Niagara

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

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

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

 http://download.live.com/

 

 

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

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

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

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