late last night I realized that today was the day that my office was being moved. As part of the sale of IBM microelectronics all people like me who are staying with IBM in Burlington have to change offices. That means I needed to pack up all my … uh.. stuff. … by 7 am today in time for a move. It was almost 10 pm onlast night when I figured that out.. I didn’t have the wakefulness to go into work… instead.. I went to bed and tossed and tunneled until 5a..

Thats was close enough to a real nights sleep so I got dressed and went in to work. In an hour I packed up my 34 years into a couple of boxes .. and made ready for them to be moved tot heir new home in building 965.

what a mess !

 

my door

 

gabe drew this a billion years ago

 

heres my desk.. it weighs 2000 pounds and is made of granite

i took out the cool evening sky light shades that diane and the kids gave me

 

z

 

my drum

 

the chair max made for me and my sitting ball

 

my new office.. almost as grubby as my old one !

 

my view.. .. well.. its a window at least !

 

my new aisle

 

the moving guys !

 

coffee !

 

my old denuded office

 

i don’t use my office much.. but now i have a nice and cozy new office not to use much..

i like changes like that !

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

Gabe and I did something fun last night. we camped on one of the sand islands in the Winooski river. We rove about 7 miles upstream from the house, loaded our canoe and took off. The water was really fast, which made for a dn ride

 

 

We picked one of the islands that had some flat spots for camping, trees for games hammocks and were high enough to keep us out of the river. The one we chose was one we call Comar island (for cohn mariano).. it’s one that Sam and I once camped on.. (Coma was also the name of my dads marketing company !)

 

we pulled the conoe out and did a quick survey of the island.. we found this geo-cache !

 

gabe hacked a way to some trees with his machette

 

and set up his camping hammock.. very nice !

 

we then set up the tent for me and began making a fire for dinner.. here’s the Amtrak montrealler coming by to say hi

.. we were just across the river from the tracks

 

This was the maiden journey for my little electric wood stove.. it has a small fan powered by a rechargeable battery.. it burns twigs.. and gets incredibly hot because of the forced air. the coolest thing is that it has a little peltier device in their that recharges the batter using the heat from the fire. It even lets you recharge your phone from the excess energy.. it took my phone from zero to 50 % .. not bad..

it also buils a pot of water in about 3 minutes !

 

gabe made our campfire/cookign fire the old fashioned way

 

after dinner we split a weird soft drink game and diane had found in an oriental grocery.. it had hairy basil seeds.. yum ?!?

\\\\

 

we tossed  a samstone in the fire just to see what would happen  \\\\

 

next morning .. after a good nights sleep .. we saw that this is what happened.. \\\\\\\\\\

 

at the crack of 10 AM we broke camp.. \

and headed home for showers..

 

we had so much fun ourt there. It was great having that quiet time with babe… and with the river..

nite all, nite sam

-me

 

 

We woke up determined to make more space in our house. We’d  spent several hours yesterday afternoon sorting through stuff in the attack and the ‘old lab’ .. looking for big stuff to give away.. I have more trouble parting with stuff than most of the other members of the family.. so i have trouble letting go of things with sentimental value

… which is just about anything..

even so, we were able to identify a ton of stuff that was just taking up space.   This morning before 7

diane and I were hauling the stuff to the front yar. by 8 am we’d made our first ‘sale’ .. I say ‘sale’… because we’d decided to donate all proceeds to the Sam Cohn foundation.. the charity we run for kids in Sam’s memory.

 

by @pm we’d talked to so many cool people.. and gotten rid of a ton of stuff. By 3 .. we put free on everything .. and that brought in more folks.. by 5 most of it was gone. We can walk through our attic now.. and we raised a little bit of money for a good cause..

not a bad day !

 

one ther vary cool part of the day .. around 11 am I helped kick off an open data hackathon in Lima Peru.. I was supposed to go down there.. but work load in my new job  made that impossible. Instead I did it by skyepe. My friends Walter and Carlos kicked it off.. then I did my thing in Spanish (thanks to Carlos’ skillful translation of my text). I know I butchered it.. but it was so fun to talk to the 100 or so folks down there hacking. I was so pleased with the turnout !

 

 

i can’t wit to see what sort of cool open data stuff they come up with . I love Ope Data.. I love Peru !

-\

gabe and I are going canoe camping now.. so I’m blogging  early.. talk to you all tomorrow

-nite all, nite sam

-me

 

I tried to take today as a vacation day.. which i sort of did.. i managed only to work about 8 hours.. hey.. you gotta take the small victories where you can find them.

 

it was a momentous day it turns out.. today was the day that the green mountains club officially opened the footbridge over the Winooski  river that allows the Long Trail to skip the 2.5 mile road walk through Janesville and our house. I have  to admit that I’m gonna miss the steady stream of year round skiers who have goone by the house for the 33 years I’ve lived here. Who knows ho many showers we’ve given. water bottles we’ve filled, dinner we’ve served or yard we’ve provided to weary through hikers.

We found out about the opeing today when this group of green mtn folks came through repainting the blazes on our part of the trail from the main White blazes to the blue side trail blazes. It was a bitter sweet moment.. who knows how many hikers we’ve water, fed and asked in the 33 years I’ve lived on this trail. in fact until today, our house was officially .. ‘the low point on the long trail’

 

 

around 2:40 we jumped on our bikes and headed towards the bridge about a mile and a half down the road (which washed out 2 nights ago in a flood). As Diane suspected. all the festivities were on the other side !  We were able to slip across before the speeches started.. we took advantage of our quick walk across to get the first kiss (maybe) on the bridge.. who knows 🙂

 

on the other side were about 100 very vermonty looking people.. and a long line of dignitaries who wanted to talk about the new 1.5 million dollar bridge..

 

 

part of the ceremony was the painting of the first white blaze.. n honor bestowed to a 90+ year old through hiker .

 

 

they cut the ribbon and folks started streaming across

 

divers stood ready in case of…

 

in case of what ?!?!?!

 

 

it was nce to see the pride in the new bridge.. at the same time. we’ll  miss being everyones low point  🙂

 

-nite all, nte sam

-me