In the middle of another incredibly busy day, something happened that took me out of my hectic spin and made me sit down and thin.k. I was trying to wolf down a salad while talking on a conference call (muted while chewing)..   my first bicuspid on the top right met a slightly stale cruton… and broke.. .. really broke !.   I fished the piece out from the stuff I was chewing and stared at it. i was about a quarter of the tooth.. big and hard and toothy. and where it used to be was a funky hole … terra incognita for my curious tongue..

I sat and stared at the piece.. that tooth had been with me.. part of me.. since i was 10 or so.. it’s seen me through middle school and high school. through college(s) .. through my professional career. through meeting my wife.. the birth of my kids.. the passing of one .. It was with me when I slept on the floor of the Colony.. it tasted rat…

After all that, It seemed kind of heartless to throw the piece  of tooth away.. it seemed wierd and pretnetious to give it some sort of ceremony.. what to do ?   I resolved to blow it up .. maybe this weekend.. it seems fitting..

I called the dentist and set up a time to get it ‘fixed’.. whatever that means.. maybe if it can’t be repaired I can make soem thign cool to go in its place.. that would be an up side..

I got therough the rest of the day by gently avoiding the righ side of my mouth.. I sipped my drinks.. chewed my salad left-ily. The day wasn’t the same though.. It was like the loss of the tooth had snapped me back to reality .. I was pretty calm.

Calm that is until 4:30 when Guido brought in a group of 6 goofy Weebelos to do some mad science stuff. Great kids.. .. an nice end to a tough day..

Ah.. here’s something else to chew on.. IBM did a 2 minute composite of my  friends Jai, Julia, Jeff and I  talking about ‘data’   . It’s pretty interesting

OK..   That’s it for tonight.. I’m going to put my tooth piece under my pillow and see if the tooth fairy shows up.

Night all.. night Sam
-me

Had lots of stuff to do today.. and it was making me a little ‘Mondayish’ on a Sunday.. no fair. I .. went for a longest run this morning to clear my head and downshift.. worked pretty well. I reframed my day to lower my expectations I ran up Dugway road and marveled at the springlike weather and the sound of spring birds.. Tomorrow is March.. wow.. 

Later in the morning, diane and I went in to buy our first mattress in nearly 20 years.
We had fun testing on all the beds Then on to home depot for some scrounging.

Gabe and I had wanted to build a forge for the last three months and this was the day to build it.   Gabe and I went scrounging through the garage for parts.. our only constraint was that the forge had to cost less than 10 bucks (I’d seen one that cost 10 bucks online.. had to do better than that)

We used an old steel wheel rim that phil had given me .. and an old brake disk from the Subaru… .. We took an old pumpkin can  through the hole between the two  and bent them back..

We stuck some hardware cloth over the can to hold the colas up..

We stuck an aluminum piece of duct work and a a dryer hose..

Gabe stuck the hair dryer into the other end of the hose.

We loaded up the charcoal and gabe torched it..

Pretty soon we had a white hot blast furnace.

We got a piece of stell yellow hot pretty quick.. Gabe pulled it out of the fire and started wailing on it with a hammer

Then.. back in the fire ! .. heat, beat and repeat..

We went through a half a bag of  of charcol shaping, bending and twisting stell. it was awesome.. and .. only about $9.20 .

Next project.. was to install our new energy monitor. It’s a TED5000 .. Gabe and I installed it in the junction box.. When I turned off power to the house, I managed to scramble the memory in our DSL modem. That took an hour to fix.. but soon.. we were back online and had a real time measure of every watt being used in our house.