I slept for nearly 9 hours last night.. The longest I think I’ve slept in over a year. We woke up to beautiful snow.. It was a perfect day to hang out inside. Our main goal for the day was to decorate the xmas tree.  Gabe had a really cool idea.. he wanted to make the tree into a robot !.. Well.. what’s not to like in that idea.. we got right to it.. the first challenge was the arms. I got some light gauge steel rod … measured out Gabe’s arms.. and started bending.

We got a rudimentary frame put together.. then took a break. I took Gabe to the Round Church to work on a snowboard jump.. the roads were pretty messed up.

I took a quick stop at the bakery, but  it was closed because of the storm. I did get a good look at the anti-TV sculpture that Ben-the-baker’s brother Chelsea had made..   I like the message.

From there I headed over to my friend Chris’s house.Chris is an amazing stone carver, engraver and etcher.  He’s helping me with a Christmas plan  have.

Chris does a bunch of work with words and rocks.. a great combination.

He has a Sam Stone in his workshop !

We hung out for a few hours working on the project and talking to his very cool family. We even made a home made light bulb with his son Finn.. (My friend Uwe also has a kid named Finn.. I’d never heard that name before)  Finn had a battery kit… it had an interesting phone number… the National Battery Ingestion Hotline.. A great number to know.. Do people really eat batteries ?

I got home around 4  and got back to work on the tree. Diane did an artful aluminum foil job on the arms

I added the LED strip lights I bought in Shanghai.

Max added a head

I had to make some trips to the attic to get lights and other tree stuff. Going up there is still so hard ..

In the end.. the four of us came together and made Jonesville’s first Robo-tree..

In fact.. Diane had just said.. “we probably have the only robotic tree in the world’ 2 seconds later Max opened the Sunday paper and saw this:

Another weird coincidence..   Anyway.. the results are pretty … uhhhh.. untraditional… You know, it’s probably easier that way.

We celebrated our successful creation with some chocolate fondue … The end of a very good day.

Peaceful day…  I managed to sleep until 9 which is what I needed after last night’s drive. Max and I got in around 3AM last night… It was a great drive.. both of us managed to stay awake long enough to enjoy hanging out together.. Max played DJ and turned me on to some new music…   He drove the second half while I slept. He saw a huge shooting star while I was asleep…

Today started out cold.. 5 degrees… and never really warmed up much. Gabe went up to Bolton to freeze his tuchus off.. while Diane, Chai and I took a great snowshoe on the side of Robin’s mountain.   By the time we got back both Chai and  my beards were frozen solid..  After a brief warming spell inside, Diane and I went out and took apart the trampoline for the winter.. Note to self.. There are probably some great 30 degree days to do this next year..

I spent an hour or so trying to figure out a good way to to get a years worth of my blog in printable form. It was hard work.. not so much the text processing.. but reading through all of that old stuff. Someday I’ll re-read it end to end.. but now is just too soon.

Around 4 I zoomed up the mountain to pick up Gabe. He still had all of his fingers and toes. .. but he did say one of his friends did get a little frostbitten.

We headed straight from Bolton to the Christmas tree place in Essex.. Max was there waiting for us. The boys immediately spotted a beauty.

After a few minutes of grunting and cursing we had the tree down, bagged and on our car.   This is another ritual that is so changed now.. everything is..

Max is home and we’re together again as a family.. 4 forks…

A really nice dinner…It’s so good to be together…

After dinner.. it was time to put the tree up..

We picked well. The tree is 1cm shorter than the ceiling !

I’ writing from the parking lot at Pratt. I’m sitting in the car while max tried to cram a semesters worth of stuff into a duffel bag. I think I’m helping him the most by staying out of his way. As soon as he’s done we’re going to drive back home. It is great having him back for awhile…
    My trip down today was really nice.. as these drives usually are. I got on the road at about 7:30… rather than 6AM as I had originally intended.. I just couldn’t pry myself out of bed. I finally got up in time to take Gabe to school.. then took off from there. The late start was just as well since the roads were still a mess.. I had to take it really slow until about White River.. Still, the day was beautiful.. and the company was good (I often ‘talk’ to Sam in the car)… I spent most of the drive down in calls of one type or other..  I find these calls in the car to be some of the most productive I have.. There’s nothing else .. keyboards, text messages… etc.. to distract me so I really pay attention to what’s being said. Consequently, the miles just melt by. Before I knew it I was approaching NYC.  My original plan was to try and catch a talk at CUNY main campus on 5th in Manhattan.. The speaker was Prof James Gee, a word recognized expert in the educational use of video game technology.. It would have been great.. but as I neared the city, the traffic started slowing down.. I was goign to be cutting it clos.. and then there would be parking. The final straw is that my friend Nora from the NY Hall of Science who’d told me abotu the talk called to tell me she was goign to blow off goign because she had too much to do. So… I aborted the mission.. But I had a good ‘plan B’ I drove down to the NY Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows.. and had a great meeting with Nora’s boss, Eric.

Eric, Nora and I are all working on this same IBM video game proj. This was the first time I’d had a chance to sit down and really talk to Eric one on one. It was so much fun. We have very similar backgrounds, raised Jewish, device physics background, love of education outreach… and both vegetarians !.. We took advantage of that fact to go have our talk over veggie Chinese food nearby.. It was GREAT !.. Everything there from the ‘pork’ buns to the ‘fish’ were all vegetarian.. It’s a place just made for  veggie Buddhists and Kosher-keeping Talmudists.. So cool. NYC  is just amazingly diverse.. something for everyone if you know where to look!

Now I’m just sitting in the car and working i.. I found some free WiFi.. so I’m pretty comfy !     

A really cool/weird  thing just happened… as I’m sitting here typing !.. I turned on the satellite radio for some blogging tunes and turned to the Indie station I always listen to (XMU).. As I did that I was thinking of the time I turned on the radio last year and this station played ‘Organ Donor’ by DJ Shadow.. just as I asked where Sam was out loud to the cosmos .. Right after that they played a really obscure DJ Shadow cut ‘ Building Steam from a grain of Sand’. That song has some very Sam like lyrics. I blogged about it  on Dec 21st and Dec 22nd last year.. raw times.
   Well.. just as I was thinking back on that weird coincidence.. on comes ‘Building Steam’   I jumped I was so shocked !

OK.. Max just came out.. time to start helping him load the car.. It’ll be a long drive home.. but nice… My family is coming together.. I love you all.. love you Sam

-me

Most mornings I go out into the world having no clue what I’m going to face… and no clue what I’m going to write about in this blog. Somehow, most days brings something I feel that it’s important for me to reflect on. Today it came in the form of a folded piece of notebook paper that my friend Ron handed me at lunch. Ron’s son Nick and Sam were friends from the time they were 4 or 5  years old. Ron told me that about 10 years ago, when Nick was 5, he an Ron were working on writing skills. They were writing short silly Dr. Seuss like stories for practice. Nick came up with the following short story about Sam and me which Ron wrote down … and found today in his office as he cleaned up .

I’ve read that paper so many times today. I’m so glad that Ron kept it. Nick and his friend Nick R. played “If I could I would” at Sam’s memorial service last year.

The rest of the day was a mix of phone conference calls. I managed to squeeze in a quick haircut. with our friend Deb. She told me today that she’s getting married in June..

I left a little early from work to get in some xmas shopping. First stop was Fire and Metal where I saw my friends Marty and Doug. Their son Jonathon has just moved to Vietnam where’s he’s working for Unesco.

I then went back to Queen City steel to get a little more metal for a present I’m making for/with Gabe.. It’s cool to have a winch to load stuff on your roof rack

I got home around 6 and soon after headed up to the baby shower that Deb, Diane and  Jen  were throwing for Hannah and Dave.. They’re due on Dec 21st…  but I’m betting for sooner… look at that belly !  I think pregnant people are so beautiful.

I couldn’t help noticing Gabe’s beautiful feet were also at the party.  Socks and feet that only a father could love.

He wanted me to show everyone that he lost a toe nail.. yuck !

Speaking of baby showers.. I heard tonight form my friend Glenn in Australia that his wife Liesel just gave birth to their third child.. baby Samantha (love that name !) .. this is the wonderful circle of life. Here’s Samantha with her brother Thomas and sister Katie

Well.. that’s all for tonight.. More tomorrow. Gnite all, gnite Sam..
-me