All posts by johncohn

Thursday night – dog chocolates

December 27, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Very lazy day watching the snow fall today.. We got somewhere between 18 inches and two feet of fluffy snow. I just love the snow and the quiet and clean it brings to everything. Diane and i went out on cross country skis with the dogs this morning to enjoy the powder.. Gabe went to smugs .. The roads were so bad that it took 2 hours to get there !
I just lazed around the house and worked on a couple of projects. One thing im pleased to report is that i finished the innards for a musical project im doing for a friend. It involved designing custom circuit boards and a bunch of pretty fancy embedded arduino code. I finished populating the 6 boards and testing the code today. There’s something very satisfying about making a bunch of uniform doohickeys from scratch .on the left you see the breadboarded prototype.

I also worked on a project I’m doing for work involving traffic prediction in a town in france.. Im coding in python which i love doing. Its kind of fun getting to know a towns roads that i haven’t visited in almost 30 years
A croissant for the person who can recognize this city by this map.

The big news fro the day was that we all came hoe to find that one or both of the dogs had gotten into a Christmas stocking and eaten 16 nice pieces of chocolate candy. That was pretty strange…since they never touch our food without our permission.. The temptation must have been just too much. What a mess.. I know that chocolate isn’t good for dogs.. But so far, so good. They’re both about 60 pounds so they’d have to eat more than that to do themselves real harm.. But I’m guessing their tummies will be off for a few days.

Ok.. Thats it for the day.. More tomorrow

Nite all, nite sam
-me

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Wednesday night – boxing day

December 26, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

In England, the day after Christmas is called Boxing Day. I’ve never really been sure why. I think it was traditionally the day that you went and visited your relatives… Once i heard that it was called boxing day because thats the day you took unwanted gift boxes back to the stores for exchange.. But that doesn’t sound plausible , .. This is what i was thinking about as i broke down all the cardboard boxes left-over from our celebration this week. Could that be it ?!
Nite all, nite sam
-me

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Tuesday night – xmaster

December 26, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Wonderful xmas day… I know it was wonderful, because I’m still in my jammies and it’s almost midnight.
Diane and I woke early, but our little darlings didn’t rise and shine until noon.. We spent from noon until about 5 lounging around, eating, opening gifts and hanging out.breakfast was at 2 pm. the last gift was unwrapped about 5.. and we finally stepped out of the house for the first time around 8 PM

max and jac made their own apple pie flavored moonshine…

the boys got me hookers and strippers…

by 2 pm the dogs were tired out..

grandma and granpa scored with a new head for Gabe’s lacross stick

a four way maple toast to celebrate the end of the day.

gabre is really like chemestry.. so he got lots of marginally safe pyrotechnic chemicals..

we then strung stale bagels and doughnuts on hemp cord..

We got outside for the first time at 8PM.. We drove down to the catamount trail and hiked up in the woods to decorate a tree for the animals it’s something we’ve done every year with the kids..

There was an almost full moon out.. we didn’t even need flashlights. A bright Jupiter was right next to the moon.. so beautiful !

the moon was so bright hat we even cast shadows !

one by one we hung the stale baked goods in the tree…

then spread grain and nuts..

they looked pretty cool in the flash !

we put a samstone on the tree as we do every year now

a lovely, slow and lazy day… lots of love..some sadness mixed in .. .

our hearts were full today

we hope yours was too…

nite all, nite sam

-me

Monday night – Sam decorates the tree

December 24, 2012 johncohn Leave a comment

Very nice and slow day as folks ready for xmas.. One thing that’s always important for us is finding ways to bring Sam into our celebration. Today one task we had was to decorate the tree.. we have a tradition of decorating them in interesting themes each of the past 6 years… we’ve had zombie trees, space ships, mexican trees. We were hard up this year thinking of a theme.. Ideas we’d discussed were a ‘chemist-tree’.. with decorations from the periodic table.. nah.. too cerebral.. then we had the idea from Gabes recent (forced) reading of the Scarlet Letter in school. of putting a giant read ‘A’ on it .. and calling it and ‘Adultree’.. .. no.. too much of a downer.. ..

Then we had the idea.. We did a ‘red bull’ tree.. The reason it was uch a great idea is that we have 5 boxes of red bull cans that sam collected up in the attic.. they went from trash to relic as did many of his belongings. Sam loved red bull.. and it remains our toast of choice to his memory. One of the boxes contained a set of cans that sam and I had cut apart into sheets. our plan was to decorate one of the walls his room with them.. but… we never got there…

So.. we had this roll of cut apart redbull cans.. perfect for making garlands.. Gabe has a huge collection of redbull pop tops to go with..

gabe strung up some of the intact cans..

while I cut apart the unrolled sheets… It felt great to handle these again… .. it was one of the last projects sam and I did together..

brit and hannah helped me staple the strips into garlands..

and up on the tree they went

sam had painted one of hte cans gold for soem reason. max took it and made a great red bull angel for the top of the tree..

then the kids made us dinner.. Max made a beautiful beet and gorganzola sald, matt made he,p burgers, ian made scalloped potatoes, Hannah made quinoa salad… and gabe made crepes for desert ..