First things first.. I’d like to wish a very happy birthday to my dear pa Hugh.. 78 years old today and looking good ! Happy Birthday Dad !

Not a whole lot to report today.. One observation was that it was friggin’ cold this morning
when we went for a run. Even stranger was the look of some of the trees as I drove in and home from work.. What can this mean ?! It couldn’t be.. could it ?!

Work was busy and productive.. Not much to report there. One good thing that happened today was that I ran into a friend of mine who lost a child many years ago. This was the first time we’d ever really talked to each other about grieving and healing. I was telling her how mad I get at myself sometimes for letting myself get stressed and frustrated at work . She re-framed this for me a bit by telling me a story she’d heard at a Compassionate Friends meeting. A woman there told a story about going to work after a tragic loss and hearing a co-worker complain about her dishwasher. The woman was angry and sad that her coworker was complaining about such a trivial thing to her. Several years later… the same woman had a similar problem with her dishwasher.. She too found herself frustrated and complained about it to a co-worker.. She caught herself doing it and started to feel bad for her loss of perspective.. Then a light bulb went off in her head.. she realized it was actually a sign of how far she’d gotten in her healing that her loss no longer overshadowed everything else…

I thought about that story all day… soemthing about it resonated.. soemthing about it didn’t..

Anyway.. the rest of the story was all work and no play. I did have a late afternoon mentoring meeting at Mexecali.. but still had a bunch of work to do. I couldn’t bring myself to drive back to work on such a nice day.. At the same time, I knew that if I headed home, I wouldn’t finish what I needed to do. I compromised.. I stopped at a starbucks and worked there for a couple of hours .. I’ve only seen people do that in movies… But here I am in an actual starbucks ! (and I don’t even drink coffee !)

I don’t go into many Starbucks.. bt this sign on the back exit made me really wonder… I couldn’t figure this out ? What do you think ? Vampires ?

I got home around 6:30.. and we immediately left for Tim and Jens’ We were making Samstonesto give to all the kids who are goign off to college and for me and Max to take to burng man…

Tim cooked .. we ate

Then we all sat down and made 50 pounds of SamStoens in record short time… It was really fun.. One cool thing about this picture is that my camera had run ot of batteries.. I treidseveral times to get at least one shot of the SamStone making.. but no luck.. I thengot the idea to take the battery out of the camera and warm it under my shirt.. I did that for abotu 10 minutes.. and beleive it or not.. that etra warmth gave it enough ooooomph for this one last shot…

Speaking of ooomph.. mines flagging. Time for bed.. More tomorrow. Gnite all./ gnite Sam !
-me