Thursday night – pounding iron

Arghhh.. I have a ton of IBM work to do tonight and I just am sitting down to do it at 10 PM.. I’m so tired and I want to go to sleep… but If I don’t get these presentations done tonight.. I’ll regret it big time next week. Sometimes I wish for a job where I just had to do 9-5 and I could go home and forget it.. but .. only sometimes

Anyway.. work today was busy and good. I got a ton done.. but even so, only scratched the surface on what I needed to get done.. By the time I left at 6PM I was a whipped puppy.. But.. not rest for the wicked.. I had to go to the Iron Pour place to make more progress on my casing mold in time for Saturday’s pouring. I got there in time to see Elijah demonstrating the last parts of the mold making.. That’s the part where you cut the filling channels and scratch in the vents. You also have to paint everything with graphite release paint. The best part is burning off the solvent in the paint.. looks like cherries jubilee !

The final touches are gluing the two halves of the mold together

And adding the filling cup and vent risers.. It’s wierd gluing sand to sand.. but that’s how it works.

flipped my mold over pulled off the sand, cut the indexing grooves, and moved the mold box up.

I thne dusted the whoel thing with graohite to make the new part release..

I then helped mix 100 pods of sand and resin, filled in the top of my mold and put it aside to cure.

Yolk and Elijh were outside workign on the furnace…

I had one more task for the day.. I had to break enough iron for my mold plus 10 pounds for the flashing… It was nasty hard work.. We used a small hand mallet to smash old radiaors into tiny bite size pieces. After a few year of blacksmitting I leanred never to hit cold metal this hard or it would break. here that was hte idea.. clang, clang, clang.. my ears are still ringing.. but in an hour I smashed about 30 pounds.. nearly twice what I needed !.. And.. I was stress free at the end.. Noth like beating the $%@out of a piece of metal to release tension.

Here’s a pile of prebroken scrap iron

Here’s my friend the mallet

Voila.. 30 pounds of tasy iron nuggets !

OK.. now to my IBM work.. i gotta get going on this.. so .. more tomorrow.. Gnite all.. Gnite sam.. !
-me

Wednesday night – bloodletting

I am having an amazingly busy week… home stuff . work and hobbies are all lining up to make me busier than I want to be.. but somehow it feels OK. Above all, I’m stressing about some talks I need to put together for next week.. but my normal last minute panic isn’t kicking in.

I worked really hard all day.. about half the day at home.. where the heat and humidity had me sticking to my chair.. And about half at work.. in the wonderful cool and dark of my office. It was on my way to lunch there when I saw this sign.. Not sure if there was intntional irony or not… wither way.. it was an odd sign.

At the end of the day I had a doctor’s appt with Dr. Joe.. I needed to get soem routine blood work done so I’d set up an appt. As I was sitting there waiting for Joe I started looking around at the hundereds of picures kids had drawn for his walls. My eyes immediatly saught out the most bizzare one.. It’s of a kid ‘streaking’… and guess what.. it was from Max.. !!!!

Joe came in and we tlaked for a good long while about life, family. dogs. music and bloodwork. He’s such a great guy.. never hurried.. very present. He’s been a g-dsend to us since Sam’s passing.

When Joe was finished.. in came Sue the bloodletter/xray person/jack of all trades..
She told me today that she’d been working at Thos Chit. for more than 39 years !!! (she started when she was 3 🙂

She had awild assortment of tuby things and sharp things to get me to part with my vital fluids… .. Thats’ right .. that’s 8 viles !

She found an arm she liked and started to set up…

I took a ton of pictures as she drew blood.. but looking at them might be disturbing to some folks.. They made me light heaed looking at them again.. .. Anyway.. let me know if you want to see them.. Here’s the aftermath in any case.

As I was lying there getting ready to get up, Sue and I began talking.. It turns out one of her grandchilren passed away last november. The one who died was one of 3 premature triplets.. The other two survived and are now doing fine. We sat there and talked and cried for about 20 minutes.. Talking like only folks who’ve been through a loss of a loved one can. I felt liek we were meant to have that conversation.. Afterward.. I gave her a Samstoen and a hug and went off on my way… a much less stressed out guy.

I got home around 6 h.. I spoke with Gabe on the way home and he’s havign a great time at High Cascade,,, He said the snow is great and so are the coaches.. When I got home Diane and I had a nice dinner by ourslves.

Aroudn 7:30 Jana, buddy, seth , Casar, and casar’s wife. Lucy Showed up. Lucy and I are taking the iron puring class together She had brought her plaster cast of a cows heart ot show all of us. She’s goign to cast it in iron… should be.. uh… wierd..

While we geeked out woring on the face for the haunted forest project, Lucy got busy sewing a bunny hat for a prefomance art piece she’s doing with Kat tomorrow.

It was very cool. it reminded us all of Freddy the wierd rabit guy in Donnie Darko

The guys and I made very good progress tonight. Brendan, Seth and I worked on the code that will make the creatures eyes ligth up and twinkle.

While Ceasar, jhn and Buddy worked n teh code fro driving the mouth and eyebrow servos.
I worked with Cesar to reqork the code that drove the servos to use an interupt service routine on a timer interrupt to time the servo refreshes.. which is a huge improvement over the suggested way of managinf the refresh timing yourself. We’re very pleased with how well it works.. We’re goign to put it back out in the open source archives to help out otheres trying to do si,ilar work with servos.

It’s abotu midnight and the kids are filtering out.. Max just wandered in to show us is new light up battle axe… Not bad.. not bad at all !

OK.. I’m falling asleep again.. so I’ll end here.. Gnite everyone.. Gnite Sam I love you all.
-me.

Tuesday night – Coldplay

I’m sitting here inside my own house getting bombarded by bugs. It’s sweltering hot and steamy.. and somehow the bugs are turned on by that.. eeeeeeeek.. I HATE bugs…. Actually.. I don’t hate bugs.. i just hate them on me…

I’m back in Vermont after a quick trip down to NY… It was a good trip.. got a bunch done on the way down, while there.. and on the way back. I spent some time at our Somers location . it always reminds me of some sort of SciFi movie backdrop.. Except that it’s filed of quiet well dressed business people. Here’s the outside..

And here’s the inside…

Here are two of the well dressed business people.. My good friends Joanne and Luba..
Luba’s the one standing on the desk… That’s what people do at corporate headquarters.. (Actually.. she was showing us how to turn the AC up !)

After a good work session. Joanne,. Luba and I went out to a working dinner at a good Indian place.. They had this curious sign on the door. The sign reminds me.. do you knwo that the world now makes more transistors every year than it makes grains of rice !.. Go technology !

I got back to Burlington mid day and had a busy afternoon. By the time I got home, Our friend Beckett was at the house. Beckett and Diane took Yoga training together several years back. She lives in Boston and is on her way up to Quebec city to mark her birthday.
It was really wonderful catching up with her. .

Nicholous joined us midway through Diane’s really great dinner. It was a cool cooincidence becaue Nicholos and his mom are also freinds of Becketts

We all went outside to try and cool off.. Nicholous and I built a fire to keep the bigs off.. that didn’t work.. but the fire was nice..

That’s it for the day.. but. I have one favor to ask on behalf of my baby brother billy… He sent me the following note today..


From: Cohn, William
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 10:44 AM
To: ‘williamcohn@mac.com’
Subject:

Hello all… I have an odd favor to ask… if you will indulge me, it will only take a minute of your time.

WFNX, a progressive radio station in Boston, is hosting a contest to identify the best unsigned bands in Boston. The 700 or so entries they received have been distilled down to fifteen finalists who have been posted at http://www.coldplayontour.com/wfnx/. The website allows web-surfers to listen to and score each band. The top three contenders will be presented to Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, a popular alternative band, and he will select one to be the opening act when Coldplay performs in Boston next month.

Commonthrill, the last of the finalist, is the band in which I played bass for the last 5 or 6 years before we moved to Houston and the Texas Heart Institute.

Winning this contest and getting to open for Coldplay would be a great opportunity for Commonthrill (and for me… I played on the song and I’ll play with the band if we win!) The band is holding it’s own in the competition for now, fluctuating between second and third place, but we could use your help. Please visit the site, http://www.coldplayontour.com/wfnx/ and scroll down to the last video. The image is a poor resolution, black-and-white photo of John Courduvelis, the singer/song writer of the band. Give the song a listen if you have the time. Otherwise, just click on the tenth star in the line below John, the one to the far right, and it will impact our average score accordingly. (If you are the aggressive type and really want to help, you could go so far as to give the other contenders a score of “one star”, (the star to the far left) to decrease their standing… let your conscience be your guide). Thanks in advance for your help.

Please send this email on to anyone you know who might help us out!



Thanks! Billy


William E. Cohn, MD
Director, Minimally Invasive Surgical Technology
Texas Heart Institute
Office: 832-355-3000
Fax: 832-355-9004
wcohn@heart.thi.tmc.edu


I think it would be so awesome if Billy’s old band Commonthrill got to open for Coldplay.
If you have a sec.. please go to
http://www.coldplayontour.com/wfnx/
and vote for the last video…Ask your friends to do it too ! The video is hard to see.. but you can make out the song

That’s all for me today.. gotta get away from these @^%&^ bugs !
Nite all.. nite Sam.. (help out uncle Billy in the voting !)

-me

Monday night – too tired to type

Hi friends.. I’m down in new york for a meeting.  I drove down this morning after about 2 hours sleep last night.  I had trouble falling asleep because I was thinking about a work problem.. when I finally did fall aslee,  Gabe’s  alarm woke us both at 4:15. I’d forgotten to turn it off.. The combination of a few hours of sleep a 5.5 hour drive and a long set ogf meetings  today are makign it very hard for me to stay awake to blog.. Hope I can get a free pass for tonight.. Can’t keep my eyes open any more.. Gnite everyone.. Gnite Sam
-me