It’s a sleepy Saturday around the Cohn-Mariano compound. The boys are off hanging with friends Diane’s having a pre-birthday tea with her friend Kathy and I’ve just woken up from the 3rd (!) of my naps on this sunny warm day. Life doesn’t get any slower or more peaceful…  It’s just what we need now..

    Last night  was a bit more active. We had a pot luck up at Tim and Jen’s  in honor of Diane’s birthday. She generally does not like a big deal made of her birthdays so it was  relatively small.. The food theme last night was Thai food and it was amazing. there were some many  exotic and spicy dishes..    This is the 3^rd or so of themed potluck’s we’ve tried and it’s been really fun   trying to  learn a little different ethnic cooking.. I think we’re going to try Brazilian next..

    After dinner we did the birthday cake thing then sat down to make SamStones..

So far we can’t make them fast enough. I’ve been  doing my best to keep track of the places folks leave them.. please check let me know if you know where one is that I don’t yet have on my map) .. In addition to SamStones making.. Diane taught a short That massage course to some of the folks there.. here they are giving each other back and neck massages.. it was fun to watch…

Another funny thing from last night was Jamal. Jamal is a computerized fake baby that gets passed around to the kids in the health class at Mount Mansfield HS. It was Kevin’s turn to be Jamal’s ‘dad’.. and we all ‘helped’ .. Jamal does many things a real baby does ie: he needs to be changed , fed and rocked.. and .. he cries at odd hours, of the night at high volume. He’s got a small recording computer inside that t measures the time it took for each need to be met.. and it measures things like vibration (no shaking !).. and head support.  This allows the teachers to figure out how attentive each ‘parent’ was.. and assign them a grade.   I think the idea is to help kids understand how big a responsibility it is to be a parent..  It’s so annoying that it’s also a pretty potent ‘responsible dating’ message that would put even the most maternal or paternal kid I know off the idea of childrearing anytime soon. It was a hoot watching Kevin attend to this thing.. many times during the evening  it started wailing and  he had to go an ‘feed’ it.. change it.. etc.. At one point late in the evening Hannah T and I figured it was going too well. We decided to help by painting Jamal’s face with a bunch of make  up then spanking it  and running away..   Kevin came running to clean him up.. he’ll make a good dad someday.. but he’s got to work on that neck hold..

We didn’t get home until after 1.. we all were beat and slept well. This morning Diane woke me up early (8:30  and we drove down to  Charlotte to see our friend Jill, Jill and her 2 dogs, Diane, Chai and I then took a beautiful and leisurely walk up Mt. Philo.. My Philo is really more of a high  hill which  sticks out of the flat valley floor. Form the top there was a gorgeous view of the Adirondacks on one side and the Green Mountains on the other.. The prettiest part of the view, though, was Diane.

We also saw some friendly tree spirits on our walk

Not much else happened after that..  I  came home  and kept falling asleep.. I’m still pretty wiped out from my case of plague this week. I did manage to wake myself long enough to go down and pick Gabe. Trevor  and Ian up from talent Skate Park . Gabe had gone down there to get trucks and wheels mounted on the ‘Sam Forever’ deck that Paul, Dave and I had made using Paul’s laser. It’s an amazing looking board now.

   Hey.. I hear Diane downstairs.. so I’m going to wrap up. Her real birthday is tomorrow.. Please send her some love. These events are all so bitter sweet for us now…The love our friends really helps with the ‘sweet’ .. We’ll look for you tomorrow Sam..

 
-jc

Folks…

     I’m at a small Samstones gathering that we’re having in honor of Diane’s Birthday. I snuck away for a second as not to miss a day here.. I have some pictures of the event that I’ll post either later tonight or tomorrow. 

    One quick thing in case I don’t have a chance to blog more tonight. Wendy broaght over a book on Dream Interpretation that she found at that great library of knowledge, Cosco. The book is pretty fun because they link everything in your dreams to soem concept in life… (“asparagus” == youth, “dump trucks” == dumping things from your life.. now that’s deep…).. Anyway.. she brought it out to analyze my ‘forest people’ dream.. Here’s the secret code:

– Mushrooms (what the people were floating on) – good that comes from bad

– Plaid (what the people were wearingin) – input from many sources

– Basements (where the poeple were floating around) – your deep subconcious

– Floating ( what the mushrooms were doing) – an aimless spirtual path

– Backhoes (what the people were hiding from) – the need to dig deeper in your subconcious

By this scholarly reading I am either a) working subconsiously on integrating a bunch of lessons in order to synthesize them into some great learning or b) I need to be vary wary of introspective backhoes…

OK… gotta get back to the gathering.. more later.. or more tomorrow… gnite folks, g’nite Sam.

-jc

   Short post as it’s late and I need to get to sleep. Today was a very ‘public’ kind of day .I ended up walking around work more often than usual which brought me into contact with many folks I hadn’t seen in a while…. Likewise the family and I went  to a play at the high school after work. In both cases  I absolutely loved seeing everyone.. I just wish they couldn’t see me.. or rather.. I sometimes wish that they wouldn’t see me as somehow different and changed. I guess I don’t get to choose that right now.   It’s just such a strange change for me being the social person I was… and still somehow am.

   Another thing that happened to me several times today was ”bloglog’… That’s  when I meet people and they start   asking me questions about stuff in my life that I just  can’t figure out how they know.. E.g. I had 20 people ask me if I was feeling better..   (how’d they know I was sick ?) .. or  people asking about my trip.. or about something the kids did .. The first few times it happens I get one of those weird ‘twilight zone’ feelings.. . then I realize they’re picking up pieces of my life through this blog.  My wonderful friend and admin Jleigh actually  read the blog to figure out how much work I can shoulder and adjusts my schedule accordingly.. It took me a long time to catch on how my workload seemed to automatically adjust to my mood (Thank you Jleigh !)  I love that people care to read this.. at the same time,  it’s a weird skew where folks know all sorts of tiny details of my life.. yet I’m completely out of touch with their lives.. Maybe everyone should send me a really newsy letter every so often with things that are going on in their lives so I can stay even with  everyone..

   If you are curious, between 200 and 500 people read this blog every day.. Tonight is pretty typical with abut 300 hits so far.  I noticed last night that I’d gotten over 40,000 total hits on this blog since I started keeping it..That’s amazing to me.

   I  get asked very often about why I’m even doing this blog. I’ve given this a bunch of thought the last few days….  as writing is actually something I really don’t normally enjoy  doing at all. (to be truthful.. I hate it). The best I can say is that it forces a discipline on me to take time at the end of everyday to stitch together what has happened to me over the past day and make sense of it. In the early days after Sam’s death this was an essential part of my sanity.. everything was so jumbled together that blogging gave em a chance to tease out the meaning in everything that was happening.. Now it’s more of a healing process.. sort of like knitting.. or knife throwing.. something to unwind with at the end of each day.  If  I’m lucky, I can also use it  to  help tease some lesson out of each day. 

   Ack.. I’ve just  written about writing.. one of the most lame literary  devices one can use.. Ackkkkk I’ve just written about writing about writing… Oh no… now I’ve written about writing abut writing about writi………..  oh.. Gnite sam !

-jc 

ps. Our friend Karey drew this picture a few years back. She sent it to us becuase it reminded her of Sam and the SamStones.. Thanks Karey… (did I already post this ?)

I smell Spring.. I woke today to sunshine for the first time in weeks. (Everywhere I went on my trip was cloudy). Everything felt somehow lighter. I got Gabe to school then spent an hour working on the SamStones.org web site. Working on the web site is one of those narcotics for me. When I’m deep in it, coding, restructuring, experimenting I feel like I’m  doing something positive for Sam’s memory.. This morning I was working on a photo gallery for the site. That will allow me to display photo sets from my Flickr  account. (check it out… http://samstones.org/WordPress1/index.php/Gallery/ it’s not all there yet.. but then again.. neither am I) The coding part is fun… looking at all these great Sam pictures is also wonderful… and hard at the same time. I had to stop several times because the pictures were too beautiful for me to look at.. do you know what I mean ?

   Around 9 I started my work day..   I was still feeling a bit under the weather so I decided to work at home again..  I had one of my most productive days this year.   When I work at home I have almost no distractions… which give me almost no sense of time passing. The first time I stood up I found that it was time for lunch. Chai was staring at me all morning so I decided to take her out for a walk/snowshoe. Given the warm  weather.. I figured this might be the last chance for a decent snowshoe romp. While the yard had many bare spots.. the woods were still had snow so deep that Chai was falling in up to her belly in places.

We managed to slog our way up to our favorite rock in high pasture and look out over our part of the valley.

It was beautiful to see the change of seasons coming on. Hard to believe that this time next month (or so)  it will all be turning green.  We looped back down to the road just in time for my snowshoe strap to come loose.. it must have been a sign that the season was over. Chai and I walked back on the road.. the mud was ankle deep in places. Ahh Spring.

     We got back to the house to streaming sunshine .. I managed to catch a great rainbow shadow from one of our window prisms 

I worked the rest of the day until Diane and Chai dragged me outside for another walk around 6 PM..

This is more outdoor time than I’ve had in several weeks and it felt great..    You know.. I can feel Spring everywhere.. even in my heart, Sam.

-jc