I can’t believe that school starts tomorrow ! t’s been a good summer.. Gabe had fun.. we loved having max for august.. and we got in some cool projects.  It’ll be a completely new rhythm for the days.. I guess I’m sort of

looking forward to it as a change.. but I’ll miss the slightly lazier

mornings.  Gabe needs to be in his seat at 7:30AM.. what kind of people are awake at that hour.. ?!?!  Maybe I’ll learn to end work earlier since I’ll be starting earlier.. but that’s never worked.
  It’s about midnight and we just got home. As with all tuesday’s we went over to jen. Jim and Avery’s to watch The Colony with a bunch of friends. There was a nice.. but slightly smaller crowd there because  tonight is a ‘school night’.  It was a really cool episode this week. Its really fun for me to see what the editors choose to hilight.   Usually I have no idea what they will choose. Tonight there was so much in there.. I didn’t think they were goign to show the ‘ozonator’ (is that really a word ?).. since it’s a little hard to explain.. but i actually think they did a pretty good job of gettign the concepts across. It was a really fun build on many levels. I loved reusing the components of the transmitter.. I’m not sure this came across.. but I was able to switch back and forth between transmitting and ‘ozonating’ just by moving the high voltage tap from the capacitor and spark gap from the transmitter primary coil to the tap on the tesla coil transmitter. ..   I also loved the way the idea came up.. I was jonesing to build a tesla coil anyway since the transmitter got me 80 percent of the way there.. the water purification application was a really lucky and useful excuse.. Several folks asked me if I could have just used the arc from the car spark coil supply I used to fire the transmitter.. What kinda surprised me is that that arc didn’t geerate much ozone.. The tesla coil combined with teh pressurized ozone cell that Mike came up with generated tons of ozone.. I used a pump I pulled from an old blood pressure machine to pressurize the cell and blow the ozone through a porous stone from an old  aquarium aerator . The water absolutely reeked of ozone after a 30 minute dose. I also really liked working with Mike on this build.. he’s a really good fabricator.. by this point in the show we’d really figured out how to work together.. I learned alot by wathcing him work. (oh man was that a geeky paragraph)
    On the people side.. I was psyched to see more of the other colonists.. I like the way Johnny V came across . He is such a kind hearted guy.. He has this deep spiritual side.. coupled with the most insane and crazy sense of humor. He kept us laughing  all the time.. for example.. every morning we woke to the ‘Good Morning with Johny V’  ‘radio’ show.. he’d do some weird off the wall improv comedy to get us moving. I also liked seeign Morgan’s phonograph build.. it was very cool watching her work through how a phonograph worked.. she’d actually never seen one working .. and there she built one !  I’m glad to see them finally showing that the women did engineering builds all the time too !  Oh… and they worked in the soap that Allison and I made.. what you didn’t see there was that we’d put a samstone in the soap too.. ou also didn’t see that we tried to use it too soon a week or so earlier and it damn near took our skin off !  It was also funny to see all the rats !.. they really were everywhere.. Johnny V and Vlad were constantly .. uh… escorting them out of this world..   But by that point in the show.. they were definitely looking more like food. It was amazing to me what vlad was able to do with them (or anything for that matter).. I have to say they were very tasty.. and my body really needed the protein !!
   It’s so much fun to analyze these episodes..  I’m digitizing a bunch of the episodes as we speak which has caused my laptop to slow to a crawl. It’s gettign tough to keep writing.. so I’ll end here and get some sleep. 6AM will come very soon..

OK.. that’s all for now.. nite folks.. Nite Sam
-me