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 ?

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 !)