Attempted to take a vacation today.. but still managed to work abotu a half a normal day.. all in all a good day . 

Cleaned my office, put away a ton of electronics.. and genereally prepared to try to do very little next week.   Around 4, DIane and I headed up to colchester for the quarterly VOMIT (Vermonsts own MIT club) meeting. Today was a tour of Twincraft soap.. i didn’t knwo what to expect.. but it was actually amazing !. .. Here are my fellow MIT alums 

 

my buddy KC’s car has a munny license plate.. her initials.. are the chemical symbol for Potassium  Cyanide 

she just had her 50th MIT reunion 

 

we all checked in to twincraft 

 

here is Kurt, Twincrafts main formulary inventor.. and our tour guide

 

here we are , gowned for the tour 

 

after a short presnetation.. we went down for the tour 

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here’s the raw soup in 1000 kg bags 

 

here’s scrap soap thats sold at cost to prisons. 

 

here’s the milling machine that shears the soap pellets 

 

here are the ingredient bays for the days runs.. 

 

one of the gieant mixers 

the pruductin floor below 

 

a pressing machine used to test spoap

 

african black soap after its first milling 

 

purpule soap !

 

2nd mixing and extruder 

 

adding exfoliants (oatmeal) 

 

heater 

 

cutter 

 

soap ingots 

 

the soap is warm and still flexible 

 

yellow soap 

 

boxing 

 

translucent soap 

 

lots and lots of finsihed product !

 

the soap dies .. they have over 5000 shapes

 

extra extruder screws

 

lots more ingrediants 

 

the soap lab.. where they expereiment 

 

 

it was 7 pm by the time we got out. I drove DIane back to Richmond.. then headed out to waterbury to meet my Burnign Man friends.   We’re planning next years projects. We met at Sun Commons, my freind Duanes company . 

 

 

It’s goona be great !

 

ok.. gotta sleep now.. more tomorrow from the road

 

nite all. nite sam

-me

 

THird work day on US soil.. I swear when I’m back in the states even a 12 hour work  day feels like a vacation,..   I’m squeezing in a a bunch of local stuff I haven’t had time to do for the last month and a half. Yesterday was our monthly Generator Board meeting.  My work day began at 5Am this morning.. but I was able to break from 8-9 for the  Generator Safety committee lab walk through.   The place looked good.. thoguh there are always things you can find to improve. 

 

here’s our fancy finger saving saw.. if skin touches the blade, it fires a brick of aluminum into the saw, breaks a pin and saves the finger..   we have proof that it works !

 

I had three remote meetings at work all which went well… but all which i would have preferred to be in the room for. I compensated this evening by attending a local IoT meetup. A group of us are planning a Long Range, low power LoRa network for the city of Burlington. all of these folks are doing it as s volunteers.. we had every skill you could wish for in that room…

 

I so love my nerdy little town !

nite all, nite sam

-me

Just finished Diane’s gentle yoga class.. my second for the week. somewhere in the middle of Shavasana I realized that this is the first time I’ve been able to make both of Diane’s evening classes in more than 6 weeks, It was really wonderful zoning out tonight in Yin yoga. Yin is one of the slow forms of Yoga.. you hold poses for 3-5 minutes. I think i fell asleep during each pose… it was wonderful.

Afterwards everyone came in and ate Diane’s wonderful  Tom Ka. We spent dinner talking about Thanksgiving  and talking about how much we loved Vermont.. 

 

not bad for a tuesday

 

nite all, nite sam

-me

Today during endless phone calls I managed to  get out the 8 interior storm windows and get them mounted. each is a  7 foot tall, nearly four foot wide heavy huge piece of dangerous glass. Half of them are tempered which makes them marginally safer. I.. if only i knew which ones were the safer ones.  dug them out of the closet, then Diane cleaned both sides and the windows..   I’m walking around with my laptop,remaining completely engaged in my meetings.. 

 

By 6PM i put up the last of them.. as each one goes up, the air gets a little warmer in the house.. and the outside sounds get a little quieter. The house is audibly quieter,. Outside is further away, the roads disappear.

 It definely sounds like  winter. 

nite all. nite sam

-me