I had a cool productive day.. lots of different low key stuff. Before I described it.. I  had a few pictures from Thursday and Friday that I just found on my camera.. Figure I’ll drop them in just to catch up..    Here’s Thursday’s breakfast. I woke up dreaming about the guacamole that Ann Marie had given me.. Diane had made waffles.. so I made a waffle/guacamole sandwich , yum..

.. and washed it down with a favorite concoction from my youth.  Orange juice and grape juice mixed. I think I’ve descried that in my blog before.. My brother and I were sure that drinking orange juice and grape juice mixed with a green tinker toy would give you super strength. I think it worked on Thursday.. The day was good.

A high point was lunch with friend Mark.. We had a ton of work stuff to talk about.. but it turns out we spent most of our sushi time talking about Eckhardt Tolle’s ’A New Earth’ book.

The rest of Thursday was pretty low key.. Gabe and I worked together to mount a different set of bindings on his newish board. He really managed to shred his old board this year. I  remember I just put the SamStone map as a blog entry that night.  

Friday was also pretty nice.. I had an early meeting.. I had to leave while Diane was out wiht the dogs so I left her a message with a cut up strawberry.

My meeting was with my good friend Jolly and his co-worker/friend Scott.   Jolly and I went to grad school together.. which we realized to our mutual amazement was 20 years ago !!!!!!!!.  He’s such a great guy.   It was my first time meeting his friend Scott..   also a very nice guy. Scott’s sister passed away 2 years ago.. so we spent some time talking about her and about Sam. Midway through breakfast we were joined by our mutual friend Scott T… We were brimming with Scotts…

The rest of Friday was also pretty good.. I had meetings through the day.. then came home early around  5:30.. a first !. Diane and I had a quiet night at home while Gabe was up at the mountain. I sat around and played around with the text analytics on my blog text..That’s the stuff I wrote about last night. So far no one else thinks it’s as fun as I do.. but I love figuring out what I talked about and when that long hard year.

That brings us to today…   I slept late and stumbled downstairs to find that Ratticus.. our resident house rodent had attacked again. We found a whole pack of oatmeal open and dragged halfway down a whole in the floor. I’m thinking of way to catch him/her. if for nothing else to get a picture.

We had a bunch of folks come through today just to say hi. Kevin. Matt, Sumner, Susan, Silas, Brad, Mike,  Tyler, Tom, Heather (?), Liz, Abbot, Phoebe , Chris, Mo-awaka, Mason, .. and later on Max, Emma and Jessie. it was nice to have so many folks around..   It turns out that we have managed to build up a surplus of American Cheese slices.. so we made sure no one left without a piece of cheese.

I spent the morning doing odd jobs and repairs around the house. I fixed the drawer under all the sam pictures. It fell apart all of a sudden this week.

I also fixed the garage door opener, a few of the kitchen cabinets and the Hoosier

It felt good to pretend to be Handy..    Gabe and Ian went up to the mountain.. So Diane and I just hung out.. We went for a run.. then did some yoga.. then took the dogs for a good walk. Chai’s still nursing a lame paw so we had to take it easy.. Just a wonderfully lazy day.

Late in the afternoon I decided to set up my new torch. It really hadn’t been warm enough to mess around with it. I spent an hour or so reading all the safety material. By the end of that I was sure I was going to blow myself and/or the barn to bits when I sparked this up. It was funny remembering te reverse threads on the acetylene lines.. you have to suppress a lifetime of ” righty-tighty, lefty loosey ” 

Sumner came buy (driving !) with Susan just as I was about to try my first cut.. so he took some pictures for me.. Here’s the first fuel only flame.. whoa.. BRIGHT !

I added the O2 and finally got the thing adjusted to cutting. I got the steel just to kindling and hit the cutting bar.. It’s such a cool shower of sparks as it cuts.

The flame moved through the thick steel like it was butter.. I didn’t think it was cutting until my new metal valentine almost fell out.. I started to pick it up.. but it was still glowing.. so I kicked it into the snow.. There was something dramatic about a red hot heart sinking into the snow in hissing plume of steam !

Max, Jessie and Emma showed up just as I was doing my cutting. Max and Jessie are on school break. Emma is off this semester.They all decided to come up and visit !. . I was able to catch Max’s first meeting of the puppy ! 

They seem to be natural litter-mates..   Here’s Diane, Max and Satori viewed through the metal scrap I had just cut the heart from. .

It’s soo good seeing Max, Jessie and Emma…!!!!!

Soon after they got here some of their friends arrived and we hung out talking all night.

It’s only midnight. and most of those kids are drifting towards sleep. I think I better do the same.  It’s been a peaceful day.. I’m grateful for that.
G’nite all. G’nite Sam
-me

ps. One other thing I did today was play around with a program that takes photographs and represents them using colored  text.    I’m still trying to master it.. But heres a first try.. A picture of Sam using the words “we love you, Sam” . Pretty cool.. no ?