Yearly Archives: 2008

Wednesday evening – leftovers

All I have for this eveing is leftovers. I managed to have a completely uneventful day. The first I can remember in several months. In fact.. Im still in my jammies and it’s 8PM. I worked all day at home.. on the phone from 8 until 6:30PM got lots done.. but nothing memorable to report… For that reason I’ll resort to a couple of images left over from yesterday and the day before  that I would like to share before I forget..  

So.. Monday.. on my way to work I drove behind a pickup with a giant stuffed (real) bear…   it was the most bizarre sight..

I guess the guy was just exercising his ’right to bear arms’…  (ugh)


I had a good meeting at Champlain on the next steps on our joint project.. and only then realized that I was not wearing green. Like friends Sara Ray and Ann had done.. 

 

Well to be fair.. I thought  I was  wearing green.. but it was pointed out to me that what I thought was green was actually brown. It’s times like that when you realize that we really don’t see things the same.

On my way back to work (still on Monday)  I took a quick detour to get a pair of shoes. Diane had pointed out that my old ones were getting worn down to the point that it might be messing with my hips and back.. I generally don’t notice things like that.. but.. sure enough.. check this out.. It’s a good visual metaphore for the wear and tare on my soul over the last year (ugh again)  Any more and you would have to start calling me Eileen.  (ugh yet again)   .

I got home in time for Diane’s yoga class.. then an impromptu St Patty’s day feast.. again.. all green.. Pesto noodles and salad..   It was good.. but I’m eating other colors the rest of the week..

Now.. here are some shots from my bizarre  pointless travel day yesterday.. It started with running into  Sawyer and  Mac-and-cheese-Deb at the airport. at 5AM Sawyer was on his way to Mammoth out west. Deb had just slipped him a SamStone when I ran into them. You can see it in the picture

Here’s a blurry shot of us landing at Philly at sunrise.. I rarely see sunrise unless I’ve stayed up.. so it was worth noting.

On the trip down to Dallas (or so I thought at the time)/.  saw this cool ’S’ in the sky… A Sam echo

As I recounted yesterday.. I never made Dallas.. instead I spent a strange 6 housrs stranded in the Little Rock airport on work calls. It gave me a chance to plant our first SamStone in Arkansas, though.

The woman on the right is Jen.. the most wonderful gate attendant who handled all four of the stranded planes that flew into Little Rock unexpectantly. As you can imagine she was putting up with some pretty irate people.. She remained nice, helpful .. and best of all, funny, through our 6 hour acquaintance..

Here’s the scene at mid day.. the photo doesn’t do justice to the level of chaos. This was Bedlam.. It was seriously fun to watch.   At one point I went and bought about 6 bags of candy (small hershey bars, milky ways. reeses cups) and opened them on the counter to calm down the crowd. It actually worked !!!!

Here’s the ambulance that met our flight when we were stopped at take off by the guy in back who was short of breath. I’ve been thinking about him all day.. I hope he’s doing OK ..

And that, my friends, clears out my backlog of pictures… Ahh.. one more thing I want to pass on is something Jessie showed me the other night. It’s called StumbleUpon and I think it’s going to destroy my productivity completely. It’s basically a thing for suggesting web content that you might like based on a profile you set.. It then lets you rate content and sharpens it’s recommendation preferences. It’s amazing.. So far I’ve found stuff like:

Ball toss It’s hard to describe but cool
The Integrator:  A program that does free symbolic integrals on the web
Special numbers A list of the special property of common numbers
Blue ball machine Blue ball weirdness
Equation Sheet The ultimate formula cheat sheet
Future me Send a note to your future self
Tower of bears Bears falling and stacking
Disney leftovers Too shocking to describe !

It’s addicting. Help.. stop me before I stumble again !!!!!!!!!!!

I gotta go.. nite folks.. nite Sam
-me

Monday night – Thoughful St. Patty’s day

Happy St. Patty’s day folks. .. the day that everybody’s Irish. Even Sam had a bit of it in him.. he loved the band Flogging Molly. He had a Flogging Molly shirt that was on of his favoirtes.. he wore it all the time. Here’s a picture of him wearing it that Sam R. took.

And here’s a cool version that Sam R made of the same photo

What a beautiful, beautiful kid

All day long I’ve been humming a song by them.. It’s called ’If I ever leave this world alive” . Max played a beautiful version of it on the night of Sam’s Celibration at Memorial Auditorium..


If I ever leave this world alive
by Flogging Molly

If I ever leave this world alive
I’ll thank for all the things you did in my life
If I ever leave this world alive
I’ll come back down and sit beside your
feet tonight
Wherever I am you’ll always be
More than just a memory
If I ever leave this world alive

If I ever leave this world alive
I’ll take on all the sadness
That I left behind
If I ever leave this world alive
The madness that you feel will soon subside
So in a word don’t shed a tear
I’ll be here when it all gets weird
If I ever leave this world alive

So when in doubt just call my name
Just before you go insane
If I ever leave this world
Hey I may never leave this world
But if I ever leave this world alive

She says I’m okay; I’m alright,
Though you have gone from my life
You said that it would,
Now everything should be all right

She says I’m okay; I’m alright,
Though you have gone from my life
You said that it would,
Now everything should be all right
Yeah should be alright

I found this scratchy recording of the Band singing it on YouTube.. I hope you enjoy it.. I can’t get it out of my head tonight !

All I’ve got heart for at the moment..
folks

Gnite folks.., Gnite all
-me

Sunday night – green

It actually felt like spring today… gray, warmish (mid 30’s)., overcast with occasional snow..   Diane and I took a morning run.. we had a plastic garbage bag with us.s o we did a little spring cleaning on the last 1/4 mile of our road.. The melting snow always leaves it’s bounty of crud. Note that in mys experience. Budweiser is the preferred beer of litterers

After that I took Chai and ’Tori out for a walk..   Unfortunately Chai bolted before I could get her shock color off and got a nasty shock as she left the yard. She gave me a lok that said.. “you bonehead” . On top of that.  Chai’s still got a hurt paw.. so we didn’t go fast..  The two dogs are actually playing together a little now..
’Tori goes where ever Chai goes.. And Chai is tolerating it about 98 percent of the time at this point.

I love the places where the mudslides  from the rain have oozed over snow pack. t looks so cool.

One of my goals for today was to repair a Theremin, a piece of equipment from my show..  A Theremin is a musical instrument that you play by moving your hands in the air near it’s antenna’s. Your body’s capacitance changes the frequency of one of two otherwise matched oscillators.. You hear the small difference between the oscillators as a tone that varies with the nearness of your hands It’s got a cool other-worldly sound.. Think of the “eww-woo-oooo-wooo-ooooo-oooo” part at the beginning of the Beach Boys song ’Good Vibrations;… or the sound track for the Sci Fi classic “The day the earth stood still” ..   Theremins were created by a Russian engineer/musician named Lev Theremin back in the 1920’s..

Anyway.. I absolutely love debugging circuits. It’s one of the most absorbing and challenging brainteasers I know. It’s like doing detective work.. kooking for clues, forming hypothesis.. going down blind alleys.. and eventfully, i you’re lucky,  finding the culprit.

Aha.. here’s the culprit, a bad JFET .. probably eaten by a stray spark from one of the other high voltage pieces in my show..   It felt good to find the source of the problem. but where was I going to find an n-channel JFET in Vermont on a Sunday afternoon. The best I’d be able to do would be to order one on Monday and wait until Wednesday or Thursday for it to come.. .. and I need this to work on Thursday.. I decided to rummage around and see if I had a replacement. I felt it was pretty unlikely.. there are literally thousands of types of these small components.. and this type is pretty obscure and is rarely used anymore I wasn’t optimistic. .. But wouldn’t you know it.. the first drawer I reached into..there they were. It was a total fluke. I bought these as part of a going our of business sale in 1995.. I offered a guy 20 bucks for his whole supply of small parts.. and these were among them.  It would be like having your exotic sports car car break down in the desert and having the diner you stopped in have just the weird part you needed to fix your car being used a paperweight to hold down the lunch orders.. OK.. maybe it wasn’t that weird.. but that was the best analogy I could cook up.  .

Anyway. I popped the thing in, tuned it up and voila !. A very satisfying outcome..

At that point I came inside again.. Max, Emma, Jesse, Alex, Mason and Abbot had gone to Burlington to Victoria Secrets.. They were giving away girls underwear today.. so Jessie and Emma grabbed their panty posse and went .. Here they are modeling their wares..   OK.. so this IS a wierd picture…

The big event today that we’d decided to have a putluck tonight with only green food., It was really cool.. there were about 20 folks.. and about that many green dishes.

We had green mac and cheese.

Roasted brussels sprouts

Spanikopita

spinach salad

Pickles and green olives

Spinach bake

Green pasta salad

green pea soup

asparagus salad

pesto noodles

I made green eggs and ham in honor of Sam
apple, kiwi, grape salad

Mountain dew and green margarita mix to drink

Green jello

and finally green ice cream cream puffs from deb (yum !)

the kids took the couches and the grown0ups took the dining room.. it was fun !

And afterwards… video games and horror movies.. the end of a perfect day.

The dogs were happy when the house quieted down.. Here’s ’Tori with her foot in the food bowl..

.. and here she is drinking my tea before I could !

There are still a bunch of kids here.. but I need to sleep.. so I’ll end here. Happy ’s St. Patrick’s day eve.  Top of the evening to all of you. Gnite Sam !

-me

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 ?