Tuesday night – project day

December 27, 2011 johncohn Leave a comment

Perfect vacation day.. I spent most of the day working in the lab with the boys.. Gabe is making a movie for a school project. He needed me to act like a crazy mad scientist.. which was a stretch, I know..

the bulk of the day i spent working with Max on his slider project.. It’s so much fun working together on this. It’s a cool combination of electronics, programing and mechanical design. Hopefully we’ll get in some long hours tonight to get it assembled.. Our goal is to have it working before max takes off for Brooklyn on Thursday.. a tall order..

Not much else happened today.. which is so very nice..
more tomorrow !

nite all, nites sam
-me

Monday night – boxing day

December 26, 2011 johncohn Leave a comment

In some parts of the world December 26th is called Boxing Day .. When we lived in the UK I never quite understood what one was supposed to do on Boxing Day.. I seem to remember something about going and seeing your mother in law.. .Or.. is it about returning unwanted gifts in boxes ? The true meaning of the holiday came to me today as we escorted a mountain of dismantled cardboard boxes outside for recycling.

THe rest of the day passed very peacefully.. Max and I had a plan to work on the computerized camera slider we’re working on together. We started at about 2:30 this afternoon. the next time we looked up it was 7:30 at night. We made great progress. It’s so much fun working together. Max is a natural at the electronics and programing stuff.. which is pretty cool for an artist at heart. We made great progress today.. we got both a servo and stepper motor working and are comparing them as potential drives for the slider. Tomorrow we hope to tackle the mechanical parts of the drive..

While Max was programming, I made some more progress on my LED strips. I built a simple arduino shield to drive them.. They are very. very sexy.. this movie doesn’t really do them justice..

Rusty came buy and played some music.. Max chimed in on the Banjo.. sounded great ..

That’s it for boxing day 2011.. hope you all had a good one, too
nite all, nite sam

-me

Sunday evening – xmas day

December 25, 2011 johncohn Leave a comment

It was a good day.. a very good day.. we all slept until about 10 AM.. no .. let me correct.. everyone but Diane slept until 10.. Diane got up at 6:30.. the rest of us climbed out of bed, very well rested… at 10.. then went down stairs for Christmas morning.. The four of us hung out opening presents and just hanging out until about 2:30. It was really fun and uplifting..

Sam was with us in spirit. All day his lamp was with us.. Max an Gabe carried it downstairs with them..

Max gave us all presents that he’d made by ‘circuit bending’ old toys. Here’s a troll he’d modified complete with color changing blinking eye and fiber optic hairdo…

THe dogs hung with us for the entire 4 hour marathon.. though satori took a long break in the middle next to the warm stove.

I gave Max a digital caliper.. so we took turns measuring our index fingers.. how geeky is that ?

both boys got enough red bull to last them the week..

then Gabe went and cooked breakfast for us.. jalapeno poppers.. a new tradition !

by the end.. everyone was tired and happy.. and the room was a mess.. a happy mess..

I love my family so much..

hope you all had a love filled day too…

nite all, nite sam.. you were in our hearts all day

-me

Saturday night – ’twas the day before christmas ..

December 25, 2011 johncohn Leave a comment

It was a long peaceful day.. we all decided not to do much today… Diane went out this morning for an early morning grocery run.. but aside from that we pretty much stayed around the neighborhood…. settling into the holiday spirit. We kept one of Sam’s lamps burning all day to keep him as part of our day, too.

The first order of business today was to finish decorating the tree.. The boys had decided that this year’s tree would be a pirate .. (last year a monster, the year before that a robot, … something different each of the last 5 years) .. They went up to the attic and fetched down our best pirate garb.. a skull mask. dreadlocks, a sword, a hook.. and sam’s pirate vest.. in only a few minutes our simple tree was transformed into the prettiest pirate tree you can imagine.. if that’s something you can imagine

then it was time to decorate tree number 2. Each year we go out in the woods to decorate a tree for the animals. We headed up the Catamount trail . we bundled up as it was just about 13 degrees..

we found a perfect little tree near one of our favorite swimming holes.. and started putting out the decorations, old bagels and doughnuts we’d gotten from the store. peanut butter, birdseed, old cereal, stale croissants . We’ll go clean up th string in the spring..