Monthly Archives: June 2014

Monday night – before and after

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First day of vacation and  i laid pretty low because of the heat.  We had a nice send off tonight for our friends Ann and Keith who are moving to Virginia tomorrow…

as for the rest of the day, I took advantage of the lull to spend some time in my newly cleaned out lab. I’ve been meaning to clean the place out for many months.. not only as it hard to move around in there.. but it was getting downright dangerous.

 

it took me the better part  of three days, but I managed to crawl through every last resistor, every last laser, every last chemical.. I threw out a ton of stuff, resorted everything else and combined things ( somewhat safe chemicals”, “somewhat unsafe chemicals” . “really  dangerous chemicals”) . I’, giving a way a ton of stuff as well. I found some amazing stuff , too.. eg distillers yeast (good to 24% abv), mercury (safely contained), potassium bichromate from when I was in high school, my first samstone experiments, diamond drills for glass, some negatives with sams pictures, some sage smudge sticks, a bottle of gallium, some carbon fiber rods, some very large firework mortar shells, a big thing of sulfuric acid i didn’t know I had, a bunch of high voltage caps and some very old gum.

 

here’s what it look like before

and here’s how it looks now

now.. what to build ?

 

nite all, nite sam

-me

Sunday night – easing in

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Easing in to vacation today// tried my best not to think about work.. or anything else I need to do.. its hard for me to do that.. succeeded in most parts..

Diane and I took a hike up around Bolton.. we chose to hike up and down one of the cross country trails..and came across the Bolton lodge.. I hadn’t ever seen it..

 

spent tmost of the day finishing up the clean up of my lab.. hard work, but mindless and satisfying..

around 5 we headed up to tim and jen’s camp to watch the sunset and hang out with them..

it was in the high 8ps so everyone was moving nice an slowly..

 

i managed to fal asleep 3 times today..

going to go make it 4

 

nite all. nite sam

-me

 

Saturday night 0 Finn, Eagle, Lucinda

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Very busy and fun day.. we spent most of the day with our young friend Finn. His mom Marcy was at a craft show, so we picked Finn up… and took him to Echo !

Matci gave me a henna lightning bolt before we went

it matched Finn’s shark

Echo was fun, I’ve been on the board there for quite a few years now.. I tend to see it through srpreadsheets 🙂 it was great to see it through Finn’s eyes..

we got to pet the starfish

and we got to play with the Keva blocks.. The staff folks were building some amazing things with them

in one corner of ECHO i learned that we are sister lakes with Lake Ohrid that borders Macedonia, Albania and Greece. I once spent a night in jai right after visiting this exact monastery !

 

after that we grabbed a bite to eat and then headed home. I was just laying down to take a short nap when diane yelled for me to come out.. There was a huge bald eagle in our back yard. I managed to get my telescope out and shoot a few iphone pics through there.. Sorry they are fuzzy.. but this was just amazing !

i managed to get my 8″ telescope out.. then carefully shot pictures on my iPhone through the eyepiece.. not ideal.. but at least you can see this magnificent bird.

 

 

I even caught him flying away

 

while I was out there , diane found a luna moth wing.. right after chris called to tell me he’d been dodging a luna moth while spinning fire.

 

 

After both finn and the eagle left, I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my lab.. very satisfying.. Then around 7:30 we headed in to town for the Lucinda Williams show.. it was really , really good.. Lots of grey (or no) hair in the audience 🙂

great show.. and I got to stre at the cool artwork in the flyn ceiling

 full and satisfying day.. now time for bed…. more stuff tomorrow !

nite all. nite sam

-me

Friday night – summertime!

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Somehow this feels like the first evening of summer. I'm taking all of next week off so by the time 6 o'clock rolled around and I had my last meeting I was ready to do absolutely nothing. And that's what I did …in sort of frenetic kind of way. We went and picked up our friend Ellen picking up two really nice hitchhikers on the way. We drop them off and then took Ellen to infinity brewing to hear my friend Adam's band play. It was Adams last gig with his son Ian before Ian takes off for a job he got down south. Adam and his band were really good. They do a lot of rock covers like an excellent cover of Cortez the killer by Neil Young. One of my favorites.

I never been to infinity brewing. It was really great. First of all it was like IBM old home week in the parking lot. I ran into so many old friends. And many more retired. One big surprise was that the brew meister at Infiniti was my friend Murray who is still at Ibm. It was an amazing operation. The beer was tasty and strong and the facility was beautiful. People sat around outside listening to music while a guy cooked pizzas in a wood fire stove. Doesn't get much better than that

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We stayed till the band was done and I had talked everyone I knew there. Then we headed out to pho dang in Winooski for Vietnamese food. Yum! Then we headed to Art's riot back on Pine Street and hung out there for a while. It Was great head walking around there people watch. Saw several friends that as well.

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Now home and sleepy. Nice start to the holiday.
Night all, night sam
-me