Smarties

Let’s talk Smarties.

I’m sure they need no introduction unless you were raised on a deserted island. I was looking at a few rolls (those in the photo…Halloween leftovers) and I noticed something interesting. The candies come in six different colors – yellow, white, green, red, orange, and purple – and they are packaged randomly 15 pieces to a roll. This means, that when you look at the sequence of colors in each roll you are looking at a fingerprint of sorts… because each roll is different. 

But how different? How many unique Smarties fingerprints are possible? Well, I’ve calculated that, and there are over 470 billion possible fingerprints. This means the chance of finding two identical rolls is about 1 in 470,000,000,000.

 

Let’s add some perspective…

 

You could give everyone on earth their own unique roll of Smarties… 60 times over.

 

You are more likely to win Powerball… 1,600 times… than you are to find two identical rolls of Smarties.

 

There are two unique rolls for each star in the Milky Way galaxy.

 

There are slightly more than two unique rolls for each atom in the human genome.

 

The actual number of possible unique Smarties rolls is 470,184,984,576.

 

If you had a complete set of unique rolls, and you laid them end-to-end, they would span over 18 million miles. That’s all the way to the moon… and back… 36 times. And if you consumed them all, one piece of candy every second, it would take you more than a quarter million years to eat them all.

 

Do you feel Smartie-er now?

 

I do. And such is life.

Transistors

Check out my iPod from the 1960s… which is why it has a 6T on it… 60s… 6T… get it? Okay… not really. 6T means six transistors… and it’s a radio of course… not an iPod.

Long before electronic grandeur and bragging rights were measured and decided by gigabytes, mega-pixels, and horizontal display resolution, they were governed by the number of transistors a device contained.

Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, so this was the equivalent of a six-vacuum tube radio. And it came with a free case… unlike iPods and iPhones… whose cases range in price from crazy to ridiculous. 

 

When I was fifteen, I built a five-band short-wave radio called a Knight-Star Roamer. It had five vacuum tubes… one of the best presents I ever received. Not sure why I brought that up… just bragging about how many vacuum tubes I once had I suppose. That would be five. I have none now. Such is life.

Someday

Thanksgiving is almost upon us. Should I say it? Yes, I will say it... where has the year gone to? 

I wish I knew. 

The autumn wind scatters the days as easy as it does the leaves it seems. I must admit...I'm feeling very wind blown. But, I’m heading home for Thanksgiving in the morning... five days with the family in Virginia Beach. Heavenly.

 

I was going to write something for Thanksgiving, but I decided to close with this instead...

 

It's something I wrote (and posted on Facebook) two years ago... and it feels like the right time to share it once again. But first, have a great Thanksgiving, all of you! The best to you and yours. 

 

3 September 2016

 

Someday... it's the most insincere word in the English language. Yet we say it all the time. 

Someday I will get back home and visit. Someday I will make that trip. We’ll get together someday. Someday let’s make time for that. Someday.

 

I wrote the above in a blog… many years ago. A long-lost blog hosted by a service called Tripod... also long gone. Both serve as poignant reminders that all of what we write here on the internet is temporary… persistent bits and bytes that are anything but…and are in fact fleeting… and eager to seek a digital entropy of sorts.

 

I was thinking recently about all the times I used the word when I was young, when people whom meant the world to me were only a day's drive away. People whom now no amount of driving will suffice for even a simple “just dropped by to say hello and spend a moment at the table with you” type of visit.

 

Anne Frank wrote in her diary that the dead receive more flowers than the living because regret is stronger than gratitude. A surprisingly deep thought for someone in her early teens. And so very true. What a wonderful writer she would have blossomed into.

 

Don't let your somedays turn into regrets. That's all I really wanted to say.

Blessings in Disguise

October. It’s almost done. I know this because there is Halloween candy in our home…miniature Mounds and Dark Chocolate Kit-Kats. I should not partake… but when the candy hits the bowl tomorrow night… well… let’s just say I will know how Galadriel felt when Frodo offered her the One Ring.

I like this time of year. I think most folks do. So much fun and such great memories. Sometimes I think I live for fall.

November. It's just around the next bend. A time of year for giving thanks… and counting one’s blessings. Did you know that not all blessings start out as blessings? Let me tell you about one of mine, that was for the longest time, anything but a blessing (to me).

 

In the early 1960s, a year or two after my grandfather (on my mother’s side) passed away, my father and his best friend wanted to purchase the Adirondack farm that my grandparents owned for most of their lives. My grandmother needed to sell it and retire. It didn’t work out for my father and his friend though... their hopes of owning a farm were dashed by events they had no control over.

 

The farm was not far from where our family lived. It lay on the other side of two large fields, its two-story farmhouse easily seen in the distance from our backyard. It was an 1800s farmhouse, adorned with large green storm shutters, a silver tin roof, and a tree-flanked covered porch that spanned the entire front of the house. The trees were huge and billowing, adding an air of strength and longevity to the already rustic home. Behind it were the customary red barns, sheds, and fence-lined fields one would expect to find.

 

I bring all this up because of a dream I had a few nights back… a dream about the farm. It was a dream that took me down a “what if” path. In it, my father and his friend were able to purchase the farm, and together they did exactly what they planned to do, raise cattle. My life was completely different of course. I grew up a farm kid. In real life, I was raised in the shadow of the Adirondacks, but I did not grow up there. I grew up in Virginia Beach, moving away from the ADK in the early summer of 1968.  In my dream, I was happy that I grew up an Adirondacker, and grateful to have grown up with my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby.

Yet, the dream seemed a bit unsettling, empty somehow, and unfulfilling.

 

The most poignant part of the dream occurred just before I woke. I was the age I am now, standing on the front porch of the farmhouse, gazing across the fields to the house my father built for us in 1959, on land my grandfather had given to him. It was an early November morning, and all was still. The sky was grey and heavy. All sound was hushed. There was no snow on the ground nor any in the air, but I knew my world was leaning gently against a coming snowfall.

 

After waking, I lay for a while, in the dark, thinking about all I had just seen, and about how I felt, in particular the empty feeling I was left with. The dream had an imperfection. A casual observer, if our dreams were allowed them, would not have noticed... but I did.

 

In my dream, I stood alone on the porch.

 

I listened to Laura’s soft breathing beside me… and closed my eyes. I traveled down a side road of the “what if” path and looked in on a T-shirt shop at the Virginia Beach oceanfront. It was May 1975 and a seventeen-year-old girl had just walked in. She was starting a summer job there that day. On this “what if” path, my eighteen-year-old self is not there to look up from his work and see her for the very first time. He is not there to fall head over heels in love with her over the summer. He is not there… and he never would be.

 

I don’t talk about it much, but when I moved away from my hometown in upstate New York I was angry… and sad… for a long time. I didn’t like my new surroundings. I didn’t like where I went to school. I didn’t like the other kids. I didn’t like Virginia Beach. For the longest time, all I wanted was to go home.

 

I lay there and thought about that… and the dream… and the side road.

Then, I reached out and touched the shoulder of a soul more gentle than a hundred Adirondack mornings… one more beautiful than a thousand Adirondack snowfalls… and the empty feeling departed… and all that was unfulfilled became fulfilled again.

 

Sometimes, blessings begin as blessings in disguise.

 

As a child, Laura loved Florida. It is there that she was born. She loves it still. I was born far to the north, in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. I moved south, she moved north, and we met in the month of May along a side road, not far from my father’s unrealized dream of owning a farm.

 

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Thanks for reading and listening… and for all the kind comments over the years. I know my posts are much too long sometimes… thanks for overlooking that. Enjoy the holidays. Enjoy the upcoming year. Enjoy life and your loved ones. Enjoy yourself. You deserve it.

And Happy Birthday to the love of my life.

In the Middle of Nowhere and the Night

When I was a kid growing up in the shadow of the ADK in New York State, I became accustomed to several things Southerners have no need for. Snowmobiles for example. And yes, we owned one. Having learned at an early age to drive it, I would take it out and roam the fields adjacent to our property. There was something magical about being alone out in the snow, the cold biting my face, while I navigated my way through locations normally not accessible, just me and the machine. Sometimes, I would stop, turn off the engine, and simply sit there, enjoying the quiet and the isolation. 

Looking back over the years, I now wonder if these are the same feelings that draw a person to sailing. I'd like to think so. In any case, I do miss it. 

Still, as much fun as I had, snowmobiles to those in the higher elevations of the ADK were more than just for fun - they were how folks got around when the roads were impassable, and then again, even when the roads WERE passable. Go ahead, stop by a restaurant or watering hole deep in the ADK in the winter; it's not uncommon to see more snowmobiles than cars in the parking lot. 

Riding at night was especially fun... the snowmobile's headlights lighting up the snow and the darkness all around. Out in the country, there is no spillage of light from anywhere. It is as dark as it is quiet, especially on a winter's night in snow-covered fields lit only by the moon and bounded by the occasional fence, line of trees, or woods. 

A funny story… I was out riding with my dad one night. He was driving, and I was sitting behind him (our machine held two riders). About 20 minutes into our ride, out in the middle of a field I had never been to before, we got stuck. It happens… often when riding on new snow… but I knew what to do. I jumped off and began pushing while my dad pulled back on the throttle. 

The snowmobile began to move and then bite the snow… quickly gaining traction. In no time at all the machine and my dad were once again skimming over the fresh snow… as I stood there… watching… from the middle of the tracks they left behind. 

I continued to watch until the lights became very faint and eventually disappeared. The idea of course was for me to hop back onto the snowmobile as it gained traction. That's the way it's done. Well, long story short, my hop fell short and I missed, all unbeknownst to my dad. He had no idea I wasn't sitting behind him. 

So, I started walking, following the tracks in the snow. A huge moon that night made it easy. My dad did come back of course. I don't recall how long I walked before I saw the headlights in the distance… my dad retracing his tracks to find me. I thought he would be angry… but he was laughing when he pulled up. He asked me what happened. I simply shrugged my shoulders and climbed aboard… and off we went. 

We did not get stuck again that night, but we did explore places I did not recognize, places I suspected I had never been to before, or perhaps had, but was now tricked by the night and the moon into thinking otherwise. It is an easy thing I think for the moon and night to do, making everything look new and unexplored, especially to a kid whose imagination often ran wild. 

By my own estimates, that ride took place exactly five decades ago, plus or minus a month or two. I was all of eleven years old… but already a budding Adirondacker. These days, my wife and I pass the time here in the shadow of the Blue Ridge in Virginia… but inside, I'm still an Adirondacker at heart… I always will be. 

We do get snow here, but not nearly as much as in the ADK, only a fraction at best. Still, when it does snow, even now, after fifty years, I cannot help but smile when I happen upon the moon shining down on a snow-covered field. Though warm and comfortable in my car, I can still feel it… that wonderful cold upon my face… the snow flying up behind me as my dad pulls back on the throttle… and that magical feeling of almost flying as we skim across the pristine snow… all while exploring places unknown… with my dad… in the middle of both nowhere and the night… in the shadow of the ADK.