I just heard that fellow blogger Yabu (AKA Sam Moore) just passed away. He had been sick for quite some time and announced the fact that he was terminally ill on his blog a few months back. He had quit coming to blogmeets a few years ago.

I always thought of Sam as a little bantam rooster. He loved rockets. One year at Eric’s annual birthday bash, he shot one off that landed on Eric’s roof. One of the guys who tried to get it off almost tore Eric’s gutters off.

I remember another time at Helen Georgia, he and some other folks were shooting off some fireworks and some people across the river called the cops. When they arrived everyone split but Yabu. He got off with a warning.

I guess it was at Jekyll Island where I first met him and his lovely wife Barbie. He liked the fact that I could play some Bach on the guitar and that I called myself a cripple. When I met up with him and a few other bloggers at Nawlins, a month before Katrina, he shocked the hostess at the bar when he told her that a cripple was gonna show up and to tell him where the group was. He told her that she shouldn’t be shocked because that’s what I called myself. He loved that about me.

I didn’t even know he was Yabu, some dude who had taken some fun pictures at Nawlins, until he told me at Helen a few months later. I kept wondering who this Yabu dude was who took all of those (some of them incriminating) until he sidled up to me at Helen and said, “I’m Yabu.”

I could tell more stories, like the Shovel Boy episode, but you get the idea that he was a fun guy to be around. He was always loud and upbeat.

He always wanted to have a bunch of us bloggers take the train from Chicago to California and then take the Wine Train up to Napa Valley. It’s sad that he never got to do that.

He really loved and adored his lovely wife Barbie. He never got tired of telling me how much he loved her and how lucky he was to have found her. When it came to Barbie he told me he was the luckiest man in the world. His other love was his dachshund Stretch.

He told Catfish he was dying before he announced it on his blog. Catfish told me a few months ago that he was terminally ill and I meant to call him but kept putting it off.

Goodbye Sammy. I’m sorry I didn’t call you just one more time to say goodbye.