Another insanely busy day. Work was absolutely crazy.. as it’s been for weeks.. I did take a short break to get a hair cut.. now I don’t look like a homeless  person…   It was gretart seeing Deb. her shop is filled with Sam pictures, samstones and pins. I love going there.

 Gabe’s last soccer game was called on account of rain.. so I headed to winooski.. to teh opening of the new Champlain Emerging Media Cneter at the champlain mill. They’ve transformed this old upscale shoping mall into a new software incubator. The EMC has abotu 5000 square feet  overlooking the winooski.

I walked in to teh recoeption and got mobbed by my friends there.. it ws soooo good to see them all.

they each dragged me around seeign there projects. One thing I liked was this cool digitizer from polhemis.. First my firend Kate got digitized

Then it was my turn

They had a demo of our IBM piece

and a runnign demo of the new cystic fibrosis game interface that I helped write that allows kids to drive with their breathing. Joe Manly and I wrote the interface.. several of the students are writing the game.. and Dr. Peter Bingham is the sponsor.. here he is with Ray and his wife Dana .. (there is no Dana.. only Zule !)

I saw some concept sketches from their new project which they’re doing for the UN. It’s aimed at young males to teach them to resist violence against women. Here’s some fo the student artwork for the concept.. ll of this was done on a computer using a digital tablet !

Around 7 all the grown ups went up stairs to the newly emptied 4th floor for dinner. We had a great time.. Lots of good speakers to kick off the opening of the EMC and the kcik off of the software incubator.

First Ann spoke.. i as very proud of what she’s made happen here.. so was everyone in the room !

Then Laura spoke.. she was my lead programmer and designer on our peice.. she gave one of the best, most honest, and inspiring speaches I ever heard anyone give for free.. I was so very proud of her  !

Then we had Dr. Finney the pres. of Champlain.. then Brian Dubie, the Lt. Gov.

Then Gov Dougles spoke.. He’s always entertaining.IWe got to talk for awhile. earlier in the evening. .He”s got such a good memory for people.. He even remembered my politics..   I really do like him.. too bad he’s a republican 🙂

I got hoem around 10 to find Dine sill apnting, Gabe mixing music  and Chai hoem from the Vet. Here’s the Rock that she hadd surgicaully removed from her small intestine yesterday.. our 2nd 1000 dollar rock..
Ugh.. glad she’s ok now !

OK.. really busy day (again) tomorrow. Gotta sleep. note all. Nite Sam !
-me

Today was wonderfuly calm in a relative way.. maybe a minor lull.. but still so nice. I woke up at 8:30 afetr a full 8 hours sleep. I felt liek a new person.. I did some small jobs around the house. Diane has been reallllly patient with all the other stuff I have going. She’s handling 99 percent of the painiing job .. and everything else .. by herself since I’ve been so stupidly busy over the past 3 weeks. Around 10 I had to head to catamount to work on the porject-x monster. I got there in time to see Seth getting a ride down in the tractor.

I saw soem cool stickers on the ‘haunted forest mobile’

They had a ton of volunteers there carving pumpkins. It’s funny…. The place has been completely empty all the times I’ve been there.

We spent some time getting the beast positioned and leveled.. He’s got a great location.

Seth and I spent about 6 hours getting the wiring cleaned up, installing the 2 wiimote numchuck interfaces and testing stuff out.. It was hard working out there.. the generator was running next to our heads, it was pretty cold out there..and we ddin’t have all of our supplies.. Buut we managed.. we used the supplies we found there…

Justin was there volunteering so he hug out an helped us It was really good catching up with him ..!

Around 4 we managed to get everythign working.. so I zoomed back to Richmond to the block party. The main event was the rail jam !.. They trcuked in a bunch of snow from an ice rink..

Sumner was doing soem great vinyl DJ scratching

While Urion kept a beat.. it was a great sound.

Luckily, Gabe had an extra jacket.. I was so freezing I even wore a yellow coat !

The rail jam was excellent.. they brought the  Sam rail and a flat rail..

Here’s Gabe making his first run.

Adah and Senyah were there looking colorful. .

So was Gabe !

Jacki was there with her Sam pin

There was some great music going on..

And… then a bonfire.. what a great evening !

My last act for the night was to cut up the chilis from the garden into an infernal relish.
I ate a bunch on my sald.. and let me tell you its hot..hotter than anything I’ve ever eaten .. Those of you who know me know thta’s saying something.   I cant wait to have soem on my oatmeal tomorrow !

OK I’m gonna sleep.. Nite folks.. Nite Sam
-me

Sigh…. this is the first breathing room I’ve had all this week. It’s been an insanely busy week at work and outside of work. As I’ve been reporting it was like every crazy project I had taken on suddenly came due at the same time.. 

The big one on the list was a paper I’m writing for a conference It was due today.. and I finished it at 11:59PM.. Yee-haw.. Well.. I say finished.. I sent it out for a bunch of friends to look over. Diane did a wonderful job of helping me edit it… I’ll get soem comments back and send it in on Monday.

I was still working on it at 4:44 this morning when I took this picture.. I ended up falling asleep on the floor out in the yoga space where I was working. Somehow I managed to get up and function prety well today with about 3 hours of sleep…

Not much specifically cool happened today, but I notice that I have a backlog of several days on my camera.. I think I’ll settle for eeek in review leftovers…

2 days ago Jessi stopped over to hang out..She was back from college on break. it was really nice seeing her. She’s loving school

Gabe had a couple of soccoer games.. here’s the 2nd to last.. under the creepy eye of my cameras color swap thing

We had our last full project-x meeting at homers on Tues night.. Brendan was back from college .. he and Seth helped us strap on the guys arms. Seth and I manged to get the Wiimote numchucks wired into the guys arms.. it’s gonna be very cool ..

Wed night we had our innagural brunign man mutant car design kick off party at Bens.. it was ben, dwayne, homer and me.. I’ts goign to be great workign with homer on this..

We had a great time tossign around ideas… including.. mutant make-up mobile, slide mobile and romman gally mobile.. it’ll be fun working this out. Ben’s place  had much interesting signage ..eg.:

Let’s see.. where’s that leave us.. Oh, thursday.. I was at a uvm meeting that haded out peace pops.. since I’m still vegan.. I took a few and haded them to the first two people I met.. that would be these guys.. whoever they are.. they were happy to get ice cream from a stranger.

Then.. I stayed up all night and worked on teh @%ing paper.. woke up.. and wnet to another set of meetings with UVM..

Late afternoon after a bunch of work meetings sleepingess got the best of me, so I took off for home.. I stopped by the ahunted forest to see the beast.. homer had dropepd him off in the morning.

I got home in time to see Sumner and Kevin who’d dropped by the house to say hi. It was really good tlakign to them.. both of them now driving. It’s one of those things Sam won’t ever do…..Oh man….

Tonight I went to a lecture back at the sheraton.. the guy was a motivational speker . Nice guy.. but the message didn’t click for me. It was good to see how someone else worked a room. He did have some good stories. One thing he did was play a movie clip of Kennedy annoucing the race to the moon. that was wierd because I mentin that speach in my $%&ing paper.. Did I mention that I was writing a paper ?

OMG.. it’s 1 AM .. I gotta sleep.. More tomorrow. nite all. nite Sam
-m