Bruce_Letters

Floored

2012-02-12T22:30:00.001-06:00

Greetings from a couple of snowy people

We had a fun snowstorm that included some low flying clouds that, when parked over the university, combined with the university lights, made it look like they was a massive fire!

We just marked our 1 year anniversary here. Seems that was a long enough penance of living with carpet to cover any past sins, so we are about to renovate 1700 square feet of flooring, a combination of travertine, tile, and wood. To pick the wood, we did stress tests of a bunch of samples. Here I’m doing the wrench drop:

And Helen did the knife test:

We also did water, sandpaper, and rocks. Here are some of the samples looking the worse for wear:

Today I started, with some pleasure, ripping out the carpet:

I’ll do the wood install and hire out the stone and tile installs.

In other news, Nick has been hard at work on porting Skritter to the Ixxx universe. He has a fun preview video here:

http://www.skritter.com/ios

And in slightly older news (from December), here is an article about one of the activities that has been keeping Helen busy:

http://healthcare.utah.edu/neurosciences/news/pressreleases/sep_directors.html

And in amazing stuff from the future news, here are some of the latest things those amazing flying robots can do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YQIMGV5vtd4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S-dkonAXOlQ

I was impressed. This guy was not impressed:

Bruce

Harvesting Mangos

2012-01-08T15:12:00.001-06:00

The LDS Salt Lake Temple is pretty amazing. 40 years to build, 210 feet (120 cubits) tall, 9 feet thick walls of hand hewn granite. Care to guess the difference between these two photos? Same wall, same night, one is backwards:

I’m guessing you’ve guessed it. The first one is upside down, taken by looking into a reflecting pool.

This is what the Utah state capital would look like after being buried by 100 feet of ash after the Yellowstone super volcano erupts.

And this is what a biker would look like if he stopped to watch the super volcano erupt:

And this is what Helen would look like if we went out for a fun ski trip with Marie, one of the residents:

And this is what I would look like if I was being chased by an angry turtle on a snowmobile:

And this is what Helen would look like if I coaxed here up the trail for a sunset hike:

We enjoyed fun New Years visits from both Aya

and Noah.

Here Helen is instructing children on how to harvest garlic:

This is Aya teaching Noah how to harvest a Mango:

And here how to harvest an mp3 file:

And here Aya is harvesting knowledge from a school book:

And here they are both harvesting Chess men:

Which Helen did not find very tasty:

We took our first trip to Park City:

where we passed on the opportunity to buy $10,000 wolf fur coats or $1,000 cowboy boots.

Finally, I also had the opportunity to eat two exotic foods. The first was this boxelder bug, who is wintering with his clan in our house:

The second was this hand crafted cinnamon sugar snowball:

I decided to save the bug as a treat for our next visitor. Anyone up for a visit?

Bruce

Buddha’s Hand in Uppercase and Lowercase

2011-12-11T13:14:00.001-06:00

The bizarre plant of the month is called Buddha’s Hand:

Also know as fingered citron, it looks like a lemon that met a creative chief with amazing carving skills. But reality is stranger, it actually grows this way.

They couldn’t fix my camera, so they gave me a new one to replace it! Coolpix S8200. This guy modeled for me on our carpet so I could test out the macro focus:

We had a great Thanksgiving visit with Mom and Dad:

We touristed Antelope Island, an Island in the Great Salt Lake that is semi-famous for one of the few places where Bison were not exterminated by hoards of white men with big guns in the 1800s. So they called it Antelope Island. Maybe Bison are like Antelope. Except bigger. And blacker. And less jumpier.

We also had a great visit with the Tim, Sue, and Abby. Tim plays a mean game of ping pong. Checked out the frightened yellow ping pong ball in this shot … I think it pee-ed its pants in fear of the upcoming hit (you can see a left a trail of yellow to the left of it):

And Abbey has the rare innate ability to hula-hoop in either direction … took me a lot of practice to be able to do that:

We were all surprised to see that Abbey had a growth spurt and is now as tall as 6’ 2”Tim! Maybe it was the hula-hooping.

We visited the new Natural History museum. That guy about to eat Dad is a ancient sloth bear:

And here Mom and Sue are planning a rare gem heist:

Last weekend we went to the Annual Epilepsy conference, this time in Baltimore. This is taken from an skyscraper observation deck, looking down on the historic USS Constellation. Those tents in the corner are from “Occupy Baltimore” … I wonder what the 1800’s ship’s crew would have thought of the tent city protest.

They had a science museum with this cool 10 foot globe magically suspended in air with various movies displayed on it:

This was a 200+ tower that made ‘drop shot’ for guns by dropping molten lead from the top into water at the bottom. Was the tallest structure in the US for 20 years:

In this museum I learned that the term UpperCase and LowerCase come from they way they stored the moveable types used in early printing presses … the big types were in the upper case, the smaller ones were in the lower case. True story. I think our tour guide invented it (that part probably not true, but maybe his Dad did):

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the piano. I took out the keyboard assembly to count all the parts need to make a piano. Helen was terrified.

I got up to about 10,000, about 8000 in the key assembly alone, then decided to count the number of lights we can see at night in the Salt Lake City valley instead. Seemed easier, but I’m still counting.

15 Minute Snowman

2011-11-13T14:49:00.001-06:00

2 unrelated mystery photos this week. This first one is NOT an electron microscope photo of flower pollen (I don’t have an electron microscope … yet):

The challenge on this photo is not what is in the middle of it, but rather how it was composed:

My camera is in the shop again (the 2 year $30 extended warrantee on pocket cameras is highly recommended), so only a few iphone photos this month. We had our first snowstorm last weekend. I constructed this 8 foot snowman in 15 minutes, likely a new world time record! (for our backyard anyway):

Speaking of records, I broke last summer’s no shower/bath record. This year, using our handy pool and hot tub, I got through 5 months, May –> Sept. This hair was washed once in the last 6.5 months (our trip to Boulder last month):

Not too slimy (is wet, not dirty), but was a bit long. Helen fixed that:

For those of you still pondering that second mystery photo and have not cheated by looking at the bottom of the post, here is a second clue (this is a ‘before’ photo):

I thought I had escorted all the mice out of our house (5 of them), but recently found this guy trapped in our food cabinet, trying to knaw his way out. The food was on the upper shelves, a mouse's worst nightmare, trapped in a box inches away from nirvana:

A spider in our garage DID achieve nirvana … he trapped this poor guy, giving him enough food for at least a couple of big spider Thanksgivings dinners:

That first mystery photo was another exotic vegetable that Helen foraged. Some sort of cauliflower:

That second photo is much more exciting. I bought myself an early xmas present … we have a new baby in the house!

Technically, at 6’ 1”, this is a parlor or boudoir grand piano, as Baby Grands are < 5.5’, but we like calling him Baby.

I’ve been monitoring ebay, craigslist, and local showrooms for a few months, looking for bargains on used pianos, but finally decided on a new entry level brand, Story & Clark at $7.5k.

Pretty pricy, but could have done much worse. New brand names start at $30k and a 6’ Steinway costs $60k. Kind of glad I’m not good enough to fully appreciate the difference.

Bugs

2011-10-16T19:24:00.001-05:00

In this month’s mystery photo, you get to guess the purpose of this mini devils tower (end of post answer):

We celebrated Rosh Hashanah a few weeks ago, the Jewish New Year, with two other couples. There was a lot of good food, even after our ovens ate much of it in impressive smoke belching displays (we need to learn how to use oven timers). I managed to launch that cooked fish on the left, off the oven, over the counter, and onto a chair, somehow landing right side up:

To further demonstrate my occasional crazy behavior, here I am dialed into three work conference calls at the same time. I do it for the technological challenge, not for any productive reason, as I’m not able to converse with any one of those calls, and when I try, I often un-mute the wrong one and everyone else joins me in being very confused:

I’ve been having fun touring Salt Lake on my bike, seeing what interesting things pop up. Here is a monument to the short lived Pony Express. For $5 (>$100 today) you could send a 0.5 oz letter, which would be carried by a < 125lb rider at 15 mph, changing horses every 15 miles, and changing riders every 10 hours, day an night, crossing the country in 8 days.

And here is a Matterhorn replica found in the Swiss section of a very pretty and flower full Peace Garden:

Not far from there was another Pyramid, used by a group that does ‘Modern Mummification’. Human prices start at $70k, but you can do your pet and have him live in your living room forever for $20k:

Last weekend we drove to Bolder to attend Noah’s Master’s concert … he did good:

We brought Irena a sampling of roses from her backyard (she and Boris have been in the UK and NH for a few months), which is flowering wonderfully:

We met up with one of Helen’s friends for a quick hike up the famous Bolder Flatirons:

Yesterday I went on a hike up the trail near here. Even red-green colorblind me could see beautiful colors in the changing trees:

It snowed last weekend, so the mountains have prettied up:

My goal was to climb Black Mountain, which is somewhere along this ridge on the left:

I overshot it (apparently it is not marked) and hiked almost to the other end where I met up with another crazy hiker who had also underestimated his hike (supposed to be 4 hours, we ended up at 9 hours). We teamed up, keeping each other company for the long hike back. Fortunately, he had found a flashlight someone had lost … came in pretty handy as we didn’t make it back until 2 hours after sunset.

I’m goanna close with some bug photos. Zach, close your eyes as you will not like this first one, my first tarantula:

These guys were guarding the entrance to what I imagined to be the New York City for wasps:

This guy I had never met until yesterday. He is called a Jerusalem Cricket, which is really weird as he is not a cricket and he is not found in Jerusalem. He is big (2-3”) and scary looking, but relatively harmless (he can bite, but no venom):

And finally, some more photos from my new favorite bug. Not only can they pray, but they pose well:

And they enjoy a good sunset, like we do:

Bruce

… almost forgot, the Devils Tower mystery photo. It is a bike jump, although I think I’d call it a bike funeral home. Those dirt bikers are insane!

Mouse in the House

2011-09-18T23:03:00.001-05:00

Today’s mystery photo is brought to you by cholera:

We had the last of our summer visitors, Ina and family from New York. The standard protocol for entertaining guests in Salt Lake City is to throw them into the Great Salt Lake:

If you look closely (click to enlarge), you can see Helen way off in the distance. She was trying to find a deeper spot, but I think that is 10 miles out (deepest spot is 30 feet).

Selly was an unstoppable swimmer. My daily swims became more of a challenge as she would hang onto my foot for a ride, was a good workout. After she wore me out, she would then wear down Ina, and she STILL had hours of swimming left in her.

We took a visit to the Kennecott open pit Copper mine. 2 miles across, 3/4 a mile deep:

Helen was fascinated by the big trucks with 10 foot tall tires. At the bottom of the mine they look like ants. Here she is trying to pick them up with her fingers:

I found this happy guy in her sunglasses:

And I found this happy guy living under our dishwasher (still negotiating a territorial treaty with him):

And this guy found us one night. Just as we were about to go to bed, he comes galloping into our living room, via a garage door I had left open:

After checking out our house, Helen got him settled down and I found a distraught neighbor outside, looking for his dog.

Yesterday we had a pool party for Helen’s EEG group. Was great fun, with 30+ guests, including her dept. chair, who here is not sitting in a chair:

I’m continuing to explore the trails near here. This is up City Creek, which feeds directly into downtown:

And on that hike I discovered the land of the dragonflies:

Some more backyard critter photos. This is the squirrel that gets very upset when I visit our backyard when he is using it:

And this is a Magpie that is just waiting for Helen to take off her gold watch when she goes swimming. These guys are famous for stealing shiny things:

This is a morning dove about to poop on a finch:

And here we have a hawk towering over the Salt Lake City library:

So that mystery photo was a close up of the beak of this dead bird, found on the shore of the Great Salt Lake:

Every few years, depending largely on weather conditions, a bacteria wakes up and kills thousands of birds. Called Avian Cholera, it doesn’t affect humans …. at least not yet (dun, dun dah … that was my scary-apocalypse-could-happen-any-minute sound).

Bruce

Birds, Bees, and Alien cucumbers

2011-08-21T20:26:00.001-05:00

Today’s mystery photo:

To hopefully confuse you further, this is related:

We had a nice visit with Noah who came for Helen’s Birthday. He also gave a nice piano concert to a local Russian group:

Helen’s co-worker gave her cake with 50 no-blow-out candles. Irena helped and after much smoke they finally got them out

We discovered a use for a vegetable called Bitter Cucumber. It is far too bitter to eat, so instead you use Ketchup and Mustard, turn them into Aliens, then make them do your bidding, which in our case was posing for photographs:

They are much more obedient than our Giant Jewish Bear, who despite our pleas constantly harasses the poor little pink ex-ball-chair (it got punctured by one of our cactus, and despite my best efforts, seems irreparable):

Figured out the mystery photos yet? Here is a clue … it has little to do with this amazing Orchid, given to us by our Real Estate guy when we moved in. The flowers lasted till last week, 7 months!

Last weekend there was a professional staged bicycle race that went down 11th Ave a few blocks from our house. Those guys are amazing, 10 laps between the U and the Capital, 6k feet of altitude gain, 80 miles, all in < 4 hours, up to 50 mph!

I was humbled. I can’t even figure out how to get my bike through one of those people only gates … I had it stuck here for 10 minutes:

I’ve been having fun biking and hiking the local foothills. This is a 150 year old lime kiln the Mormons made when they first moved here. They used lime powder for all kinds of things, like cement, water softening, reducing acidity in milk/butter, tanning, sanitizing outhouses, and destroying dead bodies.

I stepped off the beaten trail once and in an instant I got beaten by a hoard of mini-Velcro monsters:

Some of our new Salt Lake friends took us on a hike to some high mountain lakes a couple of weekends ago:

Many of these lakes had 100+ year old man made dams, made with rocks and dirt by hand by early settlers, to preserve snow melt runoff for irrigation:

My nice pocket camera broke last month when the boys and I took it swimming, so we bought a cheap waterproof camera to hold us over while it got repaired. This is guy is at the bottom of the pool, is the logo of the painting company of the original owner of the house:

This is a photo from the bottom of the pool, looking up at a floating tennis ball aspiring to be the sun:

My repaired camera, with 10x zoom, came back on Friday, so I took it to the backyard and had fun with it. Yet another Quail photo, my closest yet (I swim up under them while they perch on the tv cable):

And I chased this praying mantis around our backyard for 30 minutes until he found a tree to climb up into:

And the bees are going crazy. I counted 20 busy bees in just one flowering bush!

And this guy was was busy on a Black Eyed Susan flower:

Finally, those mystery photos? They are the sex organs of this Hibiscus:

The round red photo is the female part (stigma) and the yellow pollen producing photo is the male part (anther, connected by a filament to form the stamen). And so ends your birds and bees lesson for today <grin>.

Bruce

Swimming with the balls

2011-07-24T16:05:00.001-05:00

We had lots of fun last week, with visits from Zach, Tiffany, and Nick. After being here for 6 months, I finally got to go see the Great Salt Lake. At 2,000 square miles (4th largest terminal lake in the world), it was surprising hard to find. I knew where it was, but finding a good beach to wade in took a few tries:

Nick found a shrimp, which are harvested from the lake for fish food:

That picture reminded me of this one, taken 16 years earlier in Australia:

We took a short hike up the hills up the road, but I messed up and made it a longer hike then intended. We forgot the sun block and Tiffany got burned:

But we tried to take good care of her after that:

The next day we took a tram at the SnowBird ski resort to the top of a 11k foot mountain:

Z & T are experts at getting their picture taking, but I didn’t get Nick turned around in time:

Zach let Tiffany get away from him (he was trying to give her his shirt to protect her sunburn):

He eventually caught her:

And peace an tranquility ensued:

We also had a nice visit with Nick’s co-workers, Scott and George. In between the fun, they had several productive Skritter company meetings:

This was another hike we took, to the top of Signal Hill. We climbed up an abandoned tower with Nick, despite his fear of heights, leading the way!

Zach was chiding me for having a mis-adjusted wine bottle shelf, I acknowledged it was indeed crooked, then ignored it. But Zach can not ignore such things, saying if I left it as is, a bottle might fall and break. So he springs to action to fix it, and promptly drops and breaks a wine bottle:

We all laughed for 5 minutes. Then we discovered blood mixed in with the wine. Zach spent an hour picking out 20+ shards of glass from his feet:

But that didn’t stop him on our Mount Olympus hike the next day: 6 hours, 7 miles, 5,000 feet up (10k ft summit):

Nick got so excited on this part of the climb that his legs fell off:

For you curious hikers, here is a Google earth view:

Here is a 360 photosynth view from the top:

http://photosynth.net/userprofilepage.aspx?user=brucewinter&content=Synths

We had lots of pool fun:

Here I was teaching the boys my childhood trick for getting on the diving board directly from the pool:

After which many un-successful attempts were made:

Until Zach discovered the secret, which involved some alcohol:

We also had some nice visits with Abby:

And lots of fun with our desk chair balls. One of the challenges was to try to get a ball fully submerged. Many techniques were tried:

In the end, a 3 person team approach worked:

But not on this try:

Here we are seeing who can head bounce a ball the highest:

And here we are seeing who can stay balanced on top of a ball the longest:

Zach and George were the masters of this, but out of the water, Nick was the master ball balancer:

He is also the master of upside-down-ness:

And master of the one legged squats:

I can do 1/2 of these … the downward 1/2.

If you haven’t had enough photos (hard to imagine), there are a bunch more here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/zachwinter/SaltLakeCityUtahJuly2011

Bruce

Karate Kid Quail

2011-06-28T00:08:00.001-05:00

Mystery photo (answer at end of post):

Spring has truly sprung. The birds have gone wild:

This is a Karate Kid / Dirty Harry quail, leering at me with a ‘go ahead, make my day’ stare, ready to kick my head off with his one good remaining foot:

And the animals have come out of Winter hibernation:

And we have a bazillion-bunch of flowers! These are some amazing 4 color Clematis we almost cut down in early spring because the branches looked dead:

This flower picture is interesting, our first yellow rose, next to the house looking over the back yard. If you look close (click for a bigger pic), you can see two birds flying past. This photo was done with a ‘HDR’ option on my camera which takes two photos, different exposures, then combines them. It came out kind of like the birds have shadows … in the sky!

I have a more flower pictures here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/brucewinter/House_flowers

https://picasaweb.google.com/brucewinter/House_flowers_unknown

If anyone recognizes any of the flowers in that 2nd group, let me know. I’m trying to learn their names, so I don’t offend them.

We have had lots of fun visits in the last month, starting with our friends Vlad and Maria from New York City. We got them addicted to the buckyball magnets:

We touristed Temple Square:

And a visitors center where this little girl was visiting with Jesus:

Then Mom and Dad came for their first visit!

Mom brought some Irises and very kindly helped me tame a bunch of other flowers:

And then took a well deserved break:

We took our first swim with them. Dad took this photo of me taking my first dive (ok, 2nd, camera lag got the first one):

Noah came the next weekend. You may recognize Mom’s hand in that floral arrangement:

Irena and Boris have been very busy. After finishing the remodeling of their house, they rebuilt their back yard, adding a gazebo and 20+ rose bushes:

Abby is helping Irena inventory her cloths, hoping to find a place to sell them:

Helen’s fascination with cactus has spread to our backyard. She is convinced she can grow, harvest, and eat these nasty guys:

I have another picture taken a few minutes later of Helen trying to suck out cactus needles from her fingers, but she wouldn’t let me post that one. After that, she put on gloves.

Bruce

That mystery photo: It is a water droplet from this photo of a wild snapdragon from our backyard. Through it, you can kind of see an upside down fence and bushes:

Happy Toad Eating

2011-05-22T14:17:00.001-05:00

The snow finally stopped, so I’ve been learning how to run a pool. Not swimmable yet, but getting there. To help manage the solar water heater on the roof, I’ve started instrumenting the house. I put a weather station by the bird feeder so the birds can help me keep an eye on it:

And the neighborhood cats keep an eye on the birds:

And I keep an eye on the mountains! This is a view of our house from our neighbors deck across the street:

Nick came for a visit, on his way to a summer in CA:

We hiked 22 miles on his new 5 fingered shoes, including a trip to an observation deck at the top of an LDS building downtown:

The temple is closed to outsiders, but they have a model of it in a visitor’s center. If you look close in the lower left, you will see 12 oxen under a basin used for proxy Baptisms, allowing after death Baptisms to relatives who never had a chance to learn the LDS gospel:

One of our hikes was up a mountain just north our house. It was a beautiful sunny day, so sunglasses were out in full force:

The snow slowed us down about 5 miles in:

The 5 fingered shoes require periodic stops to thaw out the toes:

Here is another toe thawing strategy Nick tried:

Nick found a happy toady, and he was hungry:

But the toad remained happy even in ‘face’ of almost certain death. So he let him go.

We invented bouncy ball on a Congo drum chess:

We had a nice visit with Tim, Abby, and Luke:

As well as a visit from friend Philadelphia Helen:

Helen’s co-worker Pega showed us wonderful swimming pool on top of a hotel at Alta, one of the nearby ski resorts:

For you iphone users, you gotta try Microsoft’s PhotoSynth app. It allows you to easily create 3d’ish panoramas. Here are a couple:

Here are the less exciting but still fun 2d versions:

Bruce

8 foot Muenster cheese

2011-04-25T19:37:00.000-05:00

We had a couple of pretty snowfalls this month:

It melted fast. Here the camera caught snow falling from the power line:

Our backyard is remarkably private. This is one of the few places in town I found where you can see it, about 3 miles away. You need a high res monitor, middle, 1/3 from the left:

Power lines do have one nice feature (other than delivering power I suppose) … birds like them:

California Quail is pretty common all around Salt Lake:

This bird is admiring a jet landing at the SLC airport, upper right:

We setup a motion activated night camera to inventory our various nighttime visitors. Helen posted a 2 minute picture video here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/mollybloom756

The raccoon keeps stealing the cat food … he is insatiable! We switched to daytime only cat food, to discourage hoards of midnight masked bandits.

Aya came for a weekend visit:

She brought her friend Aria. They made me delete the music video I took of their drum/ukulele concert:

This is Helen’s office … note the cactus garden … they are everywhere!

Aria only brought thin/low shoes, so I gave her a tour of some nice snowbanks:

Se was happy to get back to dry land:

This morning the sunrise was really pretty on the Kennecott open pit copper mine across the valley (2002 Olympic Speed skating oval in the lower right):

In 100+ years, it (the mine, not the oval) has produced more copper than any other mine (over $1 billion a year of various metals), is also the deepest open pit mine in the world at 3/4 mile deep.

Here are a few more scenic photos from our backyard:

I’m having fun hiking up nearby trails. I coaxed Helen up one last weekend:

I’ll close with a challenge and a mystery photo. The challenge is to beat this 8 foot Muenster cheese string (I’m standing on the kitchen counter):

The mystery photo:

Bruce

------

Photo mystery:

Actually, I’m not sure what it is either. I found it in our backyard, rotated 90 degrees, hanging on a spider web. My best guess is it was made by a dog loving, ice saw wielding, artistically gifted, ice sculpting spider.

Sexually aroused skyscraper

2011-03-27T17:35:00.001-05:00

We got a new power pole installed near our back yard. The old one was crooked and would spectacularly short wires in wind storms:

I took a 1/2 day vacation while the power was out and we walked up one of the trails that starts a few blocks from our house:

Helen enjoyed her month off. She developed a habit of buying a few cactus whenever she ventured out, so we now have a fun collection:

The theory is we will have a hard time killing these cactus. That theory doesn’t apply to this 20 year old Bonsai tree …

Helen bravely and lovingly cares for it. I’m too scared to touch it.

We have a variety of animals visit our back yard. There is a small family of deer that live between our house and an unfenced stretch of house next to us:

And this guy shows up every few days, but is very elusive. Helen thinks he is feral, I think he is a neighbor’s cat who likes to watch birds around our bird feeders. Helen is attempting to befriend it with goodies so she can ask him.

We went on a few bike rides, in search of a bike route to work without killer hills (no luck there):

Boris and Irena arrived last week to close on their house. Their car and moving van came a few days later, along with their personal master plumber and carpenter from NH! They are renovating the kitchen and bathrooms:

Boris and Helen try to keep them fed, a challenge after a long day of work:

This is Boris disapproving of Helen’s ‘flatten the meat’ instrument. Unlike Boris, who has a kitchen implement for every conceivable occasion, like a meat hammer, we are minimalists who like to improvise:

Nick, Scott, and George are having a good time running Skitter from Costa Rica. Nick has some photos here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/livelily

And Scott has a fun blog of activities here:

http://scott-travel.blogspot.com

I close this month with the standard ‘Helicopter landing on heads’ and ’sexually aroused skyscraper next to a fire’ photos:

Bruce

The Mormon Trail

2011-02-20T17:52:00.001-06:00

We made it! We survived our cross-country, mid-Winter migration with some stress but minimal damage. Icy roads and nasty viruses (I discovered you can develop Asthma late in life, given the right conditions), but I reckon that’s nothing compared to what the first Mormon’s dealt with when they migrated West.

We stopped in MN to visit Zach, Tiffany, and co-workers. Z&T had the house in great shape, transforming the living room into a great computer/study area:

Mac and Cheese love the back yard, but they haven’t figured out MN cold and snow yet. Zach plows them highways, but they sometimes overextend themselves and only make it part way back before their poor shivering bodies quit. Zach then grabs his trusty slippers and dashes out on rescue missions:

Tiffany's slippers were smart slippers, choosing a sensible owner. Zach’s slippers are ready for spring:

When it gets cold enough (in this case 20 below, before wind chill), Zach will just skip the slippers all together. He loaded and started our car for us, as I was still a barely functioning wheezing Asthmatic:

Next stop was MT for a nice visit with Mom and Dad, and lots of fun visitors:

We joined the daily dog walk, here by the Yellowstone:

And I went to Kiwanis, where Dad did his weekly Medical tip:

Finally, we got to Salt Lake the night before we closed on the house. The next morning, I did one billion signatures at the title company, then we got our first on site tour. Turns out to be a really nice place, just like what we saw in the photos and videos:

The loan was processed by the next day, just as the mover got there. We set up our computer desks next to the windows, Helen’s a bit more adventurously close than mine:

The views of the city at night are just as amazing as the views of the mountains in the day:

We did this move at the peak of a busy IBM project I’ve been working on. So I was happy to get the cable guy to get us our Internet fix right away:

As time permits, I’ve been having fun being a handyman again, fixing some minor electrical issues, replacing broken washer valves after waking up to a wet garage, and here sawing off the fridge door handle (it was loose, but wouldn’t come off like it should … I found a new one on the internets):

Helen’s parents came for a visit last weekend and decided right away to buy a small (1400 sq foot) bungalow about 15 minutes from our house:

They will be back next month to close. They have their lake house in NH up for sale and just contacted a local downsizing specialist to help them sell stuff. Helen decided to try renting her lake house:

http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p370638

Within one week she has it booked for 5 weeks this summer!

Bruce

Moving West

2011-01-16T16:46:00.001-06:00

This is old news to most of you, but in case I missed anybody, we are buying a house! We haven’t actually set foot in it yet, but we are not entirely insane. We watched lots of videos and pictures, and have had detailed inspections and appraisals done. All looks good, so we hope to close on it the end of the month.

Believe it or not, this is technically a 1 bedroom house:

The 2nd room, in the basement, doesn’t have a window, so legally is not a bedroom. But after we move in, everyone needs to visit us anyway. We promise not to have any fires where a window would be required.

The movers come on Tuesday, so we have been cleaning, packing, and filtering things to the Salvation Army. We are bringing all of our pets:

We attended a nice ‘goodbye Helen’ party last night, and another one Monday. A couple of residents dressed Helen in a Sari at the annual Neurology dept holiday party:

We weren’t sure it was appropriate to go, but we are glad we did, as they put Helen’s name on the cake and the Chair gave a nice best wishes toast to Helen.

Zach has been having fun with lots of Minnesota snow this winter:

In addition to shoveling the roof, he shoveled a maze for the dogs to have fun with:

Nick and the Skritter boys are off to work in warmer weather from somewhere in Central America for the next few months. They had an eating contest, who could eat the most home baked muffins. Nick won at 36!

Helen and I have food adventures also. Actually more Helen than me. Some of it scares me a bit. This for example, is called “Blood Sausage":

We discovered that if you fry Blood Sausage it turns into Blood Mush:

And this is an army of some sort of albino asparagus:

I’ll leave with my first pretty girl picture of the year:

Bruce

Z&T Engagement!

2010-12-19T12:05:00.001-06:00

I feel remiss in not announcing in last months post that Zach and Tiffany are engaged! Since this is somewhat old news, I guess a old stock photo from this summer will be ok:

The wedding bells will chime in June 2012 in Rochester.

We got back last week from a 10 day trip to the West. Lets see if anyone can guess where this photo is from (Abbey is probably the only one who might have a shot at this one):

First stop, San Antonio.

Helen attended her annual Epilepsy conference:

I did my tele-commute-out-of-the-hotel thing. After work I toured the river walk:

A couple of miles of river and walkways. At night, with the xmas lights, is really pretty:

Of course the most famous attraction is The Alamo. If you look in the upper right of this photo, you can see it labeled as the Cro Cett Hotel, one h away from being a crochet knitters haven:

I wonder what Davey Crocket and Daniel Boon would say. They probably didn’t knit much. Today the Alamo is under siege by skyscrapers. This photo is taken from the space needle tower two photos back. The Alamo is the building in the trees, across the street from the Haunted Adventure and Tomb Rider 3D rides:

This is Helen and a college researching their dinner entrée, something made with animal foreskin. Judging from their reaction, I think they mostly found porno:

This a superman (or I guess superwoman) lady bug I found on the 20th floor ledge of our hotel, just before she leaped off into the sunset to save us from super villains:

Next stop, Salt Lake City. We spent 1.5 days with a nice realtor friend of Bryan and Christy's, looking at potential houses to buy. We were very tempted by a contemporary house who's back yard abuts the state park north of the city, but another buyer out-bid us. Probably just as well, as it was more house than we really needed. We are still looking, but will likely rent for a year, hoping for smaller house that tickles our fancy to come on market.

We wandered downtown a bit. This is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, without the choir:

And the Temple, with xmas lights:

Our last stop was over to Boulder to visit Noah and Jen:

Here we are trying to lure Noah out on a short hike up the rocky bluffs above Boulder:

It was a challenge, as Noah had a paper to write and music to practice. But we succeed!

We spent all of last Sunday flying back to Syracuse. Broken planes, missed connections, and nasty winter storms (this is the day the MetraDome collapsed). But we made it, just in time for Helen to start her final 2.5 weeks of call duty.

Our friend Sophia has spent this last week with us. She is applying to Med School, and is shadowing Helen this week to confirm she really is crazy enough to want to become a Doctor.

I walked them to work one day, so we could enjoy some of our record breaking 70 inches of December snow:

That mystery photo? Looking up at the entrance to the Salt Lake City convention center.

Happy Holidays!

Bruce

Avocado Band-Aid

2010-11-20T15:12:00.001-06:00

We traveled back to the lake a few weeks ago:

To celebrate Boris and Irena’s 50 year anniversary!

The woman folk dressed up in beautiful brightly colored clothing:

And the men folk didn’t get a picture, as they were not so clever and only had bland attire, so instead I took a picture of a nicely dressed frog:

This summer I got my old 8 mm video camera back from Nick, with the intention of converting Boris’s family videos to DVD, but the camera didn’t work. I glared at it for a month, and just before I was about to order another from the CraigList, I kicked it one more time and is started working! So I transferred a box full of tapes onto a bunch of dvds and a one thumbdrive. They were happy to see old videos they didn’t remember taking, like this one of little Aya and Noah playing a concert:

I got a new camera! Nikon 8100. It has fun modes, like this one which will mix a flash photo for crisp faces, but mix in natural but blurrier lighting for the background:

On the way back we stopped for a minute at one of those roadside historical signs that you pass 100 times thinking one day you will stop. That day finally came. This is an old rock only bridge, no cement or mortar.

Work is interesting. Lots conference calls to try to keep up with the intricacies of a complex and challenging project. I sometimes resort to two simultaneous calls with two headsets (not recommended, as a single threaded brain gets scrambled with multi-threaded conversations):

A few more random photos. We found this on a sidewalk on a walk to the campus a few days ago:

Our best guess, without tasting it, was dog poo. It smelled about right. Our next guess was it was this was a college Psyc experiment, testing the value of the dollar. We declined, waved randomly in all directions for what we expected were the chuckling experimenters, then circled back to take this picture. Before we got there, a flock of 4 college girls found it, eagerly picked it up, moved it about 4 feet, then eagerly dropped it with a shriek, probably after doing the taste test to determine its origin. I would have scrapped and bagged it if it were a $5. Helen says it would take a $50.

Helen’s computer monitor wears a Kipah (one of those Jewish skull caps). I gave it some drumming lessons:

And you know the drill on this next photo. It might be a little longer than usual before the next bag photo, as judging from Helen’s sheepish behavior, I think this one cost more than usual:

And finally, I share what I think is the cure to a prematurely cut Avocado, the Avocado Band-Aid:

We will find out in a few more days if it actually works.

Bruce

Providence RI

2010-10-23T14:44:00.001-05:00

Last weekend Helen attended a child Neurology conference in Providence RI. Not-so-coincidentally this is where Aya lives! We had a nice visit with her, was impressed by her tidy apartment:

We split our time between Aya’s place and our friend Olga’s 300 year old ‘saltbox’ house nearby in Somerset:

Built in the 1720s, before George Washington was born (1732), it was just about to be demolished when Olga bought it 2 years ago. Olga is an architect who specializes in old structures, so it was a perfect match. We woke up to beautiful views like this:

It was fun an amazing to see how things were built back then. Olga exposed much of the original structure, including these candle burn marks on the fireplace mantel:

Olga waded into the bay to get some oysters and clams for dinner:

Speaking of wading into uncharted waters … it was a year ago that Helen and I started visiting places we were thinking of moving to. After 8 trips and much deliberation we have decided to move to Salt Lake City in Feb, with Helen starting at the University Hospital there on 3/1.

I’ve started watching apartment and house rentals on Craig's list and will see if I can pick one sometime in December. Her Syracuse co-workers were sad to hear we were leaving, but we are excited. Almost as excited as Nick and George were when they got to play with their new Trailmaster knife:

http://egreogsplace.blogspot.com/2010/10/knifin-around.html

Bruce

NYC

2010-09-26T15:28:00.001-05:00

A mystery photo:

Hint: NYC. Answer, end of post.

Nick and Chloe joined us for our last weekend at the lake on Labor Day:

We had lots of fun, taming wild animals:

Climbing the highest mountain we could find (Lovewell Mountain, towering 1000 feet above the lake at 2500 feet! … that is an satirical ! for those of you familiar with the Rocky Mountains):

And the more crazy ones amongst us wandered did this all barefoot:

And didn’t loose too much blood:

Despite the loss of blood, Nick was in great shape. For fun and exercise, he would often grab Chloe and do one legged squats, or carry her up and down the trails. Just after I took this photo, a passing car stopped and asked if the everyone was ok:

This was the last picture taken by my 3 year old camera. It fell off a lakeside table and went for a swim. Time for an upgrade :)

Last weekend we visited NYC with some friends (I borrowed their camera for these pictures):

We saw a big metallic man with a well polished penis:

And walked all around midtown, including Times Square:

We are in that webcam display somewhere:

NYC is really is an impressively vibrant and diverse city. These Turkish Whirling Dervish dancers had Helen mesmerized:

This is 5th Avenue … mostly yellow cabs:

And Central Park was popular and beautiful:

That mystery photo? It is looking up the glass stairs at the amazing throng of people lined up at Apple’s flagship store on 5th avenue:

A parting mystery photo can be found on this link:

http://lifehacker.com/5645943/exercise-balls-might-not-be-the-best-posture-fixers

The mystery is to name the legs in that photo.

Hint: You have seen them earlier in this post

Answer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/etherealdawn/4588301244/

Bruce

The Lake 2010

2010-09-02T20:51:00.001-05:00

Greetings from Mars:

Actually, we are not on Mars, but rather at the lake. But sometimes it is so beautiful, it is like we are on another planet:

The lake is hidden here, in central NH:

I had 2 different projects to work on, both in difficult stages that required attention, so I moved my workstation setup from Syracuse to the porch with a forest view:

So during the day I work, but weather permitting, I get out to swim before lunch and dinner. This is me attempting to attract the attention of a passing mermaid:

Sunset is the best time to swim:

We have had lots of visitors. Here is a quad of Russian friends, mesmerized by a spinning thing that makes you feel like you are on drugs:

We have had a variety of weather, including fog:

and more a than average number of warm sunny days:

We hiked a trail up the local mountain. A view from the top:

That is the lake in the background:

I found a pair of French acorns making out in the forest:

This is from Irena’s flower garden:

We have had some amazing clear and calm moonless nights, perfect for stargazing from the boat on the lake:

I even got Helen to put on her glasses. Judging from her reaction (something like “Wow …. sooooo many!”), I’m not sure she has ever seen the stars in focus before.

We are looking forward to a weekend visit from Nick and Chloe tomorrow. Then we all leave on Monday. At least that is the theory. I think I’m goanna have a hard time getting this one to leave:

Bruce

Hershey PA, Chocolatetown USA

2010-08-01T18:01:00.001-05:00

We drive down to Hershey PA weekend before last. Helen had an interview at the teaching hospital there:

A small town of 12,000, about 15 miles from 3 mile island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg. Formed when M Hershey sold his caramel company in 1903 and built the worlds largest milk chocolate factory in the middle of dairy cow country, where there was lots of milk:

He did well, giving away his fortune to support a school for the needy and built an an amusement park for his employees, now a big ride park for anyone:

I didn’t do those rides, I took a tamer, free ride, hosted by singing cows, that explained how chocolate was made:

I’m always amazed at how old stuff is here in the East (I’m scared to visit Europe). This is a shell that Mr. Hershey built over a schoolhouse built in 1732, the year George Washington was born:

After Hershey we drove to Philly to visit our physics professor friends. This is Helen and Helen (in Russian, they kept it simple and name all women Helen):

And this is Alex (yep, all Russian men are named Alex), in his Jesus mode, waiting for the grapes in their new grape vines to ripen:

On they way home, I hit notice a small bump in the highway and started wondering when we should replace our tires. About a minute later, I got my answer:

So we are mostly done with travel for the summer. One more trip back to the lake in a couple of weeks:

This time we will stay for a couple of weeks and bond with the loons. One of the lake people shared this photo of this years 2 loon babies on a swim with their parents:

Summer Travel, 2010

2010-07-11T13:05:00.001-05:00

Last month we hit perfect weather on our 2nd visit to Salt Lake. It was still beautiful green from spring rains and not nasty summer hot yet. Helen did a grand rounds presentation and I hiked around the streets and hills. This is looking up to the school and hospital campus:

And this is from the top of that hill in the previous picture, looking down to downtown and the great salt lake:

Zach has turned me on to stitching photos to create panoramic shots. This is the Hospital from above:

And this is the entire salt lake valley:

And this is an amorous couple I met on the trail:

After we got back we met up with Zach and Tiffany on their way back from their crazy cross country car trip. The dog named Cheese has been cloned (with the help of an animal rescue shelter) into dog named Mac:

But the clone is flawed. Although it looks nearly identical, instead of turning into a mini Doberman Pincher, it ended up as a Manchester Terrier. Also, if you click to expand this photo, you will see his nose is missing:

But Cheese still has his nose, which he lovingly shares with Zach’s nose:

Our next stop was to University of NC at Chapel Hill. The tulip poplar tree in the foreground here is 350 years old:

There is a legend that says if it dies, the University, which is over 200 years old, will crumble. So to avoid that, they grafted a clone tree 100 years ago, the tree just to the left. For good measure, 20 years ago, then started another one, the skinny one on the far left. Then for extra extra measure, 10 years ago they filled the trunk of the original one up with cement! So I think the University is pretty safe from crumbling.

Like many universities, these guys like their football. I stopped by the stadium and watched kickers trying out for the team:

From there we drove to Roanoke for a 2nd visit. This time we had an extra day, so we hiked on one of the popular Appalachia trail spurs. It was a 95 degree day, so here I am contemplating a dive from a high altitude rock, hoping to land in a lake:

Last weekend, we drove to the lake. For Boris’ birthday, we bought him the same balls we use as desk chairs:

And an ipad:

Irena’s flower garden is amazing as usual:

We had a bunch of 4th of July visitors:

This is one of them escaping after lighting a pyrotechnic laden tank on the dock:

We had wonderful weather:

The last day, like most of the East Coast, was a record hot day. The propane gas company apparently overfilled the cabin’s 10 foot tank last fall, so the heat expanded the gas to the point where it violently vented a 10 foot plume of white propane gas for 10 minutes! Helen called 911 and they sent a bunch of fireman and trucks who spent a couple of hours evacuating our neighbors and spraying the tank to cool it down.

Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me go back into the house and get my camera, so I have no pictures of the adventure. So instead, I’ll close with another bag photo.

Bruce

Roanoke

2010-06-08T06:39:00.001-05:00

We are into the travel season. Last month we visited the Carillion clinic in Roanoke VA. It is a pretty town nestled in the Appalachia ‘mountains’, next to the Blue Ridge Parkway:

A few years ago the area physicians and hospital merged into a Mayo clinic like model, and are now looking for an epileptologist. This is their main hospital:

This is some clueless tourist VannaWhiteing the new medical school they just built across the road:

We took a bike ride along a pretty bike path that goes along the river that runs through town:

And drove a bit on the Blue ridge Parkway:

We are going back for a second visit in a few weeks, along with a visit to teaching hospital in Chapel Hill NC. This week we are taking a second visit back to Salt Lake, and finally (we think) a visit to another teaching hospital in Hershey PA in July.

Last weekend we visited one of the finger lakes with our friends from Philadelphia:

Yesterday we visited the local rose garden, which is in full bloom. Mom and Dad, Helen insisted on her annual ‘Bruce in the roses’ picture, so here it is:

Love, Bruce

Dino does Study

2010-04-25T11:36:00.001-05:00

As a classic tech-geek early adapter, I felt pretty proud I was able to restrain myself from buying an iPhone for 2 years. I rewarded myself for that restraint by ordering an iPad 5 minutes after it became available online. This is Helen demoing it at a dinner party:

I took it with me on my spring visit back to Rochester 2 weeks ago (a travel tip: disregard those airport monitors if they tell you your plane is delayed … I missed my flight, even though I was at the gate 40 minutes before the monitor said it was taking off!). I felt like an Apple salesmen when playing with the iPad, collecting crowds in the plane, on the bus ride from Minneapolis, at work, and at restaurants.

As a landlord to 2 nursing students, I felt a little weird turning the living room into my temporary bedroom, but they were both ok with it. That bean bag chair makes into a great bed:

One of the nursing students is Emily, Zach’s previous girlfriend. I had never met the other student, Kristine. When I finally made it home late that first day, Kristine says “I recognize you … you are that guy who was showing off the iPad at the Olive Garden tonight”. She was waiting tables near our table and notice the commotion I was making.

I read an article that says early adapters of gadgets like the iPad do it to attract attention. I’m not so sure, as we shy guys don’t usually like attention. Rather, I think we can blame it on Star Trek. I’m sold on the utopian future where we carry these all knowing tablets that we can use to solve all the worlds problems.

Take for example, this cluttered study. When I asked my iPad what should I do about this mess:

It suggested: Unleash the Dinosaur! So I found a sadly deflated Dino (a gift from Helen from the summer we met), re-inflated it and presto, a re-organized Study!

In Boy news, Zach and Tiffany are doing well. Zach is excelling in school and keeping busy with a few car projects. They found an adopted a snake:

Nick and the Inkren boys continue to enhance Skritter ( http://skritter.com ), much to the delight of their users. He joined Chloe on a spring break trip to France last month:

Helen and I are still considering various moves. We will visit Roanoke VA next week, a 2nd trip to Salt Lake first of June, and a drive down to Hershey PA mid June.

The last picture today is another ‘last bag’ photo. Helen’s latest new purse:

“This is my last bag”, says Helen. You may recall a similar quote and picture from earlier this year, with a similar skeptical look from me. Expect another bag, quote, picture, and skeptical look later this year as she continues her hunt for the elusive perfect bag.

Bruce

We’re Number 1!

2010-03-20T18:56:00.001-05:00

In snowfall. And I hear the Syracuse basketball team is hoping to work its way to Number 1 also.

We started slow in snow this year, but have caught up to average snowfall, about 100 inches. Not as much as last year (180 inches!), but it is enough to put Syracuse back in its normal spot of snowiest cities:

http://goldensnowglobe.com/all-snowiest-us-cities

This shows how much we use the car:

Helen has been busy working with her most favorite co-worker, Dr Beach, on a chapter for a medical reference book (Niedermeier for you Neurologist out there). This is them collaborating on some graphics using my most awesomeness large screen computer.

I was due for my 3 year computer upgrade, so I got a screaming 4 core, 8 gig memory XPS SX8100 Dell from Best Buy. It is black, like these leather biker jeans that Helen made me try on. I am struggling to lift up my right leg:

It didn’t work. I think bikers ride, but don’t walk.

These last 3 images are collages that were made with this nifty new feature in the free Picasa 3 photo program. You identify a few faces in some of your photos, then it crawls thru the rest and auto-identifies a bunch more. Then you can say make a collage and presto! A billion Nick, Zack, and Bruces!

If anyone is interested, I can tagged most of my friends and relatives, so can make collages of pretty much anyone.

In migration news, Helen and I had semi-decided to move to Casper Wyoming this fall, but in late breaking news this week, we have decided to go back and take a 2nd trip to Salt Lake City the first week in June. So no decisions for a few more months.

Bruce

St Thomas 2010

2010-02-14T11:25:00.001-06:00

The green eyed monster made another appearance, on his way back from the M* states (MT, MN, MI) to NJ. This is Zach making sure his nose is not too close to the monster. For fear of it passing gas, you want to keep the offending orifice at least an arms length away:

Unfortunately, I was not aware of this rule. This is the beast making sure his human slave packs the car correctly. I was an convenient ladder to the window:

I got a new chair. I replace Nick’s old $500 ultimate office chair with a $20 ball chair. It enforces good posture, and encourages me not to sit still for too long. If you ever video skype me, you will likely see a bobbing head. Helen saw the bouncing Bruce having so much fun, she got one also.

Se spent 10 days in St Thomas. I went from maximum 6 layer Syracuse insulation mode:

to minimum 0.1 layer St Thomas insulation mode in < 12 hours:

We read books. A lot. We read in the sun:

We read in the shade:

We read in the water:

And some of us sillier ones read in our sleep:

And we swam. A lot. I practice my newly acquired crawl, swimming the circumference of the bay 5 -> 10 times a day:

In addition to the pretty fish, we saw a bunch of turtles, a couple of sting rays, and a couple of 4 foot barracudas. Probably the same barracuda … we didn’t ask him what his name was.

Helen found, fed, and fhotographed a real green eyed monster:

Aya and her boyfriend Omarie came for 4 days:

They had a contest to see who could keep their eye open the longest before blinking. Me and my dry eyes were too terrified to remember who won:

This is Aya teaching Omarie how to juggle:

And finally, Aya photographed this is a couple she found on our porch. I’m not sure what they are doing, but looks like they are having fun:

Twenty Ten

2010-01-10T14:11:00.001-06:00

Repeat after me … Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand and Ten. Fewer syllables. According to my calculations, given the number of years left in this century, times the growing number of English speakers, times PI**42, we collectively save enough energy in auditory output to slow the rate of thermodynamic entropic decay and we delay the ultimate heat death of the universe by at least 7 attoseconds. Twenty Ten … pass it on.

I had a relaxed holiday. Helen bought a couple of bongo drums last summer, which mostly served to scare away buffalo (at least I think that is what they did, as I never saw a single buffalo since we got them), so over the holidays I started hitting them:

After Helen’s 2 weeks of call duty, she relaxed a bit also. Here she is partying with some residents, flower-power style:

Just before xmas, the green-eyed monster returned, this time bringing with him his normal man-servant Zach, but also Zach’s girlfriend Tiffany:

But Tiffany discovered a way to tame the wild green-eyed monsters:

And so now Zach can sleep soundly, happily ever after:

We also had a nice visit from Noah and his girlfriend Jen. Jen plays sax, clarinet, and flute. We got a nice recital:

This is Noah concentrating during one of our chess games:

This is Noah not concentrating during one of our chess games. Jen was moving the pieces for him, using his hands (I won):

We also had a visit from our Physic professor friends from Philadelphia. We went on a walk:

Helen attempted to lead us onto a frozen lake, one of those deep meromictic lakes with scary pre-historic things at the bottom of them, but we didn’t feel like becoming a scary pre-historic thing:

The final picture is of me examining Helen’s “final bag”:

She claims this one is perfect, and will be the last bag she will ever need to buy. Can you detect a slightly skeptical look on my face?

Green eyed monster

2009-12-06T22:21:00.001-06:00

We had many travels to and from Syracuse in November. We started with a visit to the Billings Clinic. An impressive facility and nice folks:

Then we visited the University Hospital in Salt Lake City:

Beautiful mountain views

And this city comes with a built in cousin (Abbey):

Finally we visited Casper Wyoming. About 50k people, Casper is tied with Cheyenne for being the biggest city in Wyoming, the least populated state in the nation! It has it’s own little mountain on the north side:

And the trout filled North Plate river on the South side:

These cities offer very different job opportunities for Helen. so we are ruminating our options.

Speaking of ruminating, we finished November with Thanksgiving. This time the travel was done by a fleet of children (Aya, Zach, Cheeze, Nick, Chloe) and parents (Boris and Irene).

Much to Helen’s chagrin, Aya cut and died her hair. Helen always proclaimed instant death to any Aya hair cutting, but after much glaring, she managed to live (the rest of us thought it looked nice):

This is me, encouraging Nick to get closer to Chloe:

My cupid arrows worked pretty well:

Cheese needed no encouragement to get close to Zach:

Cheeze (not knowing his proper spelling, I’m mixing it up), was kind of like that mutant kid in ‘Total Recall’ that lived on that rebel guy’s chest, except Cheez is much better looking:

Zach can say ‘up’ and Cheze becomes an instant neck scarf. His favorite driving position:

The boys had a marathon arm wrestling match. Despite Nick’s cheering session, Zach won. He also easily beat me … the boy has massive forearms from his tire slinging days:

Here we see the crazy boys racing down my exercise stairs …. 178 steps (trust me, I’ve counted them many times). They mostly survived the race up them, but the race down almost killed them:

And this is what happens after arm wrestling and stair exercises:

I’ll close with a few more cheezy photos. This is cheezz dominating Helen’s stuffed bear:

And this is Cheze about to get punched in the butt by a guy we found on the campus quad:

Which was a bad idea. Punch him in the butt and he hulks out into a sharp tooth, muscle bound, green eyed monster!

Bruce

Adirondack Railroad

2009-10-09T22:35:00.001-05:00

Today, I boast of 3 skills.

1: I can juggle 6 lbs (3 x 2lb balls) 500 times. And then my forearms fall off:

2: I can rep a 20 lb weight 100 times, then my entire arm falls off:

3: We can host a 1500 lb party (10 of Helen’s co-workers) on our little 2nd floor porch, with lots of good food and wine, and amazingly, especially considering the wine, nobody falls off:

The new hospital extension that was started when we got here 2 years ago is finished. I think they can do ballroom dancing in the patient rooms, but I suspect no one will:

That green thing on Helen’s back is a purse, in Helen backpack mode:

Word of warning to any of you who have semi-public apple trees. This woman has been known to fill her pockets with unauthorized apply pluckings:

Last weekend we visited the famous Adirondacks. We took a 5 hour round trip train ride, which got is about 1/5 of the way into the park (it is a BIG park):

It is an interesting park in they way they share public and private land. Lots of cabins:

And lakes:

The best place to view the scenery is from the tail car, where there are open windows, right next to do no loitering signs:

I climbed up to the top of the train, like James Bond, and then crawled onto front bumper of the engine to take this photo:

One of the above captions is not quite truthful, but its a secret as to which one.

Speaking of secrets, Helen and I are considering a move West. We have 2 interview trips lined up, first one in at the Billings Clinic, 10/17 –> 10/20, the 2nd one at the Salt Lake University Hospital, 11/15 –> 11/18. We are excitedapprehensive.

Lake Vacation

2009-09-13T17:58:00.001-05:00

Vacation time! We spent 2 lovely weeks at the lake.

My goal this trip was to learn how to swim freestyle (aka ‘the crawl’) better. Like many people, I could swim it clumsily for 10 seconds or so, then my lungs would stop me, complaining about either not enough air or too much water, or both. A few months ago I saw a TED talk from Tim Ferris about a few simple tips that helped him swim better, so I was excited to try them out. My first few days were un-impressive, but after about a week, I finally got the breathing figured out, and after 2 weeks, I could swim indefinitely! Indefinitely being defined as to the island and back. I didn’t get any pictures to prove it, but I got one of Helen taking on a couple of kayakers:

We has lots of visitors (I counted 26, but not all at once). Alex was our meat specialist:

This is Boris giving Noah a few tips on a piece he is practicing for an upcoming concert:

I took 2 big monitors and did part-time tele-commuting from the porch. I also brought my electric keyboard which was fun. More in tune than the upright, and the headphones let whoever wanted to escape into their own music land without disturbing others.

We also spent 4 days at a Neurofeedback conference in Indianapolis. A pretty state capitol town exactly in the middle of Indiana.

Helen learned about various stimulator and feedback devices and programs. She took me down to the demo room and we both got to make a on-screen robot go down a slide using just our brains, monitored with a sensor strapped to our forehead. Here she is trying out some feedback software from a single channel EEG lead:

I touristed the city with a 1/2 gallon of orange juice:

They had an impressive 3 straight blocks of war memorials (American Legion is headquartered there):

They guy, Pan, is not a war memorial:

Because he is little and low to the ground, they have a hard time keeping him around. This is the 5th one they put there, the other 4 have wandered off. Did I mention there are a couple of colleges nearby?

Lastly, a mystery photo:

Backward hint 1: derewop ralos is

Backward answer: thgil klaw nedrag a

Waterfalls

2009-08-01T14:50:00.001-05:00

I flew back to Rochester for the first time in a year a few weeks ago. Met up with Laurie (on her way to visit MT) and Zach (came back to pick up a car that he forgot), and Zach’s now ex-girlfriend Emily. I slept in the nice comfy bean bag bed, and L, Z, and C(heese) shared the couch:

Zach decided NJ was not the place for a MN girlfriend so they are officially split, with Emily keeping Cheese. After visiting with Emily, I decided she would make for a responsible renter. She found another nursing student to split the rent who moves in next month. They get a nice low rent and I get some low impact and responsible renters. That is the theory anyway.

This is Laurie showing Emily some rare money that she had inherited and was retrieving from our house safe:

I started sorting thru stuff, cleaned out the garage and part of the study. Some of the piles in the study were pretty scary, like this pile of old remotes:

Laurie and I also had dinner with the Mungers, so got to see Clark and George.

George is of to college in WI next fall, and Clark to grad school in VT. Clark just got back from a year teaching English in China. Had an interesting tale about getting his earnings out of the country. Is illegal for a non-citizen to convert money to dollars, so it involved shady characters in vans and cash money transfers.

After I got back, we had a visit from Helen’s friend Z. We tried to help some girls fly a kite in the park with no wind:

And we visited some of the beautiful parks in upstate. Lots of waterfalls, like this one in Fillmore Glenn:

This one right in the middle of the Cornel University campus in Ithaca:

This one, Taughannock Falls, is one of the tallest east of the Rockies at 215 feet:

On the trail we found this wasp sucking the life out of dragonfly. Helen was not impressed:

Last weekend we had a meetup with 17 Russian friends at the lake. These were mostly people who Helen met on an online forum, most of who did know each other. Here we see our shish kabob expert at work, with Helen’s dad Boris immersing himself in the mouth watering aroma:

Helen was given a hula hoop. She is much better at it than I:

We visited a local farm and fed the various animals. This goat seemed to be living the life until we learned this farm has a special tradition each xmas involving goat:

And for my last picture, I present to you a challenge. Who can tell me what the 2 plastic green things I found on Helen’s dresser do? I confess, I was stumped:

Bruce

-------

Ok, one more. Helen has always claimed that she has red in her brown hair. Being red/green color blind, I had to take her word for it. But in this recently published spy satellite photo, I think I can almost see it!

Fireman and bikes

2009-07-05T21:27:00.001-05:00

Remember that picture of Helen's bike in our stairway from last month? We learned a lesson about storing bikes in stairwells. Last weekend I did a long 30 mile bike ride to a Jazz festival (Helen was at on call at the hospital). When I came back at dusk, I discovered that Helen’s bike had moved itself from the top of the stairs to the bottom, wedging itself snugly against the door. I couldn’t even get a finger thru the door. The downstairs neighbors are out of town. The back door has a different lock and the landlord, who was in Florida, said that key is lost. I was stumped, so I called Helen, who had an idea, expertly illustrated here:

Her idea was to buy a 30 foot ladder, to climb up to our porch, which had an open door. But all the 30 foot ladder stores were closed. So using her best damsel in distress voice, she called up the fire department, who have lots of lovely ladders about 5 blocks away. Within an hour, their biggest fire truck lumbers up the street (thats the red thing on the lower left above) and 5 fully dressed firemen get out.

Biggest fireman: Got a drivers license to prove you live here?

Smallest Bruce: Ah, hmmm, no. (I had a Minnesota license).

2nd fireman, also big: We would look pretty bad if we helped a crook break into a house.

Non-crook Bruce: I have proof inside.

3rd fireman, bigger than the first one, who used to be the biggest: Ok, will hold you to that.

The 4th fireman, truly the biggest, slings a monster ladder on the house, disappears into the darkness, then comes out a minute later holding Helen’s bike with 2 fingers.

I show them the one thing that proves I live there (a utility bill), thanked them profusely, promised them cookies, and off then went.

Other than this instance, Helen’s bike is a usually a well behaved member of the household, safely transporting here to and from work, as seen here:

But 2 weeks ago, we had another bike incident. We biked 10 miles out to graduate the latest round of Neurology Residences. Helen spoiled a kitten with a chunk of steak:

Biking home, we stopped partway up a long hill to rest. Helen discovered that highway railings are not designed for sitting on (too thin), and suddenly disappeared into the bushes. After confirming nothing was broken, I did what any true gentleman would do: I took her picture.

She did get a scrape on the leg, but otherwise was ok.

Zach made his big move to NJ this week. He rented a big U-Hall and packed everything he could fit into it: a car, a motorcycle, a tool chest, a queen sized bed, nightstands, dressers, a 62” TV, a 5 piece stereo system, a bunch of other garage equipment and tools:

And behind that he had a trailer with a 2nd car! He stayed with Nick at Oberlin for a day, and Nick helped him saran wrap the trailer car for better protection:

After getting to NJ, he stored his stuff in a storage locker, including both cars (they are works in progress), then found an apartment. Should be moving into it this week.

In other not-so-important-shoe-news, I bought some new tennis shoes. I tried sharing them with Helen:

But she like her boots better:

Helen’s parents came for a visit. This is a picture of them looking at a picture of them just after got married:

On my bike ride yesterday, I found this tree, still under construction by Authorized Personal Only:

I’ll let the reader determine who the tree building Authorized Personal should be.

Mom and Dad, Helen made me pose for this rose picture for you guys:

One last photo, another Helen at sunset:

In a week I’m off to Rochester for a week. Then we have a few trips to the lake planed. Then a conference in Indianapolis then the summer is over!

Bruce

Bike Flowers

2009-05-31T19:44:00.001-05:00

We have been enjoying spring, biking or walking almost every day. The biker woman who bikes with studded tires year round is seen here demonstrating here special technique for storing the bike in our stairwell (bikes have a short half life when locked outside here):

The same biker woman is seen here on the left trying to taunt biker women of a different breed into a bike race:

Those bikes are parked outside the world renown Dinosaur Barbeque restaurant, #1 ribs in the US this year. I don’t think they use real Dinosaurs, but based on the size of some of those bikers, I could be wrong.

Another thing Syracuse is famous for is being a major hub on the Erie canal. They turned it into Erie street in the city, but outside the city there is a nice 30 mile bike road along it. This used to be a picture of biker woman biking along the canal, but said woman said I reached my quota of photos of her for this month, so asked me to crop her out:

This park is where the barges from the canal would pick up the mega-tons of salt that were pumped up from below the lake in the background:

If you worked here during the Civil War, you were exempt from the army, as Salt was important to the war effort. To those of you who were in the civil war, you ate salt from here.

This is biker woman on her way to work. The new hospital in the background will start ‘operations’ next month.

Another favorite haunt for us is a large nearby cemetery. Here biker woman is showing me how she would greet one of the numerous spirits that no doubt live in the abandoned church in the background:

I think her greeting has the potential to be either a hug or a double karate chop, depending on the size and demeanor of the spirit.

The college dorms are on the edge of the cemetary. In the 80s, an art student stole a skull from one of the crypts to use as part of his art project. He got busted when his roomate got suspicious of the smell coming from his crock pot (he was cleaning the skull). Turned out to be the skull of the Syracuse’s first mayor. The college kid got into a bit of trouble, but later grew up and founded a record label called Skull Records. True story.

This guy (the one under the monument, not in front of it) is (was?) Major General Sumner, a major player in the Civil War:

One of the goals these cemetery citizens have is try to have the biggest stone on top of or around them. In the background here is a 3 story pyramid!

But the winner of the biggest rock is this guy:

That is an 80 ton rock a guy paid $5000 in 1904 ($130,000 in today’s dollars) to move it 9 miles to be on top of his father. They didn’t have a crane big enough to lift it onto a train, so they had a team of men and horses move it on 2” planks, 900 feet a day for 2 months. This guy was a descendent of the now skull-less Mayor guy. I think his skull is pretty safe.

Helen has taken to a life of vandalism. When we are out walking or biking near a park or other public place with abundant flowers, she can not resist:

But Aya’s sad Mohawk puppet almost begins to smile when he sees the resulting arrangement:

Just to show you we do things other than walk, bike, and steal flowers, this is a picture of Helen’s closest co-worker, an fellow Epileptologist, and his wife joining us for some on the deck home made Sushi:

In non-B&H news, son Nick and friends officially launched Skritter, their Chinese writing learning website a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.skritter.com

A fun cartoon they made just before the launch is here:

http://www.skritter.com/launch

They really have made an amazing product in the year since they left college. Nick traveled to another conference this week to promote it, and is now with Chloe for her graduation from Wellesley (congrates Chloe!)

Time to ride off into the sunset for this month. I’m over my Helen photo quota, but I had to do one more, as a sunset makes for a good closing photo. And her boots go well with my IBM windbreaker.

And because she is so pretty.

Bruce

Laser squirrel

2009-05-02T18:58:00.001-05:00

We took a weekend trip down to Philly a few weeks ago. The girl half a couple we befriended turned 50, so it was time for a party. They are both physics professors at Temple University, so I got a tour of the boy half’s laser lab. This is a million dollar laser:

This is Alex powering it up to give me a demo:

His team recently made some unexpected but important discoveries in how to use one laser beam to modulate another.

Helen powered up an ancient Singer sewing machine she has had forever. Inspired by the Judy Adams Levi quilts that Nick and Zach have, she collected some old jeans and flannel pajamas and worked some magic:

Here I model the final product, using a modeling pose I learned in engineering modeling school:

Zach dropped by for a visit last week.

He borrowed a friend's sports car (S2000) and drove out from MN to NJ to visit his good friend Serjey. They joined up with a bunch of other sport car enthusiast down in TN to drive ‘The Dragon’, a fun 2 lane curvy mountain road in the Smokies. With his driving skill and his white helmet, he pulled away from most of the others and became know as The Stig (famous driver from the TV show Top Gear):

To achieve the ultimate stick to the road experience, he bought some wide sticky tires, but you don’t want to use them on the interstate as they wear down quickly. Somehow he managed to pack those tires and a bunch of tools into the nooks and crannies:

He also put in a racing car seat with 5 point harness. Those seats bolt in, with not much wiggle room:

Definition of a sports car enthusiast: Driving 4600 miles in an uncomfortable seat snuggled next to tools and tires.

Definition of a sports car fanatic? Someone who tattoos a race track layout on their back:

He had a good time and made it back safely without thrombosis a few days ago (whew).

Our friend Ben came for a weekend visit. Here Helen criticizes the muscle anatomy of one of the statues on campus:

And here is this month’s mystery photo. It has a story, but I’m going to first let you try to guess what this is (no cheating and looking at the next picture):

A few days ago as i was working away, solving IBM chip puzzles, I saw a grey blur outside of the window I sit next to and I hear a thump. On the shingles for the porch below us I see this baby squirrel, flattened out on all fours, like you might see in a biology lab dissection table, except his guts were still in place, and he was breathing 200 times per second, with a wild look on his face like that of a squirrel who was just run over by a herd of wild elephants but somehow managed not to get squished.

I grabbed my camera to take a picture and his Mother shows up. She sees me about to shoot her child and she gets that motherly ‘You better not shoot my child or I will break into your house at night and claw your eyes out at night when you sleep’ look on her face. You can’t quite see it in this photo, but believe me, it was there:

Then she jumps down, and after several failed attempts, manages to bundle the child that is almost her size into her mouth and runs away to safety, which is when I took the mystery photo.

Any one figure the mystery photo out? I’m guessing you non-medical types were guessing it was a squirrel barfing up a big hairball. The medical types probably knew squirrels don’t do hairballs so were guessing goiter, caused by a classic case of iodine deficiency, very common with those Great Lake squirrels who often lack access to good table salt.

Niagara

2009-03-28T19:34:00.001-05:00

We had a couple of road trips this month. First we met with some friends on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. First time I had seen the awesomeness:

It was strange to compare nature’s amazing creation with man’s creation a few blocks away. Several blocks of tourist trap spectacles, like wax museums and haunted maze houses. After a few minutes of wondering about the neon coated jungle listening to streetside talking mummies, we escaped back to nature’s creation, much more impressive:

Our host was the area’s head Jewish Rabbi, an amazing guy who knows a bit about everything and can do just about anything. Including cook. Helen picked up a few tips:

The north escarpment of Lake Erie has a mild climate, good for growing fruits, so we toured a few wineries. Here the daughter of one of our friends is explaining to me how wine is made (it had something to do with horses and dancing):

And here their other daughter is serving me up a freshly baked cake made from chocolate butter and M&Ms (those without imagination will claim it looks more like wet Canadian dirt):

Last weekend we went to NH to celebrate Helen’s Mom’s birthday. We met up with Noah (here practicing for one of many upcoming concerts at Bolder) and Aya, doing some acrobatic French braiding of Casey’s hair (a college friend she brought along from RISID):

A charcoal Casey did of Aya:

There were lots of Russian friends, and that led to lots of Russian music, which led to lots of dancing, although I’m not sure this was Russian:

We brought Vira, a family friend who was visiting from Moscow, back to Syracuse for a few days. Inspired by the jeans blankets that Judy Adams made Nick/Zach when they were little, Helen and Vira attacked some worn out jeans to give them a 2nd life:

In this last picture you witness Helen with 2 of the neurology residents studying a palm reading book:

I admire their willingness to keep an open mind about alternate medical diagnostic procedures, but come on, palm reading?? Astrology was next. It was a close call for Western Medicine, but fortunately before they got subsumed, a nearby IBM engineer eventually talked some sense into them. One of them, anyway.

Bruce

St Thomas, 2009

2009-03-04T19:36:00.001-06:00

I pronounce myself as the Sun master. On my 3rd trip to St Thomas, we had 10 days of fun in the sun and I didn’t get a single sun burn. And, I did it without putting any lotion on it’s skin. This is my master of the Sun pose:

The secret? It is a 3 part plan:

Sunbath only on sharp pokey rocks (limits exposure time).
When swimming midday, use fully body armor (i.e. a shirt).
When Helen tries to coax you out from underneath the sun beach umbrella, defend yourself by slapping her on her sunburn to remind her of her foolish ways.

I had a work project that wasn’t quite done, so I called in to the daily team meetings.

To not make my teammates feel too jealous, I told them it was raining, but I think they saw through my ruse after 5 straight days of rain.

We actually had wonderful weather, with enough sun for 3 different wedding photo shoots. And plenty of lizard sunbathing:

We had great visits with Helens parents on the first weekend and Mom an Dad on the 2nd weekend.

No fish photos this time. I dropped my underwater camera in the deepest part of the bay on day 2, so it now swims with the turtles.

I did get pretty sunset photos though. This is Helen on her last evening swim:

And this is us on our way out. Based on his expression, I’m guessing our fellow passenger did not have as good a time as we did.

Test post from Windows Live Writer

2009-02-11T20:07:00.001-06:00

This is pretty slick … much easier way to add pictures. Works great from Windows 7:

http://download.live.com/

2009-01-31T17:17:00.000-06:00

Happy SuperBowl - 1,

I've had bad luck with cameras. Mine is back in camera hospital for the 2nd time, lacking the ability to focus. Helen's camera died after taking a couple of icicle photos. It died of fright just before trying to taking a picture from underneeth a magnificant 12 foot icicle. But my underwater camera is still working, so I have a few pictures to share.

We had a good new years visit with Noah and his friend Jen:

Was very pretty at the lake. Lots of fresh snow:

We have been out x-country skiing a few times:

This is Helen pretending it is possible to skate on a rough, snow covered, mostly frozen lake:

We are 1/2 way through the snow season and yesterday reached the season average of 120 inches! I doubt we will break the all time season record of 200 inches, but I can always dream. Most of the snow has melted, so on the ground we only have about a foot:

A couple of neighers down the block are having a snow fort competition. This is the smaller fort:

My underwater camera didn't want to take a picture of the bigger fort, which was 2 stories with a big inside chamber. I think the camera didn't get a good photo because it was too big. Or maybe it is because it didn't look like a fish. They father and his daugher invited me to crawl around inside. This is probably pretty safe roof structure:

Was cozy. Even warmer than our apartment. Helen and I are on an adventure to see if we can make it through the winter without turning on the furnace. Except for the 4 times we have had visitors, we have left it off, guiltily absorbing heat from the downstair apartment. When it got down to 0 outside, we got down to a low of 48 inside, but most of the month has been in the mid-50s. The trick is layered clothing. Our model here walks the runway with thick socks, ug boots, jeans with wool liners, 4 layers of shirts, and a bowl of warm oatmeal.

Had a chat with Zach today. He is down to one roomate and has been cleaning and re-organizing the house! He is not getting many hours from his job installing security systems, so is planning on working at the local Ford dealership, starting in a few weeks.

A few days ago he drove up to Minneapolis an bought a miniature pinscher! Generic dog info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_Pinscher

Specific cute puppy photo here:

6 weeks old, male, goes by the name of Cheese.

Bruce

2008-12-30T18:41:00.000-06:00

Merry X-mas +5,

We are in NH for the New Years week. We escaped Syracuse in between some of those famous Syracuse snowstorms. 65 inches so far this season, 1/2 way to the average total of 120 inches, the snowiest big city in N. America (probably S. America as well). This is where I would normally insert pictures of the pretty snow, but the camera didn't survive the last snowfall. Helen and I took it out x-country skiing around our neighborhood and it decided it didn't like the cold and refused to resuscitate.

So instead of pictures, I have a belated Xmas gift. This is mainly for Mom and Dad, who, being parents, can tolerate semi-creative things from their children better than non-parents.

Since moving to Syracuse 1.5 years ago, I started collecting piano musings again. I started reviewing them a few weeks ago and found I had 140 songs! I've spent the last few days reviewing them and picked out 40 of them, a more managable number that would fit on a CD. But being a bit lazy and a bit late for Xmas, rather than burning and sending a CD, I put them online.

You can download them from here:

http://brucewinter.net/songs

And/or you can listen to them online here:

http://bruce_songs.s3.amazonaws.com/bs.html

Merry x-Xmas and future happy New Year.

Love Bruce

2008-12-20T20:29:00.000-06:00

Merry Xmas-5,

Helen had her yearly epilepsy conference a few weeks ago, this time in Seattle. I tagged along and split my time between telecommuting from the hotel and playing tourist, while she played Doctor. Actually, I played Doctor one night. Was invited to a dinner with her, and they printed me up a name tag, Bruce Winter, MD:

I took the Seattle Underground Tour where you walk around underneath the streets where the first Seattle buildings were built. They had a toilet problem. When the houses up on the hills flushed their fancy new 'crapper toilets' while the tide was up, the toilets down in the business on the shore, like this one, spewed sewage geysers:

When Seattle burned down, they fixed this problem by eroding dirt from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill to raise the downtown streets up by one story, leaving the first story of the buildings underground and open.

I took this picture from the observation deck of the 76 story Coumbia tower (2nd tallest on the west coast). The bottom of this picture shows that historic district area. And in the upper center, if you squint real hard, you can see Paul and Mika's house:

I had a nice visit with Kim and McKenzie, including a visit to the Aquarium. We stayed at Paul and Mika's our last night there. They cooked us a wonderful salmon dinner. Malcolm was able to get on an earlier flight from his conference in San Fransisco and join us for a few hours.

Helen claims the the Winter/Kitamura ear, modeled here, are unique and similar. I'm not so sure.

The town square in downtown was a busy place, with lots of pretty lights and Xmas carolers.

They had all kinds of carolers, including an Irish tap dancing group with blinking lights. I took the picture of them after firing up my James Bond jet backpack to get a better view:

I requested and was granted a TMIO day (The Mountain Is Out, they really do have an acronym for that, as it is normally hidden in rain clouds). I tried to direct these birds to go fly around the mountain for a dramatic flying birds by mountain picture, but they looked at me as if I was some sort of crazy tourist with a camera:

Helen escaped the conference long enough to make a trip down to Pikes Farmers market:

Actually, this is one of those trick conference photos, where they let you pretend they actually let you out of the conference, but really you are in front of a blue screen. The dog is real though. He is a Epilepsy trained dog, that can help their owner when he/she has a seizure.

This a self portrait shot of downtown reflected from a window in the Space Needle. If you squint really really hard, you can see the Seattle football team loosing a game in the open air stadium (several of us were watching the scoreboard from one of the space needle telescopes):

Beautiful views from there. This is a sunset towards Bermerton. Also seen in this photo is a water spouting sea monster about to sink the Bermerton ferry:

A couple more iconic Space needle photos:

Yes Dad, that is a flower photo. The rose was in the sea front rose garden, a bit weathered, but not bad for a rose in December. I actually had another photo like this, with the needle in focus and the rose out of focus, but figured you would disapprove of an out of focus rose, so picked this one.

Merry Xmas to all

Love Bruce

2008-11-30T12:43:00.000-06:00

Hi to All,

Time to share the tales of November. H and I biked to and explored another park, our 2nd one this year! This one had some cool steps carved out of rock:

We really have been negligent in exploring Upstate New York, home of the Finger lakes, the Adirondacks, and the worlds smallest church (I think 3 people can stand in it). We did finally visit the Big Apple a few weeks ago, stayed in White Planes with some friends. They drove us into town, to visit the Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn. Helen reveled in this huge Russian grocery store with lots of scary looking meat like products:

Here you can see they NY city skyline at the end of the Hudson river:

Other things done in November: I juggled with mystical semi-transparent balls (they become fully transparent when I drop them and they roll under various furnitures) while having a 3 foot sword plunged into my head, while a well dressed but delicate ceramic lady in a picture frame watched on in horror, fearing to be destroyed by a wayward juggling ball:

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Aya did something unhealthy while riding her bicycle down a steep hill on the RISD campus in Providence, without a helmet. She doesn't remember and no one saw what happened, but the end result was her lying in a pool of blood with her bike on top of her. An ambulance took her to the hospital, where she got to stay in bed for 2 days while they monitored a grade 3 liver laceration:

When we got there, she was in good spirits and not much pain, sporting an impressive black eye and stitches in the chin. Helen was in worse shape, thinking of what could have happened.

The liver behaved, so we brought her back with us, picking up Chloe from Wellesley College, and Nick from the airport for a lovely Thanksgiving Holiday week. Here we are exiting the latest James Bond movie. Check out Nick's cool shoes (click for a bigger picture). They are a thin rubber that fit around each toe, so you can run in them almost like running barefoot, but with some protection:

When Helen made some sushi, we discovered that when you eat sushi that has been warmed over candlelight, like this:

It will turn your hair into Japaneses style. That is Aya's puppet in the background, giving his approval (he sports a Mohawk):

We also had a a couple who both teach Physics at Temple University in Philadelphia join us for Thanksgiving. Here Helen and the she-part of the couple proudly display the 35 lb turkey:

We re-discovered what we had discovered last year but forgot: you really should have some sort of large basting pan before trying to cook a turkey. The stores sell out of those things, because there are many turkey battles being fought on T-day. We eventually won our battle, but only after much smoke and a slip-slidable greased up kitchen floor.

Nick and Chloe discovered some fun applications for their iPhone and iPod touches, including one that lets you play the iPhone like a flute. Here they are playing a game on them, while Aya makes a 2 inch clay sculpture of Chloe. The bear, as always, is the supervisor:

We had to let the kids go on Friday/Saturday, which was good as today (Sunday) we have nasty snow and ice. Here we are waiting for Chloe's 6 am bus:

This photo shows couples of 2 dramatically different cultures. On the left, a diverse 21st century, technology enabled couple, and on the right a cookie cutter 18th century, technology averse Amish couple. The one and only thing in common ... a Greyhound Bus.

Bruce

2008-10-19T20:47:00.000-05:00

Happy Falls,

We have been Falling it up here. Biked to a Russian festival a few weekends ago. This on our way, at a downtown fountain that is right in the middle of what used to be the Erie Canal:

This is where Syracuse made its big bucks 100 years ago, loading up locally dried salt from local brine piped up from ice age generated underground salt reservoirs. It was know as the Salt City, until they found cheaper ways to get salt (probably buying those blue cartons of it for 49 cents at the grocery store), and built railroads.

We also found another Irish festival in a park. But the only picture I have of those trip is of this Irishman and his pretty girl under a tree:

Last weekend we biked amongst the beautiful Fall trees in a local cemetery:

Today we found those same beautiful trees in a local park:

This park is called Green Lakes park because it has a couple of deep lakes with green water. These are unusual 'meromictic' lakes, where due to their depth and mineral content, the water below 50 feet does not circulate. So that water at the bottom is undisturbed, thousands of years old. Hmmm, come to think of it, I guess most water is probably thousands of years old. But unlike our tap water, that water has not been pee-ed out by George Washington (I read that somewhere, that we have all drunk at least a molecule of water that has been drunken by people like George and Columbus and all those other old guys).

I've been having fun wandering around the campus during the Fall festivals, like Homecoming. Before the home football games they have concerts and activities. The local mascot is a orange ball guy (is the school color). Here he is trying some pullups on the visiting Marines portable pullup bar:

The deal was, if you did pullups, they give you stuff, depending on how many pullups you can do. I couldn't resist, so gave it a go, earned enough for a tee-shirt, but opted for a lanard for my IBM badge. A marine sponsered IBMer, seemed like a good combo.

For those of you who know Helen and her aversion to crowds, and her lack of interest in sports, you will be surprised to hear I coaxed her into going to a local football game in the campus dome! I have proof:

I expected to last about 1 quarter, but we lasted the whole game (was a fun, close game).

Bruce

News from NH, 9/07/2008

2008-09-07T11:56:00.000-05:00

HiHo,

We had a lovely 2 weeks at the lake in NH. Short video and tons of photos here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/brucewinter/2008NewHampshire

Slideshow version here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/brucewinter/2008NewHampshire#slideshow

And Helen posted some photos here:

http://bloomiesphotoalbum.blogspot.com

I broke my cleanliness backpacking record, not taking a shower or bath for 20 days. That included gather lots of good sweat from fun hiking, running, and biking the local trails for 20 miles. And lots of good grim from the 20 dead trees I cut down. And dust from the 20 boxes of books we emptied out from the attic. And 20 year old spider webs from the windows I cleaned.

Oh yeah, I also swam in the lake about 20 times.

When we got back to Syracuse, there were these little critter footprints all over the apartment:

Several mysteries here:

- What sort of creature was it? Bigfoot? Baby Bigfoot? A deviant Bigfoot with extremely little feet? Those didn't quite feel right, so our next guess was one of those evil black squirrels.

- How did it get in the well sealed apartment? Given the black footprints, we are thinking ninja style through the supposedly closed chimney from our non-working fireplace.

- What did it do while here while we were gone? No empty beer cans, so no party. Lots of prints around the windows, so maybe it was one of those spy squirrels, keeping an eye on the neighborhood terrorist.

- How did it get out? The chimney would be a one way trip. And there were no open windows.

This last mystery bothers us the most, with suspicions of it lurking in a closet, waiting for the right moment. If we suddenly disappear (or even if we gradually disappear, one appendage at a time), I would suggest taking the above photos to the authorities so the bring the criminal to justice. With all those police cars we had in our street last month, I'm sure they can footprint all the street squirrels and get a match.

To those of you who were stumpped by last months puzzler. I am proud to say my Irish Mother figured it out, with help from Dad's keen eyes. That stoplight is in center of the city Irish neighbood, so they turned it upside down, putting the Green light on top.

They had an Irish festival here this weekend, with lots of great music. A band called 'Enter the Haggis' is great, although, having sampled haggis (various animal organs mixed with oatmeal and boiled in a stomach, I'm not a fan), their name stirs up troubling images for me. Here is a pic of a cute Irish dance tream preforming:

Thats it for now. I'm heading out to a 'veggy fest' today in the local park, presented by local vegans. I'm guessing it will be a haggis free zone, so I should be ok.

Bruce

News from NY, 8/10/2008

2008-08-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

HiYo,

I had a good trip back to the Rochester a couple of weeks ago. Had lots of productive visits with the Beemers (IBM guys) as well as a nice visit with Zach and friends.

Zach and I arm wrestled to see who would get the upstairs bedroom and who would get the living room couch. I had the bed last time, so I was insisting it was my turn for the couch, but he would have none of that, so he proposed we settle it with an arm wrestling match. No problem, I thought, I've been keeping in pretty good shape and I beat him last time. But I neglected to take into effect that flinging thousands of tires would have on his now bulging arms, so he humbled my handily. Or maybe more precisely , arm-ily. So I got the bed.

Here is is cooking me breakfast:

which was so nummy that it distracted me enough that he beat me in a game of breakfast chess. But then I got my feet back on the ground and won the next 2 games, so the worlds was right again.

For the last few months, the shop has had mysterious water on the floor, mildewing and rusting things. I figured it was the sump pump, but after cleaning the shop out and getting the nasty gook off the floor, I found it was actually a slow drip from a humidifier tap in a water pipe. One drop every 4 seconds is enough to fill a 5 gallon bucket in a few days, which is enough to keep an unventilated shop really nasty after a few months.

The mower had broken, so Zach was behind on the yard work. There was a field of 3 foot weeks where the hole of 2 summers ago had been:

And an the end of the deck had been grown over. This picture shows a 4 foot thorn that was putting up a fight with the ivy:

I joined the frey, and the thorn eventually lost. I also trimmed a bunch of trees and arranged for a tree guy to take out 3 or the dead or un-desirable trees.

This is the car Z had driven up from Florida this spring:

He keeps it spotless. I suggested we go for a quick trip to the grocery store to get some milk, so I could get a ride in it. After an elaborate procedure to get me buckled into the 5 point racing harness, we took the long way to the grocery store, so Zach could demonstrate why he likes this car so much. Fortunately for me he did not have his 'sticky' tires on, so he limited the 40 mph curve to 100 mph. Next time I think I'll walk to the grocery store.

Zach still has way too many fires cooking. Here he is putting new springs on the neighbors GTO. That is his friend Brie giving him moral support, and making sure someone is on hand in case the car jacks slip:

I also did a bunch of house cleaning (don't worry Zach, I'm not posting pictures). Here is a collection of Nick computer games. I left them on the table for a few days, as they brought back many fun memories for those passing through:

Speaking of the Nick, they recently posted a fun video of he and his 2 partners explaining what there Skritter software is going to do:

http://www.oberlin.edu/creativity/projects-fellowships.html

Helen was glad to get me back from Minnesota. Apparently the bear had been getting into the food supplies and gaining so much weight he no longer fits in the rocking chair:

This morning we had a collection of 5 police cars in out our window:

One of the cars was, literally, in our front yard. No, not a drug bust (although I did hide the chocolate covered raisins, as I'm pretty sure they are a drug, as addicting as they are!). One car was in pursuit of a bad guy when he was accelerating around the corner in front of our apartment. His left front tire blew, causing him to careen out of control into our yard, crashing into a tree. He was OK, but his buddies had a good time giving him a hard time. The first guy, as he pulled up, spoke into his car megaphone "Sir, please stay in your vehicle".

One last picture, from a bike ride I took yesterday. Lets see if any of you can figure out what is unusual about this picture (click the picture for a larger version):

Don't see it yet? I'll give you one hint (is backwards so you don't accidentally read it):

doohroobhgien hsirI duorp a ni nekat saw

Bruce

News from NY, 7/20/2008

2008-07-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

HiHi,

I turnified 50 a few weeks ago. Much to Helen's dismay, I managed to keep my 50th a low key event. 'Big round number birthdays' are a bigger deal in Helen's thinking. I'm thinking 100 would be something worth celebrating, so we made a party date for that.

To avoid the Bruce 50th birthday paparazzi, we snuck off to the lake for a long weekend. We met up with Aya for a few days. Here she is chauffeuring me around the lake:

Helen's parents live there full time, so they know how to handle the wildlife. This bear for example:

Lots of rain there this summer, so mushroom hunting resulted in a bountiful harvest:

We stayed a few days beyond the weekend, so I did the tele-commuting thing from there. I didn't bring my nice headset, so Helen hooked me up with this hands free unit:

Thank you me Mom and Dad for the birthday shirts and snorkle gear! I'm taking the mask with us when we go back to NH month to see what secretes are the bottom of the lake hold. Testing it out here:

Last weekend we had a trip to DC. Helen attended a conference whilst I ran about and saw all the sites. Yep, ALL of them. On Sunday, for 9+ hours I walked/ran to many awe inspiring sites around 'the mall'. I was testing my tourism endurance, a marathoner with a camera. I'll spare you most of the photos, but must prove I was there with a few, like this one, where I was measuring the size of the capital building:

I spent the most time at the Air and Space museum. They have ALL of the most historic flying things there. Here I found Lindbergh's plane trying to catch up to SpaceShip 1:

I could show photos of all kinds of other amazing things, like the Wright Brother's plane, or me touching rocks from the Moon and Mars (Mars?? yep, they had a slice of one of those metorites from Mars), but instead, I choose a photo of a toilet. People, for maybe obvious reasons, have an interest in toilets, so here is one the Soviets used in their space stations (this was the male version):

The last day we freed up Helen for a few hours. A scene from Ms Smith goes to Washington:

We spent a few hours in the Art Museum. We saw lots of good stuff, and a few not-so-good. Her Helen is trying hard not o look at a painting of what I would best describe as the inside of a marshmallow:

I'm off to Rochester next week for a week to say hi to Z and work buddies.

Bruce