Packed day today.. Cleaned up the house a bit getting ready for dianes return from portland. Watered all of her plants.. which takes a good long time 🙂 

Around 11, my friends Kasey and Ross came over to work on the vacuum tube tesla coli that we’ve been slowly working on. We’re breadboarding it now, then will build it into something pretty. I’ve not built anythign with vacuum tubes since the 1970’s !!.. so this was learnign for all of us.. .. We were following an instructables article written by a 12 year old (!) back in 2011 !. 

Today was the first time we tried power this thing on !

It worked !!!.. Tiny sparks so far.. 

Now we need to start tuning the tesla coil to get longer sparks.. that part is both fun and tedious !

After that I headed in to Burlington for my friend Jared’s 50th birthday.

 Jared and had rented out his favorite restaurant , Stone Soup.  for his birthday bash. The place was packed with freinds of his from grade school to today. .. and food from all over including his favorite places in NYC, marylind and of course vt. And we all had one thing in common.. we love Jared. He is one of my favorite people.. he’s a deep thinker, great story teller, great listener.. and soooo kind. We dont get together much.. but when we do.. it’s always memorable.. We got in a habit of buying a bottle of wine, puttign it a brown paper bag and sitting somewhere… park benches, bridges, parks.. and talking  for hours.. about anything and  everything  ..   I remember having one of those brown bag sessions on tha hiking bridge over the winooski.. and we had passover food and a haggadah.. and made a little somewhat drunken seder out there over the bridge.. 

It was great talkign to all the people heere.. many I knew, many I didnt.. we all had fun explaining how we came to know and appreciate jared (I met him by workign on a projeject for my freind Mike. 

lots of love in the room  for this guy..

Happy birthday Jared !
nite all. nite sam
-me