott’s sister passed away 2 years ago.. so we spent some time talking about her and about Sam. Midway through breakfast we were joined by our mutual friend Scott T… We were brimming with Scotts…

The rest of Friday was also pretty good.. I had meetings through the day.. then came home early around  5:30.. a first !. Diane and I had a quiet night at home while Gabe was up at the mountain. I sat around and played around with the text analytics on my blog text..That’s the stuff I wrote about last night. So far no one else thinks it’s as fun as I do.. but I love figuring out what I talked about and when that long hard year.

That brings us to today…   I slept late and stumbled downstairs to find that Ratticus.. our resident house rodent had attacked again. We found a whole pack of oatmeal open and dragged halfway down a whole in the floor. I’m thinking of way to catch him/her. if for nothing else to get a picture.

We had a bunch of folks come through today just to say hi. Kevin. Matt, Sumner, Susan, Silas, Brad, Mike,  Tyler, Tom, Heather (?), Liz, Abbot, Phoebe , Chris, Mo-awaka, Mason, .. and later on Max, Emma and Jessie. it was nice to have so many folks around..   It turns out that we have managed to build up a surplus of American Cheese slices.. so we made sure no one left without a piece of cheese.

I spent the morning doing odd jobs and repairs around the house. I fixed the drawer under all the sam pictures. It fell apart all of a sudden this week.

I also fixed the garage door opener, a few of the kitchen cabinets and the Hoosier

It felt good to pretend to be Handy..    Gabe and Ian went up to the mountain.. So Diane and I just hung out.. We went for a run.. then did some yoga.. then took the dogs for a good walk. Chai’s still nursing a lame paw so we had to take it easy.. Just a wonderfully lazy day.

Late in the afternoon I decided to set up my new torch. It really hadn’t been warm enough to mess around with it. I spent an hour or so reading all the safety material. By the end of that I was sure I was going to blow myself and/or the barn to bits when I sparked this up. It was funny remembering te reverse threads on the acetylene lines.. you have to suppress a lifetime of ” righty-tighty, lefty loosey ” 

Sumner came buy (driving !) with Susan just as I was about to try my first cut.. so he took some pictures for me.. Here’s the first fuel only flame.. whoa.. BRIGHT !

I added the O2 and finally got the thing adjusted to cutting. I got the steel just to kindling and hit the cutting bar.. It’s such a cool shower of sparks as it cuts.

The flame moved through the thick steel like it was butter.. I didn’t think it was cutting until my new metal valentine almost fell out.. I started to pick it up.. but it was still glowing.. so I kicked it into the snow.. There was something dramatic about a red hot heart sinking into the snow in hissing plume of steam !

Max, Jessie and Emma showed up just as I was doing my cutting. Max and Jessie are on school break. Emma is off this semester.They all decided to come up and visit !. . I was able to catch Max’s first meeting of the puppy ! 

They seem to be natural litter-mates..   Here’s Diane, Max and Satori viewed through the metal scrap I had just cut the heart from. .

It’s soo good seeing Max, Jessie and Emma…!!!!!

Soon after they got here some of their friends arrived and we hung out talking all night.

It’s only midnight. and most of those kids are drifting towards sleep. I think I better do the same.  It’s been a peaceful day.. I’m grateful for that.
G’nite all. G’nite Sam
-me

ps. One other thing I did today was play around with a program that takes photographs and represents them using colored  text.    I’m still trying to master it.. But heres a first try.. A picture of Sam using the words “we love you, Sam” . Pretty cool.. no ?

Friday evening – words

OK… so this may seem either inspired or pointless to you.. but let me tell you what I did last night instead of sleeping.   At work yesterday, I had been experimenting with a new data visualization tool that IBM is making available to anyone. It’s called ManyEyes.. and it’s a pretty cool concept. Anyone can upload their own data to the site..  there are a ton of very interesting pre-created visualization tools which you can use to explore the data. You can also create your own visualizations  and upload them. The idea is to allow folks to share data and share in it’s analysis, If that doesn’t sound like fun to you… then… you probably shouldn’t read any further…
     Anyway.. I was exploring the site looking at some of the very cool ways that folks had created to crunch and display data.. Many of the visualizations are dynamic.. that is you can explore them interactively..  many of them are beautiful, too. While most of the analysis and stuff was for processing numerical data, I found a few visualization for text analytics.  When I saw that,  I did what any red blooded geek would do at 12:30 in the morning, .. I thought of sources of large amounts of text data that I could analyze..   Of course !.. My blog.. I decided to run these analytics on the a years worth of my log entries starting from the first day, 3 days after Sam died. . I found one of my blog archives which had each of the first years 365 entries in web page format (HTML).then I figured out some processing on how to remove the  the pictures, the headers and the rest of the HTML formatting.. Then I concatenated it all into a singe dataset and uploaded it to ManyEyes. 

I then started looking at the data.. what would it tell me ?   I’m not even sure what I was looking for.. I felt like one of those kabalah mystics who looked through old religious texts looking for secrets in the patterns of letters and words.  The first thing I learned was that In that first year, I had written exactly 708,576 words (including punctuation).. Now.. that alone was pretty interesting .  I then started looking at word frequency…  One tool shows you a ’tag cloud’ of word frequency. The larger the word, the more it occurred.. ’Sam’ was the word I typed most frequently last year… I wrote Sam’s name in my blog 3,394 times in 365 days.. and said his name to myself 1000 times that as I wrote . That  makes sense… and is somehow .. i don’t know.. comforting ?   What else did I say frequently ?

Diane. Max, Gabe, 
Love,  Great Friends,
House, Cool. Work,
Night, Today…

Sounds like Haiku.

Then I looked at the frequency of 2 word phrases..   Sam’s death, Sam died, Sam’s passing.. all hard things to say.. but I said them often.. Good friend, felt good, cell phone… happy birthday also had high counts..  I know it’s funny.. but the deeper I looked at this the more I could see how it captured my year.. I can’t explain it.. but if you’re interested, You can look at the data yourself here  ( Never mind the MySpace anti phishing warning ) , Try entering any word or 2 word phrase and look at it’s frequency . It’s kinda fun.

There’s also a word-tree analytics tool that I tried.. It generates a concordance tree…  .. kinda like you’d find in a bible reference or quotations book. The idea is , you type in a word.. then it groups all the next words that occur after that word in your text .. and it groups all the next words that occur after that, etc.. for all the text.. The net is, you can look up any word or  phrase.. and understand its context going forward or backward.. In some way, it’s a way of looking at all the stories I’ve told  over the last year and seeing how they are threaded  together .  Maybe an illustration would help.. Say I type in ’Max; it shows me all the possible words that follow the word ’Max’ in my entire blog..

Let’s say I chose the word ’And’  .. I then see all the phrases that can come after ’Max and… ;

Now I select Gabe and see all the things that Max and Gabe did together in my blog.

You can follow this all the way down to a single sentence.. .. At any point you can ’shift click; to start the tree search over at your current word..

You can run the process in reverse and look at all the stories that end with a  word or phrase.. like ’Friends of Sam’..   You can try this process yourself by clicking  here.

So… I find this  amazing.. if your brain works like mine..   If you’re brain is wired  differently, you might be asking ’what’s the point’ ? What did it tell me ? That that first year without Sam was unimaginably hard ? That we had wonderful friends and family ? That stuff I already knew .  What I    know is that I got a great sense of peace thumbing through all this stuff.. I felt somehow that I’d captured an important and heartbreaking part of my life in day to day stories.. and that somehow woven into  those stories were a deeper story about grieving, healing, growing, aging, loving, crying.. all that..   I’m sure this means alot more to me than it will to anyone else .. but then.. who’s blog is this anyway 🙂

Gotta run.. love to you all (the word ’love’ appears 1396 times !) Gnite Sam
-me ( which occurs 3688 times)

ps.. The word ’I’ occurs 16,710 times !!!!!!!  .. whoa.. what an ego !)

Wednesday night – night riders

Tonight was the final Night Riders skiing and riding competition up at Bolton. We really have come to love these Wednesday night’s up on the mountain.. freezing our tails.. then sitting in the bar talking with friends. We’ve been doing them for years.. Since Sam’s passing they’ve been a really important link between us and the mountain,

Because of the time change it was light at the start of the competition fort he first time. It was cool being able to see the kids doing the rails in the light. First guy we ran into was Alex in his homemade Sam shirt.

Gabe’s competition tonight was  a three part jam.. first on the ’A’ rail, second  on the down-flat-down.. or ’Sam Rail’ as the call it.. and third on the big jump higher up the mountain.

Here is Gabe and crew getting ready for the first jam on the ’A’ rail.

Here come ’da judges

Diane grabbed this shot of  Gabe getting some big air on the ’A’ rail . He looked good !

As soon as the sun went down the wind whipped up like crazy. t was snowing and blowing a full blizzard.. at one pint is was over 30 mph winds.. Even though it must have been about 20 degrees, the wind chill was something fierce.. it felt like it was below zero !  The blowing snow made it look like some sort of movie set out there.

The second the last jump was done we all ran and slid down the mountain for the warmth of the bar.   While I was sliding down one of the hills, I  think I lost one of the glass SamStones I’d brought up as part of the Sam Cohn award we were giving tonight. If I really did lose it on the mountain, that’s pretty cool !

When we got to the bar, Ann Marie presented me with a bag of her very yummy guacamole.. 2 weeks ago I’d commented on how much I’d liked the ’guac’ she’d made once at her house.. so she brought me one.. Note .. the halo around Ann Marie is not just because she’s an angel.. it’s because my camera was still frozen.

It was great hanging out with friends tonight. It’a bit strange being in a bar for me right now.. I’m trying this ayurvedic diet for a month.. and that calls for no spicy food and no alcohol.  .. two of the things you generally consume in a bar..It’s also a little sad knowing that this was the last of our Wednesday night  gatherings for the season.. Still, we’ll see our friends through the year..  

At about 8:30 all the kids gathered in the lunge for the final prizes..   Zach started the whole night out with a short tribute to Sam.. it was really nice.. . He talked about Sam.. and asked the group to give it up for Sam’s memory.. They all cheered. It brought tears to my eyes.

Zach went through the evening results and the season results..im Ferrel’s Chiropractic practice donated prize money for the top three finishers in all categories. That is mighty generous !!! It was great seeing all these kids recognized for their performance. . It was tough getting pictures from where I was.. I did capture some of the prize winners..   Like Brit placed 3rd in women’s boarders.

And Caroline placed 2nd in women boarders.

Gabe got first (!)   in 12 and under boarders..  He won a new board !. I couldn’t get a good picture of him picking it up..

.. but grabbed a shot of him with it at home a bit later.   We’re so proud of that boy !!!!

Luke won 1st in 13-17 boarders…

The last award for the night was the new annual Sam Cohn award for the skier or boarder  with the most spirit. Zach took nominations then used the ’applause-o-meter’ approach for picking the winner. This year’s winner was Ellis !!!  He took home $250 bucks for that..

After the awards, the fray headed out to the balcony for the booty toss.. It was mayhem as usual.. I went and grabbed the car. On the way out I noticed that someone had slapped a Sam Forever sticker on Bolton’s bus.. I don’t approve of vandalism.. but I thought that was pretty cool !

I could feel Sam so strongly up on the mountain tonight. I know he would have liked how everything played out up there. he’d be so proud of Gabe.. …
Ride free my son
-me

P.s. When I was grabbing a picture off Gabe’s camera I came across this picture he’d taken of Satori the other night. I love this picture.

Tuesday night – dark

Oy… a suprisingly tough day for no particular reason. Sometimes a saddness just sweeps over me and I’m almost paralyzed. I know I just need to be with it.. that it will pass.. I know it’s just part of the greiving process… but.. it still sucks.  

While I was trying to find something to read to help me shake this mood.. I stumbled across this animated poetry by lily Collins.  I like reading his stuff sometimes when I’m blue. Evidently he must have asked folks to animate some of his works.. There are a bunch of them on YouTube.. like this one

Or this one

Or this one

I find these things pretty cool… because it’s using animatied YouTube clips to promote poetry. in much the same way that I’d like to  use short animated sequences to promote science..   Maybe I should get going on that…

What do you think Sam ?
-me