The root problem was that we had significant wet snowfall before most of the trees had lost their leaves. This caused unbelievable tree damage. It was unlike what typically happens in nor’easters and hurricanes, where you get many trees coming down. Instead, seemingly every single tree lost one or more limbs, but few trees came completely down. It destroyed the electrical grid and blocked roads everywhere. There are two major routes from my house to my employer (Route 9 and Bay Road) and both were down to a single lane in multiple locations, with Bay Road completely blocked in one section that caused the town to route traffic through some poor person’s front yard. On both routes, the power lines were laying on the road in multiple locations, there were a number of places where huge limbs were suspended in the air on power lines, and a roughly equal number of places where telephone poles snapped under the weight of the tree limbs laying on their lines. On my own property we have around a dozen apple trees, and every single one of them was ‘capped’ (losing its topmost section) along with most of them losing at least a portion of their other major limbs. At least 3 of them are going to die from this, and several others are on the bubble as far as I can tell. Our maples and oaks also got whacked, including my favorite maple, which was an absolutely beautiful tree that is stunning in the fall. Now it looks like pacman took a bite out of it – it lost 2 of 4 of its major limbs. We also almost lost our barn. A nut tree in the back dropped a limb at least 12″ thick onto the roof, and the barn was only saved because the force of the fall was largely taken by an adjacent tree’s major limb. That tree’s probably a goner now.

The majority of the region didn’t have power for days. Amherst College was closed due to power loss, something we think has never happened before. Our students had to bunk up with friends or sleep in the gym because several dorms had no power for a couple of days. Our daycare provider, along with a couple of other college buildings, had no power all week. My house had no power for a week, as did >90% of the town I live in. This was tough. We’re on well water and no power means no water.  The only thing that left us able to inhabit our house was the propane stove in the basement, where we lived, and the propane cooking stove we used to melt snow for water. I have a solar charger and a number of battery packs that we used to keep our phones and the ipad functioning. Susan and I alternated days off from work, with one of us working and one staying home with Brady. We lost hundreds of dollars in food (over a 100 in condiments alone!) because we couldn’t keep things refrigerated. Thankfully we had not yet finished filling our new chest freezer. Much of Brady’s home cooked baby food was lost. I bathed out of a basin using boiled snow water and felt like I had reverted to a lifestyle a century old. We fell asleep by 8:30 or 9. It was hard work and took its toll on us, with Susan and I bickering and occasionally sniping at each other from the stress by the end of the week.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of adventure and new experiences. This one was harder than most, but I suspect as time passes the negative aspects will fade and we’ll talk with pride of how we ‘roughed it’ for a week. Brady came through it like a champ despite having a cold. I think he loved the sleepover with Mom and Dad in the basement – most morning’s he’d wake before us and be happy as a clam to discover us right there next to him.

I wouldn’t say we’re recovered yet – our fridge looks barren despite spending $300 to restock it this weekend. Our yard looks like the set of a disaster film, with tree work in various stages of completion based on how dire things look, and based on the pace, months to go now that it’s dark when I get home from work. The worst limb is off the barn but there’s a tangle adjacent to it that threatens a dramatic collapse if we don’t deal with it (though we think/hope we’ve got it in a state where the barn is not threatened).

Still, by and large life has returned to its regular rhythms, and all things considered we came through this pretty cleanly, as did our friends in the region. A memory for life, in the final analysis, but not a life changer, is what this will amount to in the end, and I’m good with that

There were two immediate problems. The first was that we often park the car at his daycare provider and walk since it’s about 1/2 mile or so to work and is a good opportunity for some exercise most days. The second is that I also had Soolin. This meant I had to walk a half mile with the boy while wrangling to dog and carrying my briefcase and  Brady’s diaper bag. Brady’s been getting heavier and it’s not easy carrying him that far anymore – when Susan and I do it we trade off now as we each tire, or I put him on my shoulders, which I couldn’t do with the dog and the bags. Still, it wasn’t impossible, plus the good news was, he hadn’t been throwing up since Susan picked him up.

Things went more or less ok for half the walk. Soolin did her occasional ‘Squirrel!! Pull, pounce!’ action (the campus is overrun with squirrels) but I’m used to it. What I wasn’t used to was managing his weight for this long, and I soon began to tire. Plus both bags were constantly slipping off my shoulders. I felt like I was doing a slow motion juggle. The problems really started though when Soolin decided she had to poop. We’re responsible dog owners and always pick up after her, but I couldn’t figure out what to do with Brady while I cleaned up. I finally settled on plopping him down on the sidewalk while taking care of Soolin’s business. Several things, none good, suddenly happened at once. Brady set off towards Soolins poop as soon as I put him down. Soolin saw a cat or squirrel and decided to bolt. I saw happening in slow motion, paralyzed. I settled on grabbing Brady, and watched in horror as Soolin’s lead dragged through her poop, completely fouling it.

aigh! Picture me now very angry, trying hard not to show it to Brady, while attempting to get Soolin under verbal control. She’s usually a well behaved dog, but she was irrepressible – every time I got her in a down, as soon as I turned away, up she would pop, dragging her foul lead around. She took a fair bit of verbal abuse from me while I finished cleaning up her mess. I then took a dog poop bag and wore it as a glove, grabbed her lead with this, and tried to continue on to the car. Of course Brady spied the bag as glove and went all ‘ooh, what do you have there Dad, I really want that!!!’, wriggling and bouncing and exclaiming and complaining as I wriggled myself to keep it from his grasp, all while still trying to keep the two bags (briefcase and diaper) from sliding off my shoulder into the poop lead, and trying to keep Soolin from pulling towards whatever it was she had spotted.

Thus went the rest of my walk to the car. It *sucked*. The only good news is that Brady never managed to grab anything, and amazingly I managed to keep the pooplead from touching anything.

(except for Susan. Later that night when she came home, she came in holding the poop lead, and asked ‘why was this hanging outside?’ She wasn’t too pleased that I hadn’t warned her).

Developmentally, he’s increasingly alert. He knows his name and will turn to you if you say it. More generally, if he hears things, he will try to turn to see them. He continues to play around with vocalizations, though nothing like words yet. His only ability to really communicate verbally is ‘sad groans’,’ happy giggles,’ and ‘I love you man’ cooing and eye contact.  In terms of understanding me, he usually recognizes if I say ‘UP!” which I’ve been doing whenever I pick him up, and that’s it so far beyond his name.

[addendum for the 9th month: he recognizes more now. He knows what his hands are, or at least will respond when I ask him to give me his hands, which we do a lot as we help him learn to walk by holding his hands while he prances around. He also generally knows who 'Mom' is, and sometimes gets really excited playing the 'where's mom!' game, which we often do after his breakfast. More generally, he seems to be picking up on intent a lot, recognizing what's about to happen and what it will mean for him. For example, when I get him out of his crib, I used to have to take his pacifier out of his mouth, and as I did that I would say, 'can I have that?' Now, as often as not he knows he's going to lose it, and spits it out as I reach for it.]

Physically, he can now sit up reliably and stably, though he still topples over a fair amount. He can’t yet get into a sitting position on his own. His hand dexterity increases almost daily. He’s still a klutz, but he can pick things up, pass them from hand to hand, rotate them, and most importantly draw them towards his mouth. Everything goes in his mouth. His legs are strong and he loves when I hold his hands so he can stand and bounce up and down on his legs. He often gets very excited when we do this. He also can ‘walk’ when I do this, though he prefers the bouncing. He can’t yet crawl. He pushes his butt in the air and every now and then he gets up on all fours, but he hasn’t worked out how to move himself forward.

[addendum for the 9th month. He can crawl now. He's still clumsy and slow and gets frustrated, but he literally went from 'butt in air, but at best backwards progress' to 'I totally know how to crawl, I just am not very good yet,' in the course of about 5 days in late September. We helped in this process, by plopping him in his play area and building towers of wooden blocks - he likes toppling them over, so we started building towers in different parts of the play area, which seem more than anything to have served as his motivation to learn to crawl.

He's also become totally squirmy, almost never willing to sit quietly cradled in our arms. Instead he's a wriggling bouncy mass of 'I'm mobile, let me explore!' energy.

Food wise, the last two months have seen him eat meat (fish and chicken so far - he loves the fish but at best only tolerates the chicken), a ton of new fruits and veggies, including citrus (kiwi, which he liked), many different kinds of squashes and beans, potatoes, carrots, some grains and cereals, and probably a bunch of other things I've forgotten already. He's also started drinking a lot of water, though somehow we failed to teach him to use his spillproof sippy cup so far, so drinking is either supervised or really messy.

He had his first significant illnesses since his difficult first couple of weeks. First he got a lesion about the size of a pencil eraser from a diaper rash, which had us putting antibiotic ointment on him for about 2 weeks. Then, he got a fever of 103 that lead to a bad cough, gallons of mucus, and no sleep for anyone. This was at first diagnosed as RSV, a common virus that most people get before the age of 2. It's usually not dangerous, but in any case it turns out that's not what he had - what it was we'll never know, but it took 2 weeks for him to recover, during which he was pretty miserable - exhausted from lack of sleep, temperamental as a result, and prone to occasional shrieking fits of unhappiness. We had not seen anything like this from him before. The good news is things seem to be returning to normal - yesterday he was in most all respects back to his even-keeled, eager to smile, curious little self, hanging out with Dad watching the Giants beat the hated Eagles.

He had a number of firsts across these two months, including going to his first baseball game (Seadogs in Portland Maine - I love going to games in that park), taking his first shower (with Dad, as we tried to help him get the mucus out of his system - he totally loves the shower),' swimming' with the family at a local lake, which truth be told he didn't like too much, we think he didn't like being strapped into the life preserver, and hiking with him Mom and Soolin in the woods, which he liked.

As usual Susan's been good about getting photos posted, though she's been busy too so we are a little behind, but here's a sample from this month. Click the image to head over to the gallery:

Brady checking out his first baseball game

• Rice cereal, often mixed with fruit (he likes most of these concoctions)
• Peaches (he thought they were just ok)
• Melon mango yoghurt soup (he hated it)
• A couple of different squashes (which aside from the summer squash he had already tried, he seems to like)
• Water – he got his first sippy cup. He hasn’t figured out it’s for water, mostly he thinks it’s a chew toy, but he does like to play with it and it’s spill proof. The actual act of drinking water he is fine with, but we have to do it for him.

He’s exhibited a number of new behaviors, including:

• The first signs of free will. He often refuses to allow you to put his pacifier into his mouth, preferring instead to take it from you and plop it in himself.
• Vocalizations with meaning. He doesn’t know any words, but he has sound patterns he uses to let you know he’s unhappy and wants change, which start with grunts and plaintive groans. He’ll make eye contact with you and make those noises, clearly saying ‘whatever I’m doing right now is not pleasing me. Make it change pops!’ If you ignore him he escalates to whimpering and then tears and wails. Recovering from wails can be hard, so generally we try and get involved when he starts complaining.
• He’s realized he has legs. He can bend at the waist, and pulls his legs up till he’s in an L shape. He also discovered he has feet, and the first week or so that he first realized this you could constantly find him bending himself in half staring at his feet, touching them, and even putting them in his mouth.
• Progress on the locomotion front. He can’t yet crawl, but he can move, most amusingly when he sticks his butt in the air and slides forward on his face, but he also scrunches around. He doesn’t have great control over direction yet – if you put a toy in front of him where he can see it when he’s on his playmat, he’ll often try desperately to get to it, moving around but not necessarily towards it. This can sometimes escalate frustration to the point where he starts wailing, but mostly he just grunts in frustration.
• Something to do with neurological development that has him simultaneously rotating his wrists and ankles on their axis while also flexing his leg and arm muscles. He looks like he’s trying to do the wave or conduct an orchestra while dancing. It’s very peculiar. Presumably it has to do with reflex and musculature development. I don’t recall any of my siblings doing it though. There’s a link to a quicktime video of this below:

brady_movement_video

This was also a month of many transitions:

• Susan’s Mom Linda stopped coming every week. She had been coming to care for him 2 days a week. He’s too young to notice of course, though his face brightens when he sees her. She was a fantastic help to us and allowed us to keep him out of daycare several extra months, and we’re grateful for it. At the same time, I’m happy to have my house back to myself
• He started daycare. His first day perfectly captures how this has gone for him. I brought him into the baby room and he looked around, saw several new adults and toddlers, and busted out with a huge grin. We get daily reports from the daycare center and with 2 exceptions they have always characterized his mood as ‘happy.’ We’re blessed with a seemingly happy and adaptable kid. We’re also fortunate to be able to drop him off and pick him up together most days, and it’s a beautiful thing to walk into the toddler room to pick him up in the afternoon and get a beaming grin of recognition when he sees me.
• Stopped sleeping in a swaddle. Early in the month we stopped swaddling him, and now he sleeps as he pleases, sometimes even on his stomach. He’s also able to recover from the loss of his pacifier sometimes, rolling around till he can grasp it and plopping it back in himself. We need to get a good picture of his sleeping posture though as it’s pretty cute – he lays completely splayed out, the picture of exhaustion.
• Went on his first camping trip, and his second. The first one was for the annual Kids Camping Weekend with my college and NY friends. This was at a resort campground in PA (running water, electricity, and cable tv at every campsite?!?). He had a blast and was the center of attention with all the kids, often surrounded by 6-8 children all vying to get his attention and pleading for a chance to hold him. Mostly he handled this fairly well though it was occasionally overwhelming for him. His second trip is with Susan to her annual Falcon Ridge Music Festival expedition, which he’s at right now. It’ s brutally hot, though Mom reports all is well.

To sum up, things are going great. He’s a happy kid, seems to be developing comfortably, and has accepted the transitions he’s gone through this month easily and with little trouble. The only negative thing that I can think of from this month was him developing a fever and a case of the crankypants after he saw the doctor for some vaccinations.

As per usual Susan’s done a great job posting tons of photos. Here’s this month’s gallery, and here’s one of my favorite shots from this month:

The family sans Soolin just before leaving Kids Camping Weekend 2011

and another of my favorites, just because it so well captures his personality:

Brady's most common facial expression

one web geek paranoid about data privacy issues that shares a name with a famous photographer

Steps:

1. Visit facebook.com for the first time in months to check privacy settings, after a weekend full of old college friend facebook messages leaves you wondering what’s happened.
2. Note that profile is still configured to show info in public (google, etc) searches. Decide to investigate.
3. Search on name.
4. Note that David Hamilton the photographer is still consuming all the top results for your name.
5. Idly click on one of the David Hamilton the photographer google links
6. Find oneself on a page that looks a lot like child porno (the kids arent naked, they’re scantily clad, but it’s pretty scant, and the site name has lolita in the title), freak out, and close the browser tab.
7. Realize you never logged out of facebook when the facebook tab is revealed.
8. Curse and fret.

Fscking facebook man.

We were smart about things – we don’t normally carry debt outside of car loans and mortgage. We research purchases using consumer reports and my endless googling. We talked through everything in the months leading up to the move. In the end though, we lucked out in terms of timing and got 0% financing from Sears on the appliances, along with a bunch of savings tied to a state program that was in play during the week we purchased, and similarly got a 0% finance plus accoutrements deal on the tractor. The downside to the finance deal was, we had a year to pay it all off. We just finished.

So that’s the good news, right? This should mean tons of free capital in the family budget. A Big screen tv, a new ipad 2, and a replacement for my blown up xbox 360, all on the menu this summer? It’s a no brainer! Err, except for two nefariously expensive words which I’ll close with:

Infant daycare  ;-(

my dog Soolin leaping into the pool

this despite the fact that she’s got arthritic hips so creaky she sometimes has trouble making it up stairs, and a fat deposit under her front right armpit that causes her gait to be way out of whack*. So you get the full picture, here’s her sticking the landing:

spalasssh!

and paddling immediately on over to retrieve the tennis ball:

paddling over to her ball

so, that’s the good news. My dog is fricking cool and possessed of an indomitable will to enjoy herself. The bad news? She pays the price:

This is after it had healed a bit. It got her on both sides, her neck, and her back.

She got hotspots so badly on her cheeks that we had to pay the vet to shave her for us – she wouldn’t let us near them because they were so uncomfortable. She was diagnosed with a yeast infection in both ears at the same time. All told she’s on two oral medications, some goop that goes in her ears twice a day, and a topical spray that goes on the wounds 3 times a day.

My poor, fabulous, glorious Soolin. There’s no stopping her no matter the consequences.

*(she’s going in for surgery to have that removed sometime in the next month or so)

In the end everything worked out fine. My mother in law took him down into the basement and they waited things out. Later that night we had to grab him out of bed and head down into the basement again when another line of supercells passed through, but no tornadoes touched down either at home or work. We do have friends whose neighborhoods and possibly houses have been damaged though, so today I’ve got my fingers crossed for them. All told 7 tornadoes touched down in our region, and so far 4 people are reported dead. Scary stuff when it hits this close to home.

scene of the crime

One of our chickens was killed early this winter, and while some of the details of what happened are clear to us, some of it’s a bit mysterious as well. I’ve been sitting on a draft of this story for literally months. I’ve finally found time to post it.

We have a habit of checking in on our chickens in the late afternoon, dropping a bit of cracked corn into their coop and making sure all is well. Susan and I had just returned from a Doctor appointment for our son Brady last week, and after letting our dog Soolin out I headed back to the coop. As I approached Soolin rushed off barking – she had detected a large raptor in our garden, hunched over the carcass of one of our chickens. This fantastic little scene evolved as Soolin chased the raptor back towards our property line, her barking and snapping and it flapping furiously, trying to gain altitude. Ultimately it escaped, but I commend Soolin for her effort. It reminded me of an old warner brother cartoon.

As to what happened, well, I’m not really sure. As you can see in the second photo, something pulled the screws to the coop door latch out of the coop frame. They’re tiny screws, but still it would require a fair amount of strength to manage this. Plus there were no signs of something grasping or gnawing at the coop or coop wire, something you’d expect to find if a predator was trying to work out how to bust into the coop. Our best guess is it was a bear or racoon. Our neighbor watched a black bear pull down his birdfeeder to get at the birdseed this winter, which lead to our operating theory: a bear showed up and tried to get at the chicken feed pellets, freeing the chickens, one of which was subsequently killed by the raptor. There were large bundles of both black and yellow chicken feathers in piles outside the coop, suggesting some or all of the chickens were outside the coop at some point, and several of the other chickens had wounds.

How the criminal broke into the coop

In terms of fallout, the chickens were traumatized, and would not come down from the loft of their coop for two days. After the second day, I opened the top and chased them out of it, figuring they had to eat so I would force the issue. They pretty quickly returned to their old behaviors, sans their sibling.

If you click on the last photo to enlarge it, you’ll see the raptor perched in the tree in the center background (the far tree) of the photo. He spent the 30 minutes it took me to clean up the coop and repair the busted door circling the yard and doing low passes over the coop, with me occasionally shaking my fist at him. After the chicken carcass was no longer visible to him he settled into the tree in the photo to watch me, and was still there when I headed in.

We did lose another chicken over the winter, but I have no photos of it because I discovered the murder scene in the dark. Our best guess on that one was it was a coyote or fox based on the scat it left behind.

All of this has us concluding we need to build a better coop – the current one isn’t adequate in terms of protection for the birds. I did reinforce the chicken wire and apply a layer of metal cloth to it in response to all this though, and we haven’t lost a bird since then. We’ll see if Susan and I find time to work on another coop before the seasons change again.

The perpetrator

So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything.  I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.

Me feeding my son Brady

Brady and me sleeping

Not that I’m complaining, mind – it’s been fabulous, but also super exhausting. I’ve had to hand feed him because of some difficulties he’s had which we think we’re finally close to resolving. We’ve recently switched to Susan helping with the feeding as well, not that this had been easy for her before we did that – she’s had to use her breast pump every two hours for this entire time.

Credit to Susan for both the photos, which I love.

Turns out she was munching on the last scraps of a rabbit that had been killed and eaten by something in our yard, close to where Nori is buried. There wasn’t much left – a bloodstain in the grass, a few tufts of fur, and part of its head. I was original going to post a photo of this, but it was too gnarly. Use your imagination instead – it was part of the poor rabbit’s skull with all the flesh and skin gone, but the eyeball still sitting in its socket, staring into the photo.

Poor, poor rabbit. It’s hard to begrudge them a little sunflower or cucumber after seeing such a thing.

!!!

Fucking rabbits.

Our black lab Nori. She died on July 7, 2010

Our beloved black lab Nori died last week after a sudden and mercifully brief battle with cancer.

Her last month was rough. In mid May she contracted salmonella and spent several days in the animal hospital. At one point during this I actually thought she was going to die she was so ill. Susan and I were greatly relieved when she came home and quickly reverted to her normal self.

Sadly this was not to last. After a couple of weeks we noted that she had begun to put on weight, and within a few days of that we knew something was wrong – she was gaining weight too quickly for this to be normal. The vet suggested it might be gas and we spent several days trying a medication, but to no avail. Within a week she was having so much difficulty breathing that Susan took her off to the animal hospital.

We then spent several weeks trying to figure out what was wrong with her. They drained 2 litres of fluid out of her during her first visit. Her recent bout with salmonella confused the diagnosis, but long story short within a couple of anxious weeks that included multiple hospital visits and drainings and a visit to a specialist hospital in Boston, we had a diagnosis – terminal cancer, probably in multiple locations in her body, but certainly in her bladder and almost certainly in her glands.

Within a week or so of this diagnosis, Nori was dead.

Needless to say this completely sucked. Susan and I were shocked and emotionally devastated. About the only good I can say of this experience was that fortunately Nori did not have to suffer very long. She had some rough weeks, with labored breathing and a rapid decline in body weight and stamina, but she was a trooper right through to the end, still anxious for her meals, eager to please us, and ready with a kiss and a wag of her tail, even when it cost her dearly to raise herself up.

She died in our arms at home on July 7, surrounded by those who loved her. Most of the folks who knew her well got a chance to see her at least once before she died. She’s buried in our yard, in view of the picture windows which look out over one of our gardens.

I’ll miss her dearly. Soolin and Nori did everything with Susan and I – they came to work with us, they’d usually accompany us on our errands, they were our hiking companions, they even attended our wedding (in fact, they’re the only people who attended our wedding!). It’s a terrible loss for us.

We’re going to spruce up the flower garden we buried her in, and I’m going to get a memorial page up for her on this site at www.metamusing.net/nori as soon as I have a chance to pull together enough photos for it.

Yesterday I let the dogs out to do their morning business, and Soolin went zipping off towards the garden, barking. Turns out she had spotted a rabbit. Said rabbit? Inside the fence. Soolin? Stuck outside the fence. Soolin, apparently our only effective rabbit deterrent, was reduced to running furiously up and down the perimeter of the fence, barking madly but impotently. Eventually the rabbit scooted out of the fence and into the nearby shrubbery, but its point was made. We’re debating our next move.

An approaching SUV stopped in time, thankfully, and no one got hit, but there was this awful prolonged moment when she wasn’t responding to repeated queries from me or the driver of the SUV as to her well being. A line of cars grew in both directions as this was going on. By the time I was opening our gate she finally stirred and after a exchanging a few words with the driver of the SUV she tottered groggily off, either ignoring or not hearing my repeated calls offering assistance – the best I got was a quick glance in my direction.

It was disturbing – I couldn’t tell if she was too dazed to actually be walking, or she couldn’t hear me, or if she was pissed about what had happened and had decided it was my barking dogs’ fault and thus didn’t want to engage with me. I ended up standing on the sidewalk watching her totter off down the street, worried the whole time.

Monadnock and the forest floor from the Pisgah ridgeline

All in all we had a fantastic day. The only downers were Soolin, who had to hike with her lead on because of her still-healing hotspot from last weekend, and my sore body which apparently wasn’t quite recovered from last week’s adventure. By the time we got to the car my ankle was super sore.

trail map and links to a gallery of pictures below. One note on the trail map – it’s slightly inaccurate because I had to manually edit the trailmap. If anything, the hike was a bit longer on the southern end of the trail than is represented below because the gps lost signal for a bit while we were in the deep forest towards the SW end of the trail.

Trail Map

Image gallery

You can checkout the image gallery here. Below is a sample image to give you a sense of it:

Beautiful fall colors starting to peak through around a pond on the forest floor

The image gallery is here.

When I was in high school a proliferation of 1-900 for-pay calling services emerged. They covered every genre under the sun, including porn. Some of them were even free. Scott was still a little kid back then, and somehow he figured out about a 1-900 fantasy role playing game you could play over the phone. I think it played along the lines of those old fighting fantasy books – they’d read you a paragraph of text like ‘you enter a dark room. You can hear scritching noises. Press 1 to cast a light spell. Press 2 to draw your sword. Press 3 turn back,’ etc etc. I suspect F.I.S.T. was the game, though it could also have been Phonequest - I’m not sure. Anyway I remember him telling us about it at the time, and how he was trying to make his way to the end -  if you managed to get to the ending you’d win a prize. You can probably tell where this is going – Scott managed to rack up hundreds of dollars in fees before his parents figured out what he was up to.

We teased him about it at the time, one of those awkward juvenile moments for him where his older brother and friends gave him shit for not having much common sense, but I remember him standing up for himself, trying to explain how his plan was to win the prize – it wasn’t that he didn’t realize he was racking up a bill, he just figured he could make it pay off in the end.

This sort of captures another fundamental piece of who Scott was for me. He was by no means a conventional thinker, and he knew it. He wasn’t embarrased by this, or mostly not, and he wasn’t afraid to defend his ideas even in the face of withering criticism or the good natured ribbing of his friends. The truth is I really admired him for this. I often thought he was a crackpot, but he was a crackpot with a plan and the willpower to carry it out no matter what anyone else thought.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

Scott on our way to get gas and ice

My friends and I have this annual group camping trip that’s been going on for 25 years now. As a coincidence Scott and I both attended the first time in 1995, and since roughly 1998 it’s taken place on Lake George in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. If you’ve never been, Lake George is absolutely gorgeous. It has a reputation as a sort of mini-coney island tourist trap, but that’s just the southwest corner of the lake – the northern 4/5ths of the lake are mostly state lands and undeveloped, and there are a few dozen campsites that are accessible only by water. For 10 or so years out of the 25 year history of this camping trip we’ve rented a boat and camped on the water-accessible only sites, floating in all our supplies and spending the weekend tubing, cruising the lake on the boat, etc.

The area is known for its powerful thunderstorms in the summer. You can be out on the lake on a completely beautiful sunny day one second and the next find yourself in the heart of the maelstrom, thunder crashing, the wind roaring and the rain coming down so hard and fast you can’t keep your eyes open to see. Usually the dramatic storms are short lived – they blow through, relieve some humidity, and then you’re back to your beautiful sunny day.

after the worst of the storm. You can see the white line where the rain is still coming down hard

Dave, Scott and me set out to refill the boat one year the day after we arrived. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were tubing on the way back after picking up gas when we noticed thunderheads moving in, so we pulled in the tube. Almost before we had finished that it started coming down hard, the wind picked up, and things got rough. While we didn’t exactly panic, Dave and I both got concerned. Dave had been driving and he had slowed the boat to a crawl, but the winds were high and were forcing us towards shore. Scott and I both started exhorting him to keep the boat moving. Dave complained that he couldn’t see a damn thing with the rain blowing in our faces. Scott took control of the situation, taking the helm of the boat. I asked Scott how he could possibly see – I had sunglasses on which was keeping the rain out of my eyes, mostly, but I still felt blinded. Dave meanwhile had pulled the tube up as a shield and he was kneeling behind it. I joined him and the two of us knelt there on the deck, cowering behind it.

Tell me that doesn't look a bit like a 1970's Yes album cover

Scott meanwhile had started to accelerate. At first he was just trying to get the boat’s nose headed into the wind so we would stop drifting towards shore, but soon he was laughing, nudging the speed higher and then higher again. Now the wind was just whipping through the boat and the raindrops stung when they hit you, and Dave and I were clucking like nervous hens behind our tube, occasionally poking our heads up to try and see what was happening and then quickly ducking back down.  At some point during this Scott asked for my sunglasses, and that’s my image of him in this scene – my sunglasses on, laughing, laughing, laughing – laughing at Dave and I, who definitely looked pathetic, laughing in the face of the storm as he pushed the boat ever faster into it, laughing at life and the chaotic fun it could throw at you.

It was over in 5 or 10 minutes, and soon we were all laughing at what we had just been through, Scott poking fun at Dave and I, observing that we felt like we were starring in our own Yes album cover, and chugging back to camp in what was now a gentle rain.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

Scott out on Lake George circa ~2007

This is my favorite story about Scott because it really captures an essential piece of who he was for me.

Some years ago Scott and his wife were trying to have a baby. There were some issues and they were tracking her cycles. There were certain moments in time when Scott needed to be there to do his part. Scott had driven up to my place in Saratoga Springs to pick me up, and we drove up to Bolton Landing to wait for our ride.

On the way we talked about what he and his wife were going through and how he might have to take off early to go be with her, which was understandable but a bummer. Sure enough we got there, Scott got a call from home, and the next day off he went to be with his wife. What’s surprising is less than 24 hours later he was back, spending at least 15 hours on the road (some of it in the worst traffic the tri-state area has to offer) in less than 2 days. And more surprising than that was that he got another call from home and took off, a day early, to again do his bit.

I’m not sure if Scott’s son Logan came out of this experience but I’d like to think so. I also think it says a lot about who Scott was, selfless in his devotion to those he cared about. No one else that regularly comes on our trip would have done this, but for Scott it was a no brainer, even in the face of all of us ragging him about it.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.