I am having an amazingly busy week… home stuff . work and hobbies are all lining up to make me busier than I want to be.. but somehow it feels OK. Above all, I’m stressing about some talks I need to put together for next week.. but my normal last minute panic isn’t kicking in.

I worked really hard all day.. about half the day at home.. where the heat and humidity had me sticking to my chair.. And about half at work.. in the wonderful cool and dark of my office. It was on my way to lunch there when I saw this sign.. Not sure if there was intntional irony or not… wither way.. it was an odd sign.

At the end of the day I had a doctor’s appt with Dr. Joe.. I needed to get soem routine blood work done so I’d set up an appt. As I was sitting there waiting for Joe I started looking around at the hundereds of picures kids had drawn for his walls. My eyes immediatly saught out the most bizzare one.. It’s of a kid ‘streaking’… and guess what.. it was from Max.. !!!!

Joe came in and we tlaked for a good long while about life, family. dogs. music and bloodwork. He’s such a great guy.. never hurried.. very present. He’s been a g-dsend to us since Sam’s passing.

When Joe was finished.. in came Sue the bloodletter/xray person/jack of all trades..
She told me today that she’d been working at Thos Chit. for more than 39 years !!! (she started when she was 3 🙂

She found an arm she liked and started to set up…

I took a ton of pictures as she drew blood.. but looking at them might be disturbing to some folks.. They made me light heaed looking at them again.. .. Anyway.. let me know if you want to see them.. Here’s the aftermath in any case.

As I was lying there getting ready to get up, Sue and I began talking.. It turns out one of her grandchilren passed away last november. The one who died was one of 3 premature triplets.. The other two survived and are now doing fine. We sat there and talked and cried for about 20 minutes.. Talking like only folks who’ve been through a loss of a loved one can. I felt liek we were meant to have that conversation.. Afterward.. I gave her a Samstoen and a hug and went off on my way… a much less stressed out guy.

I got home around 6 h.. I spoke with Gabe on the way home and he’s havign a great time at High Cascade,,, He said the snow is great and so are the coaches.. When I got home Diane and I had a nice dinner by ourslves.

Aroudn 7:30 Jana, buddy, seth , Casar, and casar’s wife. Lucy Showed up. Lucy and I are taking the iron puring class together She had brought her plaster cast of a cows heart ot show all of us. She’s goign to cast it in iron… should be.. uh… wierd..

While we geeked out woring on the face for the haunted forest project, Lucy got busy sewing a bunny hat for a prefomance art piece she’s doing with Kat tomorrow.

It was very cool. it reminded us all of Freddy the wierd rabit guy in Donnie Darko

The guys and I made very good progress tonight. Brendan, Seth and I worked on the code that will make the creatures eyes ligth up and twinkle.

While Ceasar, jhn and Buddy worked n teh code fro driving the mouth and eyebrow servos.
I worked with Cesar to reqork the code that drove the servos to use an interupt service routine on a timer interrupt to time the servo refreshes.. which is a huge improvement over the suggested way of managinf the refresh timing yourself. We’re very pleased with how well it works.. We’re goign to put it back out in the open source archives to help out otheres trying to do si,ilar work with servos.

It’s abotu midnight and the kids are filtering out.. Max just wandered in to show us is new light up battle axe… Not bad.. not bad at all !

OK.. I’m falling asleep again.. so I’ll end here.. Gnite everyone.. Gnite Sam I love you all.
-me.