House hunted
We found a place! Applied, accepted, signed, and move in around Aug 13th.
I'll be updating my contact / re-relocation page at that time: my relocations

More potato sites
Global Potato News: Home Page. Thanks to kelley for this one. This reminds me - I have a pile of old potato bookmarks that I need to roll out.

I want a home
House hunting again. The market is crazy again. Move-out date is Aug 15th, so we ride the stress express... again.

Things That Go Bump..
I just felt Aidan (which I will eventually learn to spell first time) kicking... Kelley has been feeling him moving around and bumping around in there for a while, but this was the first time for me. There really is a real-live miniature human bean in there :)

Wow!

More Potter
Hey, there's a Hogwarts MOO. I'm crap at these, but I did take a peek.
(another day perhaps.. getting late here)

Reading
Just finished "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" by J.K. Rowling
which was as good as the other 3, and an all round cracking read. Especially the bit where...
Just kidding, read it yourself. :)

Knots
I was looking for something to learn me crochet(ing) when I found this page:
Ropers Knot Pages
which has a wild list of knot links.

Reading
Just finished "Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner and John Markoff.
Catching up on some cultural background references. It was weird reading about the kit form Sinclair in the early 80s, and then the Spectrum (which we had at home at the time.)

Ooo, new design
Not here (well, here too) but on my home page.

Mobiles
Next up is mobiles. For the baby.
...Well, and for me too.. sorry, Aidan, you'll have to share.
(Aidan being our much anticipated but as-yet-unborn child)

Keep an eye on Aidan's baby site for more.

Potato Sculpture Action
I finished the new truncated icosahedron piece I was making (for a friend... hi Drain and Liz :)
It's kind of slick.. I have the drying process down now so all the polygons are dense, and polish up to a nice sheen.
If this is all new to you (a potato wha?...) I'd like to point you to my potato sculpture pages for details. Except that they are miserably out of date.
I'll drop the link anyhow: Sam-I-Am's Potato Pages

The jointing was better. I dunno how much tighter I want it to be, without it looking kind of dry and manufactured.
Picture a ball about 3" diameter, composed of wood-like hexagons and pentagons.

I also made a little denim cushion for it. Sweet :)

This and That Blog
In case you (all 0 of you at this point as I've not announced or linked this from anywhere) didn't notice, I've enforced a fork in the road that is this blog.
Work-type stuff is going into:
  http://www.sam-i-am.com/work/blog.html

All that other miscellaneous stuff remains here.

Reading
Biosheres (metamorphosis of planet earth) by Dorion Sagan.
This is the second time round, and I've really just picked it back up for something to pick through on Bart to and from work. He takes the Gaia hypothesis (meme?) and suggests that a truly living organism would be capable of reproduction, and that Biosphere II, and all the other self-contained living systems we see are evidence of this. He proposes we are simply agents in this - the Earths reproduction.

What I find difficult about this (and some interpretations of Gaia) is the need for this to be taken literally. As a philosophical statement I've no difficulty with it...

(this is me catching up)
It being the day before July 4th, all is quiet at work. I'm catching up on events, moving forward with this validation-of-life-by-documentation-of-life concept that blogs embody. Not having been a diary/journal person for many years, (and this being an entirely different thing anyway) I'm still looking for the right voice.

Martial Arts Update
Wow, a 4 hour test. It was indeed gruelling (no matter how fit you are, when someone asks you to do push ups until you can't do anymore, exhaustion will follow). That was apparently the idea - the tests followed a long workout that left me acheing right through till Tuesday.
But I did prevail :) and it was all a worthwhile.

The Baby
we learnt last week is a boy, is alive and well, has a 4 chamber heart [this had been a concern] and is generally looking just fine and dandy. Due date is somewhere round about 5th Dec. 2000.
(a 2000 kid. I wonder what that will do to him...)

As of last friday he also has a name: Aidan. I wasn't in a hurry to come up with a name, but we'd already narrowed down to 1 girl name and maybe 3 boy names. And when we looked at those, Aidan was the one that popped out at us. So it is. Hope he likes it.

We are working on a baby site (this seems like a good thing to me, but the world at large is apparently not ready for home pages for the as-yet-unborn.) It's taking shape at:
http://www.sam-i-am.com/baby/