Sunday – telepresence

Nice dayy.. record setting warm weather.. ti was nearly 60 degrees at a time where we often have our coldest weather.. it could be 80 degrees colder next week.  Diane, the dogs and I took advantage of the warm weather to take a hike up Catamount Trail.. the snow was deep enough to be slow walking.. but not deep enough to need snowshoes. We were both down to tshirts abotu 5 min into the walk.. it felt lieke spring.. and we’re less than a week into winter !

We spent the rest of the day puttering around the house, doing odd jobs and hanging out. Diane finished the cleaning job we started on the toy room.. and I started welding a frame for a very cool (and quite heavy) wooden painting that one of Max’s roomates painted for him right after Sam died.

My borther called while I was welding to see if we could get the robotic cameras he got us working.. the thing hooks up to your home wireless and lets folks see through its camera and drive it  around through any web browser.. I talked Billy though doing the secret handshakes (port forwarding, IP setup) that allowed me to access his robot.. then I did the samw on my router.. we spent abotu an hour driving the robots around each others houses and looking around. it was fun and erie.. The amazing thing is that this technology is primitive compared to what will be available in a few short years.. it boggles my mind.  Here’s gabe explorign Billy and Shaun’s hallway

About 5 we all cleaned up and headed over to Hannah and Daves for our second-to-last hanukah party.
They had ther friend Toby and Mark and their kids and Adj and Andrew and thier kids. We had the four of us as well as Abbott and Jessie.   Hannah and Dave have a great christmas tree too.. I loved their ‘star’ a Sam ornament.. !  It was wonderful to see it up there ..

Diane and Hannah went to work heating and frying latkes.. we had normal ones and sweet potatoe ones.. both great.

Yummmmm

Meanwhile, Dave and I tried our experiment with Sufganiot, the fried jelly filled donoughts that folks soemtime eat on hannukah. Diane had made soem yeasted dough for us.. we took Lindt chocolate balles

 

and wrapped them in the dough ,

sealed them up and let them rise some more.

Then fried them up

We even tried soem filled with chile con queso   (not traditional.. and not that tasty :-D)

Before dinner we lit the candles and said the blessings… Adah and Ava did the candle part..  They were so cute !


Gabe is cute too ..

Then it was tiem to eat.. I don’t know if I can look at another latke…  at least until tomorrow night.

Right after dinner I Skype called Deb and the guys in Peru.. they wanted to say hi to all of the crew.. we had a camera with us as well.. it was great talkign to them.. it was really like being in the same room. This technology is so great….   I wish we could use Skype at work

Right after that Adah stole my amrea and went aroudn taking pictures for awhile lots of pictures of the floor and cieling.. but she did get this flattering one of me.

Hannah had just baugth a banjo for 5 bucks at a garage sale..but no one knew how to play one.. Max hs never even touched a banjo.. but picked it up and started playing a pretty passible version of dualing banjos… by swapping back and forth between dave’s guitar and the banjo.. Who knew ?!

OK.. that was today.. gotta sleep now.. I’ve still got the bug that I caugth last weekend on the way back from Endicott. I need to sleep it off.. Oh.. one last hing. Here’s the movie that Gabe made for Max as a present.. He said I could post it..

OK freinds.. Happy last night of Hannukah.. nite all. Nite Sam
-me

Saturday night – Captain Sam

Today was unexpectedly quiet.. by the middle of last week we new of no fewer than four places we had to be and things we had to do today.. but one by one, they fell off our calendar.. the biggest one, Jingle rails, the rail jam for Sam that Ralph is organizing was postponed until next week due to the rain.Another event, a party is actually this coming Monday.. and another party was called on account of a stomach bug.  In the end we just stayed inside out of the rain and cleaned the house. We still had two room that were not quite usable since the big painting project.. We manged to empty out and clean the upstairs guest room.. and the downstairs  ‘toy room’…. The toy room was packed with knickknacks that Diane had carefully taken down, cleaned, wrapped and stored when we painted this fall. Now what to do with all that cr-p ? It took us hours to go through and figure out what stayed, what we could give away and what we had to keep. Every cleaning job now is both cathartic and emotional. kid’s artwork, pictures.. you can imagine…in the end we were actually able to dig through and see the floor.. By evening that room is usable again.. actually.. all the space in our house is usable now.. and that’s a whole lot of space !

We had a few visitors today. jack. jessie. pat who was in from Japan.. the skanky green guys, Jonathon from down the street. My dinner time there were 6 of us.. I cooked

Around 8 we decided to brave the wet roads and go hear Skanky Green at On The Rise. They put on a great show and the place was packed. The house was full of the bands fans, friends and family.. which are all good friends of ours. It was so wonderful hearing good live music and being surrounded by all these people we like.. We really do live in a wonderful place..

As the show wound down. the guys did the song they wrote for Sam.. ‘Captain Sam’.. It always makes me choke up.. I love hearing them sing it.. Here’s a rough recording of them.. Abbot made a real recording which I can post later…

..

I love the chorus from that song.. it goes like:

 

Relax a bit, you might just have some fun
Don’t take it all so serious
You’ll never live it down
Take the plunge, you might have to take a dive
‘Cause that’s what he would have done
if he was still alive

And I go like this zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz  
I stayed up till 2 last night programing.. tonight I’m in bed by 11:30.. and I need it.. More tomorrow !
Night folks !. Night Sam !
-me

Friday night – Boxing day

The day after Christmas is called Boxing Day in England and Canada. (and probably other places with good tea and interesting accents). All the we lived in England I asked folks what ‘Boxing Day” meant.. and never got a satisfactory answer.. Some folks thought it had to do with the boxes presents came in.. .. Wikipedia tells me that that’s not far off the mark.. it’s traditionally a time when folks gave presents to the needy in the community. A nice tradition.. and maybe one that is coming back in some form. I’ve heard of so many folks toning down or forgoing gift giving all together this year due to the economy.. I’ve also heard many folks taking some of the money that they would have otherwise put towards gifts to charitable causes.. I think that’s a great new tradition to build !

Today was another quiet and sleepy day.. our big foray outside of the nest was to go and decorate a tree in the forest for the animals This year we chose a clump of small pines off the Rivershore trail where we run and walk the dogs. Last night we spent an hour or so stringing old bagels and donoughts on strings.. today, diane spread them with peanut butter and birdseed.. We pied them all in a  box then headed off to the trail  It was the four of us. Gabes friend Kristen and all three dogs.
The tree we always had decorated in the past was way to tall now for us to reach the higher branches. These were nice tress.. we could reach the tops of them all.

We each grabbed a handfull and started hanging our edible ornaments…

We also placed a SamStone in the tree in honor of Sam.. This was always one of the things we did together neassr christmas/solstice.. and he was much on our minds as we did it today

The last step was to spread the birdseed and cereal we’d been collecting…

Kristen managed to catch us all smiling.. even the dogs !

The rest of the day was pretty low key.. we had a bunch of visitors dropping by.. One nice suprise was a Skype call from hannah and Matt from Peru… (they’ve posted some great pictures on their  blog recently)
They’re doing well down there. They’re workign in an orphanage filled with street kids. We’re goign to be dooign a clothign drive for them in the next week or so, so please beging collecting any kids clothes that oyu can spare…

One fun thing we did during the call wasto let the guys in Peru drive the very cool Rovio robotic camera that Billy and Shaun got us for Xmas.. It’s a camera and mike that you can steer over the web !..Here’s a picture of  Hannah driving it around the room looking at our dogs and the christmas tree.. it was cool and surreal ! 

Around 7 Avery came by to say hi with her bright and shiney new driver’s license. It’s so cool to see these kids get their wings.. !  It’s hard for me to beleive .. or think about.. the fact that Sam would be driving now…

It was great hanging out with Avery.. She’s so funny and cool…

The last couple of hours I’ve been ‘geekign out’ building soemthing.. which is what I’ve done wiht much of my time off. I can’t really explain it.. but it’s so satisfying to design and build things  these days.   Tonights project was pretty wierd.. I created a pretty complicated system that spins a small fan every time soemone reads this blog.. Why’d I do it ? dunno… guess because I could.. !… Though it keeps scaring me every time it spins…

It was fun to do simply because it wasn’t straightforward…Here’s how I had to do it..  (Warning .. geek speak approaching)..   

  1. First, I needed to create a simple ‘hit counter’ that I could embed in and query from myspace.. Nomrally that would be a piece of cake in PHP.. but myspace blocks PHP .. and javascript.. and everything else marginally useful due to seccurity concerns.. I found a loophole though.. because they do allow you to call Flash (I guess to allow Youtube videos)..
  2. So .. I wrote the counter in Flash..
  3. Inside the flash it callls a PHP file which updates a file with a hit count that resides outside of Myspace (on the Samstones website, actually)..
  4. I then embeded the SWF from the flash code in the header for my blog (You can now see the total hits counter under the scolling pictures at the top of my blog) . Every time soemone reads the blog , it updates the count in the file on Samstones.org.
  5. Then…. I wrote soem code in Python that runs constantly on my PC that every so often (every 10 secs or so) goes out and queires that hit counter file on SamStoens.org..
  6. If it’s been updated, it calculates the number of new reads since it’s last visit and sends them to the USB port.
  7. At the other end of the USB port is an Arduino microcontroller board. It’s runnign a short AVR C++ program that poles the USB port looking for input.
  8. When it sees a new hit counter come in it raises one of it’s control lines which drives a simple one transitor amp that drives the fan motor..
  9. et voila !

..

Now that’s done.. I can finally go to sleep !.. Happy boxing day folks..
Gnite Sam
-me

Thrusday night – christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope it was peaceful and fun ..  The four of us spent nearly the entire day together just hanging out which was wonderful. There is plenty of love  in this house and it fills me up. Once again the expectation of how hard a holiday like this can be are much different than the reality. This is our third Christmas since Sam’s passing.. and like everyday.. today had it’s joy and it’s sadness.. Several folks have asked me whether it’s ‘getting easier’..  I can’t say easier… It’s different.. but every day is different from  the next. I spent some time looking back over what I wrote over the past two chistmases.. Christmas 2006  was just a month after Sam died.. things were so raw and jumbled then.. Christmas 2007 seems much like today.

Today was slow and dreamy. The kids woke us at 7:30.. which is relatively late for a Christmas morning.. then we moved downstairs to check out what was under the tree…

Our first act was to light the lantern and candle  for Sam..   one of our new traditions.. We all held hands and invited Sam into our day. It was sweet and so sad…

Then like every day.. we have to move through those moemnts and get on living.. And we had lots of livign to do today.. 2 kids and 3 dogs were eager to open presents.

We had stockigns stuffed with stuff for people

.. and for animals… Including our bird Gabby that died in 2006.. we always get birdseed or suet for wild birds in that one.

Sam still has a stocking. this one was filled with 5  metal Samstones.

Then came time for Diane and I just to sit back and watch..   The boys took their time enjoying opening their gifts.

At the end we had a happy mess. One thing I noticed is that we’d all made things for each other.. Diane had made Gabe a verty cool scarf thing out of his old ski pants.. I made both boys electronic headbands like the one I where. Gabe made max a really cool movie that he’d writiten the music for as well. Gabe made me a set of his music mixes.   Max made an experience for all of us.. but more on that later.

We then wandered back to the kitchen.. Diane made us a wonderful traditional breakfast of crepes and fruit.. with the untraditional bit of left over ceasr salad thrown in for fun..

At that point the boys went up to Bolton for a bit.. while DIane and I took the dogs for a walk with Tim and his dogs.. It had rained quite a bit last night so we didn’t need snowshoes.. thoguh we stil had 6-8 inches of snow that made for tough goign in places…

Around 4ish we all gathered back at home.. It was tiem for Max’s suprise. First he cut up all sorts of foods, lemmons. limes, gretfruits. carrots, cranberries. olives, onions. ble cheese and beer.. Then he set out 4 glasses of water.. He had us each swish oem water around in our mouths.. then…/.

he gave each of us a small berry abotu the size and shape of a cranberry.. they’d arrived by FedEx yesterday packed in dry ice… but I had no idea of what they were.. He had us pop the berries in our mouths and chew them lightly for about a minute.. at the end of that, we spit out the bitter seed in the middle..

Then he invited us to tast the food.. I picked up a lemon and bit into it gingerly.. I was amazed. It was as sweet as maple syrup.. then I ate a lime  and a greapfruit.. all the same story.. these normally bitter frutis were as sweet as hone.. with no trace of sourness… at all !..It was unbelivable !.  The olives and cheese tasted like.. welll… olive and cheese.. but everythign that was supposed to be sour tasted incredibly sweet.   It turns out that these were miracle berries from West Africa. Evidently its  called ‘taste tripping’ in the big city.. luckily we have our cosmopliton kid to bring us a taste of medern cultre !

We had a quiet and wonderfull dinner around eight.. We lit the canlde for Sam and hepd hads.. then lit the candles for the 5th night of Hanukah as part of our polyethnic day.. then we dug into veggie shepards pie that Diane had made  Yum…

Our last official act was to help Gabe get set up to wax his board with his new waxing iron..   His board is now smooth as silk…

.. and I’m stugglign to stay awake. I’m goign to go to bed early. It’s been a wonderful and fulfillign day. Thansk to everyone who was thinkign of us this season. We are surrounded by love and   truly appreciate it..

Merry Christmas everyone. Merry Christmas Sam…
-me