Finally it was time to start !

the kids were magnificent.. there were 5 different plays.. each about 20 minutes long. They included excerpts from Midsummer Night’s  Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Adu About Nothing, and Taming of the Shrew.. which Gabe was in.

Here’s Gabe waiting to go on….

Here’s Austin as Malvolio

Gabe had a great part that included him getting hit over the head with a guitar.. t was really, really cute.

Here’s Will

and Sydney…

At the end of the play everyone scattered. in a few minutes the theater had been carried away.

After the play we went to the Cider House in Waterbury to hear Marshal and Friends play some really . really excellent Irish music. Tim and our mutual friend Mark came down to join us. The place was packed..

Rusty and Rj’s mom was there and tipped them off that it was my birthday.. They sang a great ‘Happy Birthday’ Irish style to me.. it was really wonderful.. I needed it !

There were many of our friends in the bar.. Aisha, Elisabeth, Wanda, Rusty and Rj’s mom and her husband and friends, the Ferrel’s neighbors. It felt like old home week .
 At one point, Diane, Gabe and Max snuck off to play pool.. When I went to get them. Gabe was glued to this pre-video, video Machine. it was fun watching him play..

OK.. I’m falling asleep after each sentence.. time to say good nigt.. It’s one minute until my 49th birthday.. I’m going to make it a good year.. I love you All.. I love you Sam… Happy Birthday to me !

-me

ps. Our team from Mexicali is taking the  penguin plunge tomorrow at around 11 to 11:15.. If you’re still interested in sponsoring us . please let me know ASAP. Thanks !

We woke to today to a thick blanket of new snow..   It had snowed through the night. but not enough to get a snow dya for the kids (darn) . Driving was pretty crazy though.. it took me over 30 minutes to drop Gabe of at school .. I worked solidly for about 2 hours. then Chai gilt tripped me into to going out for a snow shoe. It was so beautiful .

The snow was deeper than Chai’s legs.. she had to do the bunny hop to move forward.. cute and I’m sure exhausting.

The snow shoe was exactly what i needed.. I’ve been stressing mightily these last few weeks. some of it is normal end-of-project jitters about the work I’m doing with Champlain.. (it’s going well.. and I’m loving working with those guys.. it’ll just be down to the wire on delivery)… some of the stress is thinking about going back to my old job in a few weeks .. and some.. I’m sure is my birthday on Saturday.. I think I’ve always freaked a bit around my birthday. Now having a birthday without Sam is so hard . so, so hard…
    Anyway.. the exercise today was just what I needed .. I came back feeling pretty chill. I had a few more phone meetings.. then headed in to town. On the way I stopped at Road ResQ to figure out what was making the Prius’s left rear tire leak.. Grillmaster Phil was there minding the shop by heimself.. he found a very cute sheet rock screw threacec nicely through the tire.. dang… I generally use a huge magnet to clean he garage to pick up evil welding scraps.. but soemhow I must’ve missed this..

Phil showed me the shops prominatly placed SamStone.. pretty cool !

I spent the rest of the afternoon at Champlain. Ann, Ray and Lauren are back from Houston.. where they did a cool gig.. They wrote 2 video games in 3 days as part of a conference..  They were staying in downtown Houston.. which is pretty quiert at night.  I asked them how they liked my home town.. but I think they spent the whole time indoors..
 
The project is goign pretty well. the design is really coming together.. and the story is shaping up. It’s got to be good to go next Friday.. which will keep us busy till then.. but  it’s goign to be worth it..

When I got home, gabe and I took advantage of the snow to start building a ramp up to the rail. We piled on snow , sprayed it with water to help it pack then stomped it down. By the end of the hour I could actually see how soemone could board down this thing. We took turns coming down it on sleds to pack the snow.. it was a hoot !

It was beutiful out there.. there must be 18 inces of snow out there now..

Diane shwoed u about 8.. we were making dinner about 9…

I’d already eaten.. but I couldn’t resist just one raviol  (is that the singular of ravioli ? )  . I found the perfect plate..

It’s snowing Sam… you’d love it.. it was so peaceful and beautiul waking up to a real snow storm. I had almost forgotten how much I loved it.. Driving Gabe to school was almost magical the way that everything  faded into white a few hundred yards from the car.

Burlington traffic was a mess.. the snow parking ban was in effect.. cars were sliding around. it was freaky and fun

There was something different about the snow.. it wasn’t flakes.. it was needles.. long straight needles that clumped together.. very different than cartoon snow.. the funny thing is that nearly all of them looked just the same.

I’m not sure what I did to pass the day.. I know I was working.. thinking hard about you. I think my birthday is making me feel you more than most times…

this evening we went up to Bolton for night riders..  All your friends were up there too..

Gabe had a good night.. he’s got great style…  He tried your bindings tonight on his new board.. but it’ll take some adjusting yet to make them feel right..   Gabe ended up getting 1st in the 12 and under boarders.. Whoo0hooo.. he picked up a sweet Burton backpack..

Matt T. picked up 2nd in the 12-18 skiers !.. Great night for him. too !

Wendy picked up the ‘name most like a ski trail’ prize.. Not sure where she found that,

After prizes we went down to the townsends.. such a beautiful and warm place. Deb.. wanted me to say hi to her cousing Megan (Hey Megan) .. 

The house and coat rack were empty when I walked into the house at 8:30… By nine the house was packed..

By nine Deb had whipped up another amazing feast.. pasta with three sauces, fish soup with home made aioli , several salads, vegetable plate, wine, beer, fruit.. She makes it look so easy..

You should have been there Sam.. you really should have been there…

I love you my son,
-me

Happy Mardi Gras everyone.,.Fat Tuesday  As they say in New Orleans, laissez les bon temps rouler . (let the good times roll) .. I remember going to New Orleans to ‘do’ Mardi Gras many times as a kid … We’d stay with my grandparents or my uncle and aunt , eat weird food like king cake… the cake with a choke hazard built right in… then go and catch beads and dabloons thrown from floats . I really loved it.. The thing I remember most about Mardi Gras was New Orleans without the sweltering heat..   Those are great memories..  Even post Katrina, New Orleans  is my ninth favorite city in the world ( after Burlington, Montpelier, Austin, Shanghai, San Fransisco, NYC, London, and Haifa)

Anyway,  Mardi Gras seems pretty far away,…. it’s in the 20’s and drizzly up here… I had an extremely productive morning.. of phone calls.. then a mad dask out to a lunch meeting.. Thankfully, my fairy god wife had put reminders of all the important stuff in my car.

I did do one quick errand to Burton on my way to Champlain this afternoon. As I said in last night’s blog, Gabe is trying to retrofit Sam’s bindings unto an 802 board that he had won in 2006. The trouble was that all of the screws didn’t fit..
I stopped into Bolton and the guys there helped me understand that some of the boards mounting holes were messed up.   We developed a plan to work around this. After that, I loved walking around Burton .. they have this great ‘poaching’  campaign in which they are actively encouraging folks to ‘poach’ the four remaining ‘no boarding ‘ ski sites on snowboards. They are even offering sizable rewards for folk who poach; and take movies of the event.

I had never been in the Burton store.. I just loved it.. so many cool things to see:

One of the boss guys, Justin, helped me super glue a SamStone up on the nice flagstone fireplace that Burton had in the lobby. I like that there’s a SamStone in this store.. I think Sam would think that was pretty cool.

Here’s the guy that helped me figure out why I was having trouble matching Sam’s old bindings to Gabe’s board.. The answer was.. the threads in Gabe’s board was messed up
 

From there I headed back over to Champlain. we’re in our final crunch I picked up some of the edited interviews from Rafi ..

Then I piked out enough donuts to motivate some late night help

I went back tot the EMC and started working with Iain, Bryan, and Glenn…

Somewhere in there’ my friend Scott’s friend Andrew showed up. . I told him that I worked at IBM.. he asked me if I knew /’John Cohn’ I told him..  ‘sort  of’..’ Then I told him the truth.. Andrew and I had once been out to dinner with Scott.. but it had been such a long time.

I left Champlain about 6:15 in the middle of a call. Diane and I were starting a meditation program at the Shambala center. I was sitting outside the meditation center mindlessly talking on the phone when Dian slid up and put this delicious sandwich in my arms.  It was a soy protein thingy with sweet potato friesin a tortilla .. yum 

The meditation class was pretty full.. more tan 25 folks. It was fun being there.. not sure yet what I make of the vision.. I’ll share it here when I do.

After the meditation seminar.. I headed to Champlain Farms and bought some of my student partners some sweets and caffeine .. I then delivered them to the game lab where many Champlain Techies were hard at work.. making gaming safe for democracy in our lie time.. . 🙂 .

I didn/t get back until after 10.. but the whole family was awake..  Gabe and I started to work the new binding hardware I’d gotten.. In the end that worked !

We were all ready to go to sleep when Gabe crawled into this stove box’ ..chai followed quickly.. then so did we..   it was pretty cozy !

I finally decided to go to bed.. I came over to start emptying my pockets and I found that I hadn’t worn my Sam pin this last day,    It was so weird to reach for it in my pocket and not see it there.   I found it on my night table where I left it yesterday..   It was good to see it again ..

OK. I keep falling asleep.. It’s time for me to sleep.. much more tomorrow.. I love you all.. I love you Sam !
..
-jc

Ps. I just decided yesterday that I’m going to participate in the 2008 Penguin Plunge this Saturday.  The Plunge is when a bunch of crazy people jump into Lake Champlain as part of a fund raiser for the Vermont Special Olympics.  The event is this Saturday, Feb 9th around noon.. it’s also my 49th Birthday !.. I’ll be ducking out of an all day meditation seminar to jump in the lake with the fine folks  from Mexicali Returant  which sometimes feels like my second office. The way this works is plungers find sponsors who pledge to donate to Special Olympics if you agree to strip down to your swim trunks and dive through the ice for a quick 32 degree dunk in the lake.  Most folks collect their sponsors well in advance… So I’m getting a late start at this. I don’t expect I’ll get many takers.. but if anyone is interested in making a tax-deductible pledge  to Special Olympics for the pleasure of seeing me freeze.. please let me know 🙂 . I’ll be sure to get pictures !