I worked at home  all day today  because Diane was out all day and I needed to puppy-sit   I love workign at home.. I seem to get so much more done I was on the phone working without a break from 8 through about 5. I even took the dogs for a walk in the woods while I was on a work call.. At one point, I lost my footing and slipped down an icy shoot.Luckily I was on mute whch blocked my swearing.

After work I took a  quick stop at Tim F’s to get my back adjusted.. He had this most curious diagram on his wall.

I got home around 6:30… just in time to run to Avery’s house to help celebrate her 16th birthday. Her folks had asked each of her friends to show u and play Avery a song..   I opted to bring my Theremin.. I played a rusty version of Happy Brithday on it.. At least I thought it sounded like Happy Birthday…

Even though it wasn’t my birthday. I got a present. Eric and Pam had commissieoned Ave’s mom Jen to make me a magic hat.. .. It is just so cool It’s covered in lightening bolts and looks just like Dumbledoor’s hat.

I only stayed at Ave’s for a few minutes.. then zoomed back to the house to intercept my buddy Jim. It was great having him come by. Jim lives in POK and has been  my close friend since we started working together in 2003. He Gabe and I went out to dinner. First we tried On the Rise.. but they were packed because there was music there.. Then we tried Bridge Street.. but it had just closed at 8… so we ended up at Zachary’s.. After dinner we came home and started some mischief. The first thing I wanted to show Jim was my new flash powder composition. I just got some new primo atomized aluminum.. I mixed it 30/70 with potassium perchlorate and put it in a paper cup. We lit it and got back… not far enough. It was so much louder and brighter than it had been with my 325 mesh Aluminum. It knocked me back and left us all seeing spots and with ringing ears.. it was quite cool..

Then we did some fire breathing using powdered starch. I rigged up a simple PVC pipe-like thing to allow us to blow the starch out without actually having to put it in our mouths. It was a pig step up from having a mouthful of starch powder

This simple set-up was amazingly effective !!! Here’s Gabe doing it.

And here’s Jim..

Jim liked it.. I think !

Diane got home around 10:30 .. She had some boxes to open.> The first was form Shaun and Billy and family.. It had some really cool stuff in it.. The bag they came in was pretty interesting too.. interesting English/Chinese hybrid language

Shaun had managed to find some very cool postcards of our town.  That took some real work !!!  Here’s a view of Mt. Mansfield form near the Richmond town center.

Here’s one of a famous train wreck from 1919.. This is the covered bride that used ot be next to our house before the 27 flood.

Here’s anaother view of that same wreck I found online

Here’s the Round Church where Diane and I got married !

…. and a very cool picture of Jonesville sometime near the turn of the last century. I marked our house with a red arrow. Note all the buildings near the river that were destroyed in 1927 Notice also how cleared all the hills were. Nearly everything was cleared to raise sheep at that time.

OK.. Time for me to got to sleep.. Busy day planned for tomorrow. G’nite to you all.. G’nite Sam !
-me

Today is Diane’s birthday.  Happy birthday Diane !  Wonderful, sweet , beautiful love of my life ! 

Gabe had the great idea to get tattoos in honor of Diane’s birthday.   We opted for the kind made with sharpies… they don’t hurt as much. We wanted to have them to show her at breakfast this morning, but there was a catch. I was going to the Victor Wooten concert last night.. and Gabe was going to be in bed by the time I got home. We came up with a great evil plan. Gabe drew his tattoo and took a picture of it with his camera.   He left me this note by the back door when I came in.

This morning both Gabe and I came down this morning super sleepy.. We both pulled out our ’ink’ to wish Diane a happy birthday…   

Diane thought it was pretty cool… I was so intent on having them match that I didn’t even realize that mine should have said ’Diane’ or ’Wife’ until mid day. You know you married the right women when she doesn’t even point out such a goofy mix-up !

I took Gabe in to school and noticed that the temperature outside was 55 at 7:30.. that’s amazing.. All the melting snow is creating this cool fog everywhere.  .

It was raining a bit, but Diane and I wanted to take a birthday walk. We took the doggies up on the catamount trail. It was surreal weather.. probably in the 60’s.. but more than a foot of snow on the ground.

It was so warm that I  couldn’t resist the urge to jump in the honey hollow creek.

 I had to slide down in the snow.. Diane stayed up above.. so I had to take this picture by hanging my camera on a tree.. this is the only G rated one that came out.  

That water was cold …

When we got back to the house I noticed that the inside and outside temperatures were the same. 63 in April with all this snow is a cool combination.

Diane went to Marci for a massage/reiki..while I stayed home and worked a bit.  around 3 Diane and Gabe came home… Around 5 a bunch of friends showed up spontaneously to help us celebrate Diane’s birthday !  Nate, Julia, Abbot and Jen were there. Jen made a cake and I had one made at Chef’s Corners.. We had lots of cake..   I put 5 candles on each…   a group of 2 and a group of 3… the prime factors of Diane’s age.. 48… she’s proud that she’s 4 times older than Gabe.. how often does that happen ?

Gabe’s lighting the Sam candle

Marie showed up for a few minutes on her way up to see Evan . I made him a special piece of cake for her to take… It had a big layer of mustard between theslices.. I know he liked the mustard filled twinkie I made for him before.

It’s so nice.. our house is full of flowers  for dianes brithday.. Here she is talking to her dad.. with the flowers her parents sent.

OK.. we’re going to take Diane out for dinner now.. so I better get going.. Happy Birthday Diane…   We all love you so much.. Sam we’re thinking of you today, my son..
-me

It was an easy trip home yesterday morning. I used the ferry trip to blog which always makes the time pass quickly. I did stand up once to toss a SamStone into Nantucket Sound.

which reminds me… … the SamStones website is having some major trouble.. Our hosting service ’upgraded’ their software and all the database queries that drive our website now take minutes instead of seconds. They say it will be fixed this week.. but that’s what they said last week !

Anyway… I got home yesterday after a nice drive.. it was a bit of forced mindfulness… I had lost my phone handset so I couldn’t talk much on the phone…
My ipod ran out of batteries, XM satellite public radio was doing endless pre-pre-election analysis and broadcast public radio was doing fund raising.. I just sat there and thought.. and not-thought for 5 hours. It was cool to see the climate shift from the cape to here.. it was in the 50’s and cloudy there.. but it was in the teens and full of snow back here… Some of the flowers are getting tired of it by this point. !

I got home around 2.. and we had a pretty quiet day. Gabe was at Jay with Dylan… so we just hung out and read… We’d been invited p to Deb’s for Fish Tacos… and Diane had the great idea to make sugar on snow !.. That requires donuts… so Diane started the closely guarded secret process of donut making.. Actually, I think she said that she’s only made them once before in her life.. and that was before we met 26 years ago…

It’s a pretty cool process.. it’s a yeasted dough.. a little softer than bread dough..

She roiled it out and cut the outside with a beer glass and the inside hole with a film container..

Then they got fired in shallow oil.. This is actually what I’m supposed to be eating for this ayurvedic diet.. sweet and oily food.. some diet.. eh ?

They looked perfect..

Are those for me, Mommy ?

The one catch is that one side of one batch got a little crispy when I called Diane over to see this cool video I’d found on Quantum entanglement … I think it was from ’What the Bleep do we know’ I wrote the author.. Dr. Quantum (aka. Prof Alan Wolf) asking him about how he made the animations.. I think they’re great.. there are several others out on YouTube like this one on the ’double slit experiment’ .

Anyway.. back to yesterday.. We went up to Deb’s around 7… It certainly still looks like winter up there !

We turned off (most of) the lights up there in honor of the ’Earth Hour’ which was being run yesterday to bring awareness to the need for more energy conservation in light of global climate change. After a great fish taco dinner we switched the lights back on and Diane went into sugar on snow production.. it took a good long while to cook the maple syrup down..

When it was ready, the kids brought in snow and Diane poured on the hot syrup . It’s amazingly good.. and amazingly sweet.. folks ate the donuts to cut the sweetness.. traditionally you’re also supposed to eat a pickle with it.. but none of us felt like going that far.. even though we had a jar of pickles with us just in case.

We got home around 10:30 – 11 and all went straight to sleep..

This morning was pretty sleepy, too.. we just hung around the house… Gabe and Will headed up to the mountain at around 11 with Victor. I noticed that Victor’s gloves and glasses made this cool fish-like guy on our counter.

Once Gabe was up boarding, Diane and I took the dogs up the honey hollow road for a hike.. The road is not plowed and  the snow was still deep.. but packed enough that we didn’t need snowshoes.. at least most of the time … At one point we found an old fence line with boarder markers and decided to bushwack up the hill. It was a beautiful walk.. 

It was cool following this old land line.. You could tell that this used to be some sort of pasture sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It was  probably for sheep.. Nearly this whole area was cleared then for grazing. It was hard to see that now except for these old fence wires embedded deeply in the trees.

The new markers were for the state forest…   We walked the boarder up several ridges.. it was clear you could get all the way up Robbins mountain this way. it would be a great hike back to our house if we had a GPS..

This area is know to have lots of bears.. Diane and I saw a big one up here a day or so before Max was born. We didn’t see any bears today.. but you could sure see signs of them.. Their scratch marks were everywhere.. and man, were they BIG !

YOu could see where a big one climbed all the way up this tree !

Satori was having a great time.. but she stayed pretty close to us.. maybe she instinctivly knew she’s still the size of an hors devours.

OK.. That’s it for today.. Diane and I are going out for some errands in prep for her birthday  this Tuesday… Talk to you all tomorrow. Nite Sam
-me