After that I took Chai and ’Tori out for a walk..   Unfortunately Chai bolted before I could get her shock color off and got a nasty shock as she left the yard. She gave me a lok that said.. “you bonehead” . On top of that.  Chai’s still got a hurt paw.. so we didn’t go fast..  The two dogs are actually playing together a little now..

’Tori goes where ever Chai goes.. And Chai is tolerating it about 98 percent of the time at this point.

I love the places where the mudslides  from the rain have oozed over snow pack. t looks so cool.

One of my goals for today was to repair a Theremin, a piece of equipment from my show..  A Theremin is a musical instrument that you play by moving your hands in the air near it’s antenna’s. Your body’s capacitance changes the frequency of one of two otherwise matched oscillators.. You hear the small difference between the oscillators as a tone that varies with the nearness of your hands It’s got a cool other-worldly sound.. Think of the “eww-woo-oooo-wooo-ooooo-oooo” part at the beginning of the Beach Boys song ’Good Vibrations;… or the sound track for the Sci Fi classic “The day the earth stood still” ..   Theremins were created by a Russian engineer/musician named Lev Theremin back in the 1920’s..

Anyway.. I absolutely love debugging circuits. It’s one of the most absorbing and challenging brainteasers I know. It’s like doing detective work.. kooking for clues, forming hypothesis.. going down blind alleys.. and eventfully, i you’re lucky,  finding the culprit.

Aha.. here’s the culprit, a bad JFET .. probably eaten by a stray spark from one of the other high voltage pieces in my show..   It felt good to find the source of the problem. but where was I going to find an n-channel JFET in Vermont on a Sunday afternoon. The best I’d be able to do would be to order one on Monday and wait until Wednesday or Thursday for it to come.. .. and I need this to work on Thursday.. I decided to rummage around and see if I had a replacement. I felt it was pretty unlikely.. there are literally thousands of types of these small components.. and this type is pretty obscure and is rarely used anymore I wasn’t optimistic. .. But wouldn’t you know it.. the first drawer I reached into..there they were. It was a total fluke. I bought these as part of a going our of business sale in 1995.. I offered a guy 20 bucks for his whole supply of small parts.. and these were among them.  It would be like having your exotic sports car car break down in the desert and having the diner you stopped in have just the weird part you needed to fix your car being used a paperweight to hold down the lunch orders.. OK.. maybe it wasn’t that weird.. but that was the best analogy I could cook up.  .

Anyway. I popped the thing in, tuned it up and voila !. A very satisfying outcome..

At that point I came inside again.. Max, Emma, Jesse, Alex, Mason and Abbot had gone to Burlington to Victoria Secrets.. They were giving away girls underwear today.. so Jessie and Emma grabbed their panty posse and went .. Here they are modeling their wares..   OK.. so this IS a wierd picture…

The big event today that we’d decided to have a putluck tonight with only green food., It was really cool.. there were about 20 folks.. and about that many green dishes.

We had green mac and cheese.

Roasted brussels sprouts

Spanikopita

spinach salad

Pickles and green olives

Spinach bake

Green pasta salad

green pea soup

asparagus salad

pesto noodles

I made green eggs and ham in honor of Sam

apple, kiwi, grape salad

Mountain dew and green margarita mix to drink

Green jello

And afterwards… video games and horror movies.. the end of a perfect day.

The dogs were happy when the house quieted down.. Here’s ’Tori with her foot in the food bowl..

.. and here she is drinking my tea before I could !

There are still a bunch of kids here.. but I need to sleep.. so I’ll end here. Happy ’s St. Patrick’s day eve.  Top of the evening to all of you. Gnite Sam !

-me