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 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.

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

The alarms went off at 4Am. Gabe had a 6:20 Am flight this morning to High Cascade Snowboard camp in Oregon … and we weren’t going to be late. Gabe and I are not morning people.. Diane kindly wrangled us into the car by around 4:30.. We picked up Luke and made it to the Airport by about 5.. Here are Gabe and Luke looking wide awake.. (yeah)..

Gabe is really excited to be going to High Cascade.. It’s his second
year.there. He loves the place and gets to work with some really
awesome coaches. (as well as play dodge ball and eat cobra dogs).
Gabe will have Luke, Sumner, and Ralph out there to hang out with. I
think he’s really going to love it. Sam went there for a year.. so Gabe
is taking soem more amsstones out with him.

We at there and watched Gabe’s plane took off.. It was about 7 when we got home.. I went to sleep for 3 more hours… and Diane stayed up… That made for a very long day for her !

Around 11 Diane and I drove in to John M’s. (aka Yolk’s)shp to begin work on the iron casting course I’m takign this week. There are abotu a dozen of us akign it.. Each of us will cast one or more objects in pure iron. It’s such and amazing process.. My friends Homer and Kat turned me on to it. You can transform any object.. even soft objects into a pice of iron.. like this hat !.

Or this fish (made by Thea)

Here we are learnign the ins and outs of sand casting.> that’s Elijah from NewOrleans teaching the class.. he’s a master caster who’s come up to Vermont just to do this class for us. The other folks in the class there today include my friend Kat the welder, her intern Lucie (married to my firend Cesar) .. her other friend Julia (I think) , Susaqua, Thea .. They’re all very cool people.

So far they are also all women.. which is … interesting .. for a firesport like Iron casting..I’m sure I’m going to learn stuff here.

BTW.. I had to switch back to my old camera..I as borowwing Gabes.. but he needed his for camp. The flares in these pictures hare due to dirty optics.. I’ll have to find a way to clean it.

Here Elija shows us how to tamp the resen impregnated sand into the molds.

Here’s the small furnace that Elijah and Yolk build.. it burns chunks of coke.. and can melt a 50 pound batch of cast iron (from broken up radiators) in abut 15 minutes.

Julia and Luci practice lifting the ladel.. on casting day this will be filled with glowing hot melted iron.

Thea and I got our forms ready to make molds.. I’m making iron SamStones.. and a few decorative ‘E’s (Iron-E’s… get it ? .. ughhh)

So we put 100 pounds of sand in the mixer…

Measured out the resin and catalyst..

And put it in the mixer with the sand.. Here I am holding Thea’s reperator so she doesn’t breath the nasty resin vapors or the silica..

4 minutes of mixing.. and we now have 25 minutes to work the sand until it becomes rock.

Elijah helps me cromble the resin sand into my mold..

Then I tamp it down .. and leave it to cure.. I’ll come back later int he week to do the other half of the mold.. then next Saturday we pour the iron.

It was about 4:30 when we finally left there. I’d gotten much more done than I thought I would on this first day.. Diane stuck there with me through the whole thing (and on less than 4 hours of sleep).. You know you married the right person when something like that happens..

We got home and played with the dogs for awhile.. then went on a 12 mile bike ride.. 12 miles may not sound like much.. but we hadn’t ridden bikes in more than 2 years.. Diane called this the ‘weekend of different muscles’.. yesterday’s tube riding had required about a 2 hour abdominal crunch to make it through the shallows of the Huntington .. then I did about 2.5 hours of sything on the Rivershore trail.. again.. differnt muscles.. then todays’ ligging of 100 pound sacks of sand.. and then the bike rde.. Of all of them.. the bike ride was the touhest.. that particular sore muscle is making it difficult to sit right now 🙂

Finally about 8 Pm we gt the dogs out for a walk on the upper Rivershore.. They neede the run.. they both got in the wter to cool off.. it was in the mid 80’s by late afternoon.

I came home and did some sheetrock spackling in the barn in prep for the painting we’re goign to do in there this week. Then Diane and i cooked dinner. We heard from Gabe in Oregon.. he’s there safe and already having fun.

That’s about it for the day. It was long an fun.. and I’m beat.. but I still have a few hours of IBM work to do.. So I better get on it.. Talk to you tomorrow !.. Gnite all.. Gnite Sam !

-me