Nice productive day.. We started by meting Homer and Mary for brunch.. Homer and I had some errands to run today for the Haunted Forest project, so we used it as a chance to get the families together.. It’s always great hanging out with them.. We made crepes with strawberries from the garden.

Gabe, ian and Trevor came down as we finished and took their turn with the crepes. Gabe even folded hos own crepe.. He is now officially a man !

And a fine creation it was !

I ran upstairs to get dressed.. and pulled on one of my favorite shirts.. It’s one that I wore in one of my favorite family pictures.. That makes me want to wear it.

Homer and I took off around 1:30. First stop was Barre.. Homer is working on a new sign for a welding shop.We had to measure and photograph it for the replacement.

The building was next to an old historic building : The meeting hall for ‘Socialist Workers Party’ which dates from 1900. When all the Italian stonecutters came to this country and settled in Barre they organized into radical socialist Unions.. It’s a pretty cool heritage for the only State in the Union with a socialist senator !

We finished our measurements and headed towards Waitsfield. On the way we went by a stone cutter and found this huge set of hands…

Homer strated to crawl up on them.. until one of the neighbors yelled at him to get off..

We got to Bills around 3:15 and said hi to his family Bill has a cool daughter named Tesla.. The name of my favorite inventor.. How cool is that..

We then spent a wonderful 3 hours crawling through all of his cool electronic
and mechanical junk .. He has the best collection of cool gizmos,
giblets and thingy of anyone on the face of the earth..

It was so cool watching two of my most respected mentors working with each other as we scrounged for motors and power supplies for Project-X.. the giant robot project we’re doing for the Haunted Forest.

We did pretty well.. we found a bunch of gear motors which will help us get the beast’s arms to move around in a scary way.. It was a successful mission.. We had one last thing to do before leaving bills, We had to help him load an old Plasma Etcher into their horse trailer for transport to his production building. I was wondering if it was the first time in history that a plasma etcher was ever transported in a horse trailer.. if not.. it was very likely it was the first plasma etcher transported in a horse trailer with a girl named Tesa wearing an orange shirt.. And that made it special.

Bill celebrated the loading by setting off fireworks.. that’s his response to most things.

By the time we loaded that big heavy thing it was after 6. Homer and I needed to be heading home. We drove up for the Appalachian gap.. which as particularly beautiful in the late afternoon..

We got to Homers right at 7.. which is when he needed to be home.. We unloaded the loot we’d found at Bills. i also got to see some of the new ‘water panels’ that Homer’s been working on. The pictures don’t do them justice.. they have the coolest depth.. many layers of colors over some patterns made by a grinder.. They look like living water… very cool