Today is Chai’s fifth birthday.  if you ask me.  I guess that makes her middle aged like me. That’s really hard to believe ..  I think she’s still got some puppy in her.. She’s been such a good friend through the years.   Our running buddy, playmate.. and a warm and furry shoulder to cry on when we needed it.
Gabe decided to make her a cake,. it had hamburger, bologna (where’s he get that  in a house of vegetarians ? ) cheese, peanut butter and 5 dog biscuits on top. I have to admit it smelled pretty good !>

We put one of those blinky LED candles on it.. Gabe ran and got a SamStone for it too…

Then we sang happy birthday.. (boy am I tonedeaf)

Both dogs loved the cake.. Gabe has a future as a doggie chef..!

I can still remember when we got Chai.l. it was wnter and we drove up to meet her in Montreal.. She’d flown in from toronto.. she was so tiny.. The boys just love holding her.. Sam really loved her.. and she really loved Sam..

Happy birthday Girl….

Woof woof everybody.. wooof.. arrrrroooooooo Sam
-me

Today was kinda strange. I had planned ot spend the entire day working on my paper.. but it didn’t work out that way. I got some time on it this morning.. but then we decided to take advantage of the unseasonible warmth to fix a few broken windows in the spare bedroom (strange to call it that because we now we now have 3 spare-ish bedrooms) .. and the two bad breaks in the tower.   There were 3 windows in the spare bedroom. there that had one way or another gotten broken enought to be able to insert a peice of your body through the whole.. not great for dead winter.. While I was in the mood to fix windows, I figured I’d look around for other windows in need of repar.. Beleive it or not, I found 12 window panes thta had some degree of cracking.. none as bad as the aforementioned 5.. 12 broken windows.. sounds like a big deall.. but not when you consider that our house has 530 pains of glass (not counting decorative cubbords or glass in the front of funrinture.. or the yoga studio/garage/lab .. Wait.. now that I think of it, It’s actually 538.. since one of the doors has a window that Sam punched out once when we were goofing around.

Here’s 10 of the broken windows.. the other 2 I forgot to grab pictures of.. because they’re on a bell tower window (and curved – ick)

Diane and I muscled the huge ladder in place and up I went..  the top window I had to replace was about 24 feet up.. Diane looked smaller than ususal

I dug out the old window and   handed it into Diane.. Then cleaned out the old putty..

When they were all cleaned out, Diane handed me out the new glass, and I placed it and stuck it into place withh glazing points.

Finally I squished the putty in .. after I’d wamred it enough to work..

I spent a good hour and a half up at that height.. it was nice and peacful up there… When I came down, we walked up the hill to meet the folks Marcia and Tim wo are buying Justin and Barb’s place. Justin and Barb had a small party for us to all meet the new neighbors.. now that’s a nice seller.. and a nice neiborhood. The new folks are realy nice but//and we’ll miss Barb and Justin.. THey’re not going far, though.

We’ll that’s it for tonight.. back to working on my paper.. More tomorrow… Nite all.. Nite Sam !
-me

Ps. On  the way up to Barb and Justin, Diane spotted this hige spider in the field.. Looked like he was getting ready for winter..

I have absolutely nothing to report today I spent the entire day in the yoga studio working on my paper.. .. well that’s not completely true.. I did about an hour of painting this morning. Then  Diane and I took a short but beautiful late afternoon hike with the dogs up between Honey Hollow and the Catamount trail.

I have a funny relationship with this paper..which is on why folks like me should be workign with kids and teachers to get kids more interested in engineering and scientists On one hand I love doing it .. I think the message is pretty important.because the world needs engineers and scientists to work on hard problems like energy efficiency. healthcare, etc.. . On the other hand  I hate doing  it. As with anything involving writing.. I struggle trying to get my thoughts into words.. or at least words that make sense in a linear order.   I spend long hours staring at the screen messing around with the same four or five words. .. Sometimes I don’t get as much as a paragraph after an hours work…

You know I just had one of those wierd aha moments sitting here typing (and procrastinag from working on my paper) .. For soem reason I have no trouble at all sitting down every night and writing here.. In fact I’ve written problemy close to a million and a half words over the nearly two years since Sam died..

Why is it hard for me to write about stuff other than what I’m thinking.. Hey.. I can sit here and ponder that instead of writing my paper.

I guess I should get back to it..   Before I do, let me share the following pictures I got today from our friend Georgia who lives down in Guatemala (I think.. you still down there Georgia ? ).. I was doing some  maintainance on the SamStones website today (Instead of working on my paper) .. I was looking through the spam filter and found a comment that Georgia had posted on the site.. I guess it got picked up because it had several html links in it.. as many spam messages do.

Georgias message had the scanned image of a thnk you card that Sam had written with Dianes help for his 7th or 8th birthday.. here’s the front

I can remember sittingdown at the computer wiht Sam to make that picture as if it were yesterday.. We were so jazzed that we could  wiggle that picture of the kids at his party. Oh man…….

I love finding stuff like this…  Thanks so much for sending it Georgia !

I could stare at it all night.. but.. I gotta get bck to my paper…

Gnite folks..  Gnite Sam..
-me

..

The day passed mercifully quickly.. I took tow of my meetings outside.. The first with friend Norman.. we walked down to the river as we talked about IBM stuff..

The second with friend Jason.. another IBM meeting. b I took him to Catamount trail to the palace where the Haunted forest  is goign to be. I wanted to check out the place that the project X monstoer is goign to be…

Here’s the site we’re going to use.. nice and open and flat !

Here’s Jason innefectivly covering the beers we smugged on to the trail..

Man this place brings back all sorts of meemories for me and the three kids..

Here’s where Max played ‘Jack’ in the original Jack-o’-lantern story.

And here’s the pumpkin patch where Sam, Gabe and I hung out for several years as part of scareforce.. I loved sitting here scaring people…

We also stopped in and saw Jana before we left..

THere was a car in the parking lot there with good bumper stickers..

I got hhome around 5L30 and no one was here.. so I decided to blog.. One less thing to do later.. . This weekend I have to finish my $%ing paper.. THat calls for soem interesting new way to procrastinate.. I know.. how about a nap ?!   More tomorrow.. Nite folks, Nite Sam
-me