All posts by johncohn

Thursday night – N-Y-E

Happy New Year’s Eve folks…
     It’s always hard for me to figure out what to write on ‘big’ days like new years eve. There’s always a set of expectations around holidays. ore milestones. special time to remember, to reflect. The thing is every day has that kind of significance to me now.. it’s just that mos days don’t have a name. This is the 4th new years since Sam’s passing.. Diane pointed out that last week I’d written it was our 3rd xmas SSP (since sam’s passing) when it was actually the 4th year.  That;s not a mistake of forgetfulness.. it’s the opposite. Time perspective for us is very different for me now.   I think htat’s why I’m having trouble seeing this as a turning of a decade. The decade itself seems fractured in half.. The early half was so different..  The first half had Y2k, 9/11, some great family trips, the second half.. so many milestones.. and then of course, sam’s passing. I still can’t call any year good or bad.
   That said, we had a ton of fun this year..   my education talk at the geek conference in Feb, The 58 days in the colony wiht Diane showing up, the show airing, burning man., the cusp conference. making those movies, jumping in the lake in december.. All fun.. all heading in the same direction about making science fun.  Another thing to note is that this year marked the longest time I’d not been out of North America since I was 19.
 My family is doing well.. .my folks, my inlaws, our siblings, cousins etc are all doing well.   I feel grateful , optimistic, excited and peaceful as this year comes to an end.. I feel surrounded by fun and love and cool challenges .    

I’m calm and hopeful as the new year comes.. I guess I couldn’t ask for more right now..

I hope te new year is interesting and fun for all of you

Happy new year folks
We miss you so much sam
-me

 

Tuesday night – inbox

I just love this time of the year.. I’m officially working this week because I burned all of my vacation doing The Colony. The thing is hardly anyone else is working… so I’m pretty much on my own. Not that I mind that..  it means that I can catch up with all those good intentions.. paramount  among those is cleaning out my email. 
 Like most folks, I get a ton of email..  for example. As I typed this, I went off and did a little data mining and found the following email counts for the month :

The ramp down in email count reflects folks flagging attention to the real world as the holidays approach . Today was relatively quiet.. I got 120 emails… not counting spam Compare that  176 on 12/10. And December is definitely the quietest email month.. ( even if April is the cruelest) .   Not all of these need answering.. but

most need to be read. .. and quite a few of those need at least short

responses. I sometimes wonder how we have time to do anything else. 


And.. for one glorious moment.. I got down to zero emails in my inbox.. zero … nada .. zip .. ..   It was the electronic equivalent to a clean desk, or an organized

closet.. It was magical, positively transformational in fact . I said

to myself in that moment that I would never again let my email backlog grow out of control..  !

 but .. then I looked a few minutes later and it was already filling up..

I wish you all luck in your new years intentions..  We can dream, can’t we ?
Nite folks, Nite Sam
-me

Sunday night – Latkes… again

Another great, slow, peaceful day..   Last night My folks took us all out to dinner to Mexicali.. the official restaurant of the post-post apocalypse in Vermont. I always love seeing the guys there.. After

They  left this morning.. It was nice having them up here. Before they left., I had to share this Billy Collins poem that I came across last night. with my mom. . It felt appropriate..

The Lanyard – Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.


Here’s a recording of Collins reading that poem

The re..st of the day was pretty uneventful:.. some house cleaning, a sloggy run through the melting snow with the dogs, a trip to the town garage to pick up sand… 

 I also managed to build a little cool contraption with an arduino processor that wirelessly checks on the the number of hits on this blog. Originally I had the little thing send a twitter message every time it checked.. … which dumped a bunch of cryptic messages to me twitter and facebook feeds. It’s only when you do soemthing really dumb like that. that you find out who’s whatching oyur feeds.. (sorry abotu that folks)

Tonight was a special treat, Max accidentally had a party.. it didn’t ‘t start out as a party.. Diane had offered to make Max some post-Chanukah latkes because he’d been at school for the holiday. then Mason showed up, then elsa.. then raye and josh and .. then .. Merideth came in from eastern VT.. and mariah and her folks showed up.. then Brendon.. It was pretty festive.. the house filled with proto-grownups and the air heavy with frying potatoes.. Yum…


Ugh… just looked t the time.. its nearly 1:30… Programming always makes me lose track of time.. I better hang up now..

Nite folks.. Nite Sam !
-me

Saturday evening – Jonesville Riots


Boxing day. Very sleepy rainy/sleety day.. Aside form a good walk this morning with Diane and the dogs, I didn’t go outside … didn’t even go upstairs more than twice.. I sat on the couch and hung out with my folks who are up visiting..  Even fell asleep there.. I think my brain is trying to catch up from the last couple of weeks..

One thing I did do was thumb through a book on our town that  I’d gotten Diane for Christmas. It’s called  “Richmond, Vermont: A History of More than 200 Years” by Harriet Riggs, a woman we know from here. Harriet had talked about writing this book for all 25 years that we’ve known her, and she finally did it.. She did an excellent jb capturing the history of our small town..  It’s full of pictures, maps and stories about folks from the earliest days until the present. It’s great looking back at through this and seeing the grandparents and great grandparents of our friends .

Our little neighborhood… Jonesville,  and our house are mentioned several times.. Here’s a picture Hariet found of our house from 1904…  You can see several differences compared to today:

– the weather vane is different
– the tower has shutters rather than windows
– you can see the old staircase.which which has since been removed through the right front downstairs window
– the windows over the door are staggered and different than they appear today.
– the front door is different…

Here’s another picture… which I think I must have given Harriet. it shows Joensville right after the 1927 flood. You can our house in the left center of the picture. You can also see the old toy factory washed off of it’s foundation in the foreground. The building is gone.. but the foundation is still there in our neighbors’ back yard.   ………………..

To the right you can see the place that the old covered bridge was before this flood. The story goes that THE bridge washed out and was swept own the Winooski where it crashed into the Richmond covered bridge and took it out too.

The stories in the book are pretty amazing. I just learned something new about our little town of Jonesville (pop 400 ?) According to the book on the 1st of July in 1846 a group of 200 to 300 Irish railway worker started a riot here because they had not been paid by the railway.   They dug trenches across the main street (now Us Route 2) to block all travel between Waterbury and Burlington.. That was a big deal because that road was the only path through the gap that the Winooski cuts through the Green Mountains.  When pay was still not forthcoming. They took one of the railway bosses, Henry Barker,  hostage and held him in the Jones Hotel (which burned in 1980) while his partner, S.R. Haight,  went to Montpelier to see if he could find some money to pay the rioters and ransom his friend. On July 2nd, Deputy Gleason from Richmond and the local priests tried to tlak the men out of the building/ When that didn’t work, the sheriff called in reinforcements. On July 3rd, the Light Infantry from Burlington came and disperesed the mob by force.. Many of the men ran up into the  hils in Bolton.. Finally on july 4th they managed to free Barker. The rioters were rounded up and put on trial. In the end all but one were released.. The story doesn’t say what happened to that last man. Seems like you need to fight for your right to party !
   A record of the event said that the total cost to put down the “Irish Insurrection” in Jonesville was $370.11 including 1.5 barrels of crackers ($5.25) and  27 loaves of bread  ($2.16)

That’s probably the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in Jonesville !

OK.. insurrection is over, time for bed
Night folks… night Sam !
-me