One of the high points of the trip… Beyond just being with family… Was the game taught me to cut, grind and polished stone. I made my first bear birdbath under his expert tutelage.… First I had to find the right stone… Then I had to crisscross it with cuts from a diamond cut off wheel. From that I had to knock The things I cut out with a rock chisel and hammer… To basically shape the rough parts of a bowl. From that I used a 30 grade diamond grinding bit to take down all the roughness that the chiseling have left. From that point it was a progression of 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 to 1500 to 3000 to buffing Using a water cooled electric grinder…

Hard work… Loud, messy and noisy…

It was heavenly !

Nite all, nite sam

-me

Man… I’ve gotten behind on my blog post for my trip… Usually was too tired in the night to post… So here’s my deleted effort to fill things in. Last Monday was really fun we finally made it to H Mart… The oriole grocery store just down the street from GabÉ. We stocked up on so many things we ended up filling up the whole suitcase with rice noodles and spices… It was so much fun going in there and seen everything from durian (Ewwwwww) Two whole aisles of Kim Chee

After that Max and Becky had to head back to Santa Fe. It has been so great hanging out with them both

I love being with all my family… Well almost… Sam is on all of our minds whenever we’re together

Nite all, nite sam

-me

We woke up late… And then headed over to Gabe ‘s. We had such a great time last night… But luckily we had cleaned up most of everything last night so we didn’t walk into the mess of a party… We walked into a basically clean kitchen.

Line it had been a late night swimming was moving slowly

We had a really nice takeout brunch… Then we headed to the “each” which is on the shores of the Columbia and Willamette rivers



Gabe and I took advantage of the warm sun and light breeze to “fly” or 50 foot garbage bag of black plastic. It’s kind of a solar blimp.… The sun warms the plastic which warms the air which makes the whole thing lighter than air. With some experimentation GabÉ and I were able to make the thing wow pretty high in the air… It’s hard to see something that large… 50 feet across flying under control… Really fun to surprise people

Have had the idea to teTwhr the thing at both ends which really helped

We ran I to abbot and amy at the beach

Later we headed to “the farmhouse ” a great Thai place in the Hawthorne. Super Spivey and delicious

We went home after that and did some

Maintenance around Gabe’s ho we replaced an external spigot. And put in a. Security light

Really nice day to end our family vaca

More tomorrow !

Nite all, nite sam

-me



Fun day yesterday… We all agreed to meet at 10 o’clock in the morning and head up to hang out on a river for the day. It was going to be hot and sunny so we knew it would be busy everywhere. Gabe found a great place in Washington state which was only about 40 minutes away… I was on a beautiful river… (The East Fork?)

We were joined by some of gabe’s friends… girlfriend Samm, Her roommate Emma, Gabe’s roommate Sean and keep his friend Taylor used to work at our favorite poke place. Really nice group for a really nice day



GabÉ had an inflatable boat and inflatable unicorn… We put those up with the car and Max and Gabe save them to our picnic place… We had to move to a new place because We needed to get more in the sun.

We hung around, eat, drink, explored… And then it was an epic game of Uno!

Around four we headed back towards Portland to prepare the party tonight… Max paddled the boat… Now down an oar that broke… And pulled it up At the put-in place

People started showing up around six…I think we had around 14 people… Diane had prepped on this wonderful food with lots of our help… We haf carne asada, grilled fish, Homemade guacamole, tons of tortillas, homemade pico to Gallo, salad and lots of margaritas !

Dang it also made a beautiful carrot cake so we had that and Ben & Jerry’s for a group birthday party of all the birthdays that were coming up

The crazy thing happened at the end of the evening… We were all looking at the moon when I was a planet off the tip… I think Jupiter… But I never washer. As I was looking up there, our friend Cody pointed at the other side of the sky and said what’s that… We were 100% sure we were having a UFO sightings… We ran out the door and looked at it was a long bar lights moving very very slowly across the sky… Very distinct

I posted it on Twitter and several other people had seen it to flying over Portland and Washington and British Columbia… We were so excited… Then larissa did a little research and it was Elon musk’s company starlink Communication satellites…

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/spacex-starlink-satellites-surprise-british-skywatchers.html

Sort of disappointing that it wasn’t aliens… But still cool to see it

… Today I’m not sure what we have in store… I guess we never do :-)

More from the day later

Nite all, nite sam

-me