I slept for nearly 9 hours last night.. The longest I think I’ve slept in over a year. We woke up to beautiful snow.. It was a perfect day to hang out inside. Our main goal for the day was to decorate the xmas tree.  Gabe had a really cool idea.. he wanted to make the tree into a robot !.. Well.. what’s not to like in that idea.. we got right to it.. the first challenge was the arms. I got some light gauge steel rod … measured out Gabe’s arms.. and started bending.

We got a rudimentary frame put together.. then took a break. I took Gabe to the Round Church to work on a snowboard jump.. the roads were pretty messed up.

I took a quick stop at the bakery, but  it was closed because of the storm. I did get a good look at the anti-TV sculpture that Ben-the-baker’s brother Chelsea had made..   I like the message.

From there I headed over to my friend Chris’s house.Chris is an amazing stone carver, engraver and etcher.  He’s helping me with a Christmas plan  have.

Chris does a bunch of work with words and rocks.. a great combination.

He has a Sam Stone in his workshop !

We hung out for a few hours working on the project and talking to his very cool family. We even made a home made light bulb with his son Finn.. (My friend Uwe also has a kid named Finn.. I’d never heard that name before)  Finn had a battery kit… it had an interesting phone number… the National Battery Ingestion Hotline.. A great number to know.. Do people really eat batteries ?

I got home around 4  and got back to work on the tree. Diane did an artful aluminum foil job on the arms

I added the LED strip lights I bought in Shanghai.

Max added a head

I had to make some trips to the attic to get lights and other tree stuff. Going up there is still so hard ..

In the end.. the four of us came together and made Jonesville’s first Robo-tree..

In fact.. Diane had just said.. “we probably have the only robotic tree in the world’ 2 seconds later Max opened the Sunday paper and saw this:

Another weird coincidence..   Anyway.. the results are pretty … uhhhh.. untraditional… You know, it’s probably easier that way.

We celebrated our successful creation with some chocolate fondue … The end of a very good day.