Saturday night – 400 miles


Long day.. I left Endicott just before 9 this morning on a quick round trip to grab Max and his dog in NYC> The roads were sloppy.. but I had a good book on tape (Malcolm Gladwell’s new book ‘Outliers’.. it’s great !)

It ytook me about 4 hours to get to the city.. A completely different world. I know I’m close to Max’s when the signs turn to Yiddish..

… or chinese

It was a drag driving thoguht the city with no map, no copilaot.. and only  the GPS on my phone (We took the van).. I was really happy to get to Max’s door.

We did a pretty effiecient Evacuation.. btu before we did.. max took me up on his roof to see his metal workign final… It’s called ‘Down in flames’.. He learned to Tig weld for this.. it’s really cool !


The drive back was fun-=ish.. the first bit of getting out of the city was rough with my cr*ppy GPS… we managed to have to cross Manhattan.. and the beutiful town of Newark NJ.   Max and I talked on and off most of the way home.. which is a great pleasure. He’s so much fun for me to talk too. We’ve got so many similar interests now. I get inspired by listeing to his ideas.

It took us a little less than 4 hours on the way back.. as we pulled into the driveway, my milage for the day read 399.9 miles.. so.. I exagerated.. it was less than 400 miles..   We have another 320 tomorrow.. this will be a 1000 mile weekend.

It was nice having Max with us in Endiocott.. I love seeing the boys together..

Gabe had used his day to further perffect his candy cane welding.. he’s now the frank lloyd wright of candy cane architecture

My brother and sister in law Joe and Pat were there too.. We sat down and had a great meal.. toasteign each other.. and Sam…

Then we did a really nice gift exchange.. It was the first christmasy feelign I’v ehad this year.. It felt good to be all together with Diane’s family…

Diane’s mom had a nice suprise for us.. She’d found an old newspaper clippign of the time that Diane taight Highschool part time at Bellows Free Academy.. This is from Oct of 1986.. and she looks the same to me.. very cute !

OK.. Gotta sleep. We’re leavign early tomorrow to beat the snow..
Nite folks.. Nite Sam
-me

Friday night – Keep Vermont Weird

Hello from Endicott, NY.  We’re down at Diane’s folks. We left this morning at 10.. we managed to follow a snow storm all the way down here. It was slow going.. large stretches of 20-30 miles per hour..  I’m glad to be done driving.

I have a bunch of pictures from yesterday that I decided not to run last night in honor of the anniversary of our friend Kate’s passing yesterday….  May favorite form yesterday was this bumper sticker I saw while out for lunch.. I love it !

Yesterday was a crazy day .. I had meetings all morning.. then I tried to take the afternoon off to do some shopping.. but, I still managed to spend much of it on the phone.

Our friend Julie came by on her way up to the mountain.. she was sporting a Sam shirt.. which made eme happy ~

I had a lunch meeting at the Echo Center.. I’m goign to be part of their advisory board.. That entilteld me to a behind the scenes tour of how they keep the place healthy. That gave me a great face to face with a couple of oversized sturgeons..

I alogot a chance to meet soem of their ‘spare’ poiison arrow frogs.. These guys arent that deadly because they don’t feed on the special teermintes that gives their aamazon cousins such a dangrerous poison on their skin.

On the wat back I stopped for a 10 minute meetign with Herb to fetch ne of the power supply components out of the Pumpkin man. We first had to go figure out which truck the beast was stored in…

THere he is !

I forgot how much I missed this big guy !

THanks Herb !

I went back to work ad got anohter good 4 hours in.. aorund 8 I headed over to Higher Ground to see the Matisyahu show with my firend Gary. THe show was sold out and packed. I ran into lots of friends in the corwd including Gabes freinds Jack and Austin… and our old friend Rachael.

Matisyahu is an ex Phsh-head who found releginon and became a chasidic jew/ His music is a cool blend of ereggae, jewish negun style trance and beat boxing. There’s nothing like it  He was awesome live !.. as were his two back up bands.. really a great musical soul .. and very upbeat message…

I had to leave around midnight because.. beleive it or not.. I had one more phone meeting around 1AM..   As soon as that was done.. i crawlde off for a few hours sleep..

This mornign we decided to try and leave earlier. The big predicted snowstorm  was coming soooner and harder than predicted… we got on the road around 10.. and I said above it was about 9 hours of driving (compared to 5.5 usually.. yuck !)

Gabe spent most of the long drive in his own multi media cacoon in the back…

Meanwhile.. the front seat was having much less fun !  It was a tough day to be driving !

Gabe finally surfaced as we were approaching Ednicott..   The dogs were pretty patient as welll.

OK.. I’m just beet.. 4 hours of sleep last night and a 10 hour drive yesterday.. tomorrow I’m drving  into NYC to grab Max and Reptar…   I’ll be back tomorrow night…

In the meantime.. good luck digggin out.. Gnite Sam !
-me

Wednesday night – Dog ate my homework

I woke this morning (Thursday) and checked my myspace as I usually do..only to find that my post last night hadn’t gone through !

I’ll try to recreate what I remember of it from memory.. I say what I remember of it .. because we’d just come back from visiting our friends M and B.. For some reason I always come back from seeing them a little tipsy.  We always enjoy hanging out with them.

 
Unfortunately, their house burned down at the beginning of the month. They’d lived in that house for 30 years…Of all the things they lost that night . but most important to them were two young kittens.  That was very sad

We also talked about all of the stuff that  they lost and the stuff they managed to save. . What was irreplaceable and what you have that you never need to see again.. like old work papers. I can’t imagine the loss of  going through something like that.

We do have one very tough loss in common, one of their sons passed away about 20 years ago. That similar experience between us makes it very easy to talk about things that are difficult to discuss with other friends. It felt really good to be able to share that stuff… I know it sounds from the outside like a bunch of sad, tough  topics.. but he had a great time over there…  we laughed alot.. They are really great people

Lessseee. what else did I write about last night ? I did have these two pictures folks sent me after Sunday’s Candle lighting.for Sam .. The first is from my folks. Ou can see a great picture of my mom and sam next to the candle (Thansk for the picture, Mom !)

I also got this sweet picture form Hannah.. 

Thank you both for sending those !

I can’t remember what else I might have written about.. but It’s time for me to go to work.. so that’s gotta be it.. Be well folks.. TTYL Sam..
-me

ps. My frienf Peliera in Pretoria South Africa just sent me pictrures of his wedding from last month. 
Peliera is the guy next to the bride  with the very big smile on his face 🙂   COngratulations my friend !