Cohn-zone

Today was rthe day of Gabes real birthday party. He’d been planning this for months. He wanted a science themed birthday/PhD party.. .. so we’d spent hours digging up weird science stuff aounr our house and gabes house.. What we didnt have we eithe made or baught.

We spent all of today preping for the party whiel the rest of the world was either watching miliotary parades or protesting them.. .. I was sorry to muss the no kings events.. many of my freinds went and foudn them really good .

we set up chairs and fire pit outside

Gabes thesis room which was temprorarily Maxs bedroom .. became our storage room where everythign we didnt want out was stored

Gabes notes were still all over the wals

Max and mason set up the DJ booth in the basement.. Last weekend Diane and I had cleaned up the basement so it could serve as a dance floor .. today ew all helped decorate it.. it was hard to beleive that Gabes packed basemetn could look this good !

Max rigged up an anti head bonking bar onthe steep basement steps complete with sequencing lights . I defintely appreciated that as i’m always banging my head tehre

i’d braught my small but powerful musical tesla coil wheihc we set up on the gas stove .. (is that dangerous 🙂 ?

Gabe and I rigged up a spot for his microscope.. its the one that scott gave to me to find a home for. Its one of Gabe’s prized possessions. Scott was one of my best freinds.. he died of pancreatic cancer in 2021.. I think of him very often. I liek to think he’d be proud to see that gabe went into cancer bio and works in a pancreatic cancer lab.

I baugth a simple microscope camer then installed soem code on a rasperry pi to cast it to a computer mointor so everyone could see what was beign viewed. I also got him a collection of prepared slides.. it was really cool and proved to be a big hit

mweanwhile diane and gabe, max , becky and mason strung up lights and decorations everywhere he’s where we had the beakers and erlynmeyer flasks for drinks.

Diane and I had made ice cream fixings over at our Airbnb last night, which basically is just cream, half-and-half, chocolate syrup. We chilled it over there because there was more space in the fridge. The idea was to make liquid nitrogen ice cream. Henry had kindly picked up the liquid nitrogen yesterday, so we were all set. Dana and I went and got the ice cream stuff in a wagon because we didn’t wanna lose our good parking place.

Keep helped out by sampling the keg and the beakers

Our friend Ben and his friend Ryan came over to help with the cocktails. Ben is good at everything including Mixology. He made some sort of alcoholic thing that had blue Carosso, etc. it was made to copy something you could get at Taco Bell. I didn’t know what it was named after, but it packed a punch… And he then made a non-alcohol lemonade both were delicious

Max made some super bubble mix using it a secret ingredient that he got from Tucker. Some sort of veterinary lubricant. Whatever it was, It made fantastic bubbles

We also had the automatic bubble maker out front

I bought a whole bunch of light up pink ice cubes… They turn on when they’re in liquid. And they were a huge hit. Lots of fun to see. The thing is is that when you take them out, the light goes off and you can reuse them again again and again.

Folks started showing around six. Tucker, Haley and Winslow rode over on their bikes. They were the first to put on the lab coats. I think we might’ve had something like 15 lab coats and lab gloves and everybody got dressed up. It was really great.

Tucker and his family are some of my favorite people… He is so fun and crazy…

Things quickly got fun and rowdy. Mason and Max got tunes going downstairs and people started funneling in. It was a takeout potluck and people brought food from all sorts of different places. It was delicious.

Dr. Isabel graduated about a year before . She’s good at many things, including ballet and baking cakes. She made two beautiful gluten-free cakes… They were absolutely delicious and absolutely stunning to look at.

Diana and I had bought fluorescent chalk and fluorescent chalk pens. Would also put up some construction paper for people to write on. I got Haley who has wonderful handwriting to label the top something like put your results here or something to get people writing. I had also installed black lights all over the place, so it really popped.

At one point, I got out the circular periodic table that my friend Elliot’s dad had embedded. I figured there’d be no better place to show it and a bunch of Pd hbiochemists and their friends people. People instantly got it and why it had some advantages. There were people talking about SP orbitals and that kind of stuff pretty quickly

Midway through the night, Max brought out a video that he had helped Gabe make. When Gabe really sat down to start writing his thesis, it was about a month before and every morning he dressed up in a different costume went in there explained what he was going to do and then said “let’s do it “and then he took a time lapse of about two hours of his work for each day. Max got all of that and edited it together into some really fun sequences. Here’s an excerpt one that I made that I’m posting with maxes blessings.

It was so fun and crazy. Make sure you watch all the way through
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Someone brought over Jell-O shots that were made in petri dishes that had nerd candy sprinkled in it to simulate several growth. They were gross but yummy.

And it was time to go outside to make liquid nitrogen ice cream. This is something that gave Max Sam and I have done hundreds of times for kids. It’s so much fun and so fast and so delicious.

Shortly after that, we all went inside and Gabe asked me to do the Tesla coil. We played happy birthday and a bunch of other songs. I think people really liked it.