Laser squirrel

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

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