Hello from JFK Airport. Seems I’m often writing from these sleekly polished hallways. I’m on my way to India for a few days. I better post now.

Today’s been a bit anti-climatic after the iron pour yesterday. That was such an amazing experience. All I’ve done today so far is go for a run with Diane and the dogs, pack and get on a plane. Diane and Ann dropped me off at the airport on their way to the Burlington Garden tour which our friend Gina is helping to organize.. then they all will get together for Tea.. sounds pretty civilized .

The flight down was pretty easy.. I slept the whole way. I saw Trey Anastasio sitting in the front of the plane.. that was pretty cool. I’ve never spoken with him.. but I see him around Richmond sometimes. I’m sure he likes his privacy.

On the AirTrain between JetBlue and AirIndia I saw this guy with a Sam tattoo which made me smile… Thanks goodness for zoom lenses.. I don’t think he thought I was taking a picture of him.

I’m several hours too early to check in… so I found a small corner of floor wit an electrical outlet. I’m in the religious wing of terminal 4. In this corner we have the ‘Multifaith’ chapel (everything inside is written in Arabic)

The Jewish synagogue

The Christ for the World Protestant … uh.. what do Protestants have ? church ? chapels ?

And the wonderfully named ‘Our Lady of the Air’ Roman Catholic church.. I love this statue of the Virgin Mary on a propeller

What made me feel good was that the religouns had a joint social area with snacks. There is hope for the world.. I beleive that where there are snacks.. ther can be peace !

El Al and IsraelAir both use this terminal .. so there are several Kosher restaurants.. My favorite tis the Kosher vending machine !.. I was hungry and curious so I ordered a Kosher (and it turns out luckily Vegan) Potatoe Knish.. It was delicious.. and blessed t boot !

Eeeeek .. an alarm is going off here.with buzzers and flashing lights. I’d better finish. More from India.. Love you all. You too Sam !
-me

ps. Ahh the alarm stopped.. wonder what it was ?!

I accidentally fell asleep at midnight last night. I’d planned to stay up all night and finish my presentations for India.. but… I konked out right after 12.. I woke up well rested but in a panic. I had no idea when I was going to finish these things. Somehow I managed to sit down at around 7AM .. and not stand up until noon.. When I did .. the first passes of 2 ouf the four presnetations I needed to pull together were done. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.. as in… don’t work all night, it’s not worth it.. or sleep makes you more effective.. or soemthign like that.. Whatever it was.. I was so happy to have at least finished a pass.

I worked my @^ off today trying to get ready for traveling next week. I had so many loose endes I needed to track down.. btut somewho.. by about 5:45 .. I had most of the stuff I neded to get done behind me.. I drove to williston and waited for DIane.. While waitng I finished another of my India presentations.

When Diane got there, we drove together down to Pine St. for the last bit of prep before the iron pour tomorrow.. . I got there just as they began the safty walkthrough. We learned all the ways to hurt yourself with a 100 pound ladel of white hot metal.. It’s going to be SO COOL tomorrow…

Here are Yolk ad Jennifer.. the calm before the storm.

Once the safety walkthrough was done, I went in to finish my mold. Elijah helped me crack the molds apart

The back and front seperated nicely.. Both had great images of the SamStones.

It took some el ow grease and patience to nidge the SamStoens to release from the sand,

I really had to work to get the last ones out.

The next step was to paint the molds with graphite paint.. then light it to burn of the alchohol. Here’s Orina burning off hers.

Here’s my mold with all the sprue and vent channels scratches and etched in..

I painted them.. he n Diane took a picture of me setting the graphite on fire..

Then we placed a bead of refractory cement around the whole mold.. It was very weird gluing sand together.. but it works !

Then we eased the back of the mold on to the front.

It was a perfect fit.. then I glued on a filling cup..

And two vent risers,

Et voila !.. It was done ! I glued on some paper barriers.. then we were all done.

We’re supposed to show up at 8:15 tomorrow.. ugh.. but I think I’m ready to go.

Diane and I drove home and fixed a nice light dinner. Gabe called as we were finishing up. He’s having a blast.. I can tell.. Here I am talking to Gabe. Looks like I’m tired.. Tomorrow isgoing to be a long hot day as we pour.. so I’m ending now..

You’re all welcoem to come buy and watch the pour.. Here’s the flyer with info

and here’s an article about last year’s pour..

OK.. that’sall for tonight.. sleep well folks.. Gnite Sam
-me

Arghhh.. I have a ton of IBM work to do tonight and I just am sitting down to do it at 10 PM.. I’m so tired and I want to go to sleep… but If I don’t get these presentations done tonight.. I’ll regret it big time next week. Sometimes I wish for a job where I just had to do 9-5 and I could go home and forget it.. but .. only sometimes

Anyway.. work today was busy and good. I got a ton done.. but even so, only scratched the surface on what I needed to get done.. By the time I left at 6PM I was a whipped puppy.. But.. not rest for the wicked.. I had to go to the Iron Pour place to make more progress on my casing mold in time for Saturday’s pouring. I got there in time to see Elijah demonstrating the last parts of the mold making.. That’s the part where you cut the filling channels and scratch in the vents. You also have to paint everything with graphite release paint. The best part is burning off the solvent in the paint.. looks like cherries jubilee !

The final touches are gluing the two halves of the mold together

And adding the filling cup and vent risers.. It’s wierd gluing sand to sand.. but that’s how it works.

flipped my mold over pulled off the sand, cut the indexing grooves, and moved the mold box up.

I thne dusted the whoel thing with graohite to make the new part release..

I then helped mix 100 pods of sand and resin, filled in the top of my mold and put it aside to cure.

Yolk and Elijh were outside workign on the furnace…

I had one more task for the day.. I had to break enough iron for my mold plus 10 pounds for the flashing… It was nasty hard work.. We used a small hand mallet to smash old radiaors into tiny bite size pieces. After a few year of blacksmitting I leanred never to hit cold metal this hard or it would break. here that was hte idea.. clang, clang, clang.. my ears are still ringing.. but in an hour I smashed about 30 pounds.. nearly twice what I needed !.. And.. I was stress free at the end.. Noth like beating the $%@out of a piece of metal to release tension.

Here’s a pile of prebroken scrap iron

Voila.. 30 pounds of tasy iron nuggets !

OK.. now to my IBM work.. i gotta get going on this.. so .. more tomorrow.. Gnite all.. Gnite sam.. !
-me

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.