today was an amazing experience. Arin and I took part in a very special event at University of Vermont. My friend Kevin from Brandon Vermont had organize the event. They were about 20 students from otter Valley high school who came up to UVM to see the unveiling of the “new” davenport’s motor that my friend Dave H had built. The first electric motor in the world… Or at least United States and certainly the first patent it electric motor was built by Thomas Davenport, a blacksmith a Brandon Vermont a long his wife. He designed the motor after seeing an electromagnet working to separate iron ore .Ruth did a number of basic electricity demonstrations including how electromagnets work, the Lorentz force,, lenses law etc. The kids even got to build two small motors… And electromagnet mutated motor and a homopolar motor. The last 15 minutes Aaron and I showed our new study hall electric motor. It is the pusher motor from our Alia playing it was constructed by our wonderful studyhall team… Aaron, andrea, Sara, ‘Shannon and me. We calculated that the new motor was 5000 times (!) more powerful than the Davenport motor… That’s a lot of progress and just 186 years :-)… We learned quite a bit I having our motor out reviews for the kids. We have some ideas for improvement… It was the first time we taking it out of beta And we were overall pleased with how it worked.

WCAXTV did a nice short piece on the visit

https://www.wcax.com/2022/03/08/how-electric-motors-start-vermont-is-still-driving-students-today/

I was proud to be part of this!

nite all, nite sam

-me

Most of today was spent driving back from and the cat.… We woke to warm rain and drove the entire six hours with various fluctuations of hard and soft rain.… We use the time to listen to a book on tape… It was “a brief history of time” by Stephen Hawkins… Almost done with it. Really amazing that he could write that…

It’s pretty bleak up here in Vermont… All the snow is gone and it’s raining like crazy.

This is a hard time of year

One bright spot is that our friend Nate is visiting back in Vermont for another day from Montana… He and our friend Hannah came by for a short visit which brightened our day

nite all, nite sam

-me

On Sunday we woke up to amazingly warm temperatures… Eventually got up to 71. All the snow was gone. Dianne and I took advantage of it to take a longer run down the floodwall on the Nanticoke river… Brought back lots of memories of running there over the years especially with the dogs

Around noon we went over to Joe and Pats and then started heading up to visiting hours for Diane’s aunt Jean.… On the way we drove past all of the old buildings that used to be Ibm. It really looks like visiting ancient ruins. The buildings are now empty and crumbling… Hard to believe this was the start of the company…

The visiting hours for aunt Jeanne we’re up in Port Dickerson… They gave us a chance to drive by Dianne’s grandmothers old house… It was looking pretty good.

The visiting hours themselves were nice. We are able to see Diane’s cousins and share some memories. Luckily we had just scanned a bunch of pictures For Jo which included quite a few pictures of aunt jeanne and family . I’m happy that I can share them with the family.

From there we all drove back to Chou and Patz and sat out in the 70° sun.… So strange that there had been several inches of snow there the day before

That evening Joe Pat Dianne Linda David and I went out for Thai food…. The end of a really nice visit

nite all, nite sam

-me

had a great day down and cut. We started with a hike at oakley corners .. I New York state park near Lynda and david. We were able to let Willow off the leash and run through the snowy trails… We saw some crazy stuff including a clown doll hanging randomly out in the woods and a crazy not-that-old Honda wreck sitting out in the middle of nowhere. It was really hard to figure out how anyone had gotten a car that far down in there .

I had my tracker on and it’s funny to see the tracks of us looking at that old car

One thing about this trip was watching the world situation in Russia and review Crane evolve… Our friend Dave is Ukrainian… It really drove it home

Around mid day we headed over to see Diane’s brother Joe and our sister-in-law pat. It was so great hanging out with them. They live in ‘Diane’s parents house that they fixed up so nicely. Joe still has a lot of my father-in-law GabÉ’s tools… I went through them one more time and got some cool stuff for me and for our kids

Later that night we went out to a small family style Mexican restaurant in Downtown Endicott Called grandma’s. It was so good!

really nice day!

nite all, nite sam

-me