It may be time for a snow blower...

I love manual labor, but I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea....

And we finally pulled out snow shoes after years and years...

Grooming

I taught the boys how to make carbon fiber composites today.  I don't get in the lab much (I do mainly computational work) so Sidd and Christoph helped a lot, and we made a little plate.  I'll include the final part when it is cured.  I'm just grooming them to work for me during high school and college:)

This is A-man cutting the woven carbon sheets.  He couldn't really press down on the cutter hard enough, so his cuts weren't that clean and we were worried that he'd get carbon fibers all over him (which he did).  Work in progress....

This is Mr. Timnus checkin out the part as the resin was flowing through under vacuum. 

As part of the grooming process, I have the boys doing a little programming and trying to get them into robotics a little, so we went to the First Lego League competition and watched for a bit.

Let it Snow!

It's beginning to look at lot like Christmas!

And I finally have a place to display all the little Christmas nick knacks I kept through the years.

(They were on the chopping block many times, but I'm glad now that we had some fun things to put up, especially from Germany)

 Today was our first big snowfall, and it's still coming!   The buses were over an hour late.  It was surprising that they didn't cancel or delay school start.  There were a lot of accidents on the roads this morning.

 The one nice thing about having the boys wait for over an hour for the bus on the driveway, is that they helped us shovel the driveway for all that time!

 Happy Birthday to Timmy today!   We are celebrating on Thursday when a fun activity is open he wants to do with his friends: Skyzone!

Cora is enjoying the tree and fun decorations.  

She really likes the little nativities, santa snow globe, candles, books, etc.

Backyard

 I think we love having woods in our backyard.  Maybe....

Going to the dentist

On any average day, this is how Cora dresses.  She loves all the reactions she gets from strangers as she walks by commenting how pretty she looks.  

She had a great time at the dentist this time, being very patient with the cleaning.  She most looks forward to petting the dentists super-duper nice doggie, Leroy.

The Flume

KTs parents are in town, so we went to the Flume yesterday.  It is a little slot-canyon thing, which reminds me of Partnachklamm in Garmish.

Aside from the canyon, there were a lot of huge glacial boulders sitting in the middle of planes, which was really fun.

One funny happening: I noticed 3/4 of the way through that my keys aren't in my pocket.  I looked in all of our bags, then ran back through the trail to find them.  I want all the way back, and turned around to catch up to everyone else.  Right before I caught up to the others, KT calls me to let me know that Aaron has my keys.  He saw them fall out where we had stopped for lunch, and put them in his pocket.  Once he noticed I was gone, he asked KT: "Where is dad?"  "He lost his keys and went back to find them," she replied.  "I have them right here," he says as he pulls them out.  Lesson learned: always put keys where they can be zipped in, and always notify everyone in the group that you have lost something.

It was a great place to go: my only complaints are that it was kind of crowded (lots of tour buses of Chinese and German tourists) and it was expensive ($16 for adults, $13 for kids).  I would probably try to go next time during the week.

Our new house

So we bought and moved into a new house.  Not new, but new to us.  We had put an offer on it way back when, and were out-bid.  Just as we had given up, I came back from Japan with news that the sale had fallen through and we were given our original asking price!  So we closed on the house 2 weeks ago, and I spent a week painting, cleaning, and generally fixing things.  I knew this was the right house when I found 3 frogs sleeping on the porch light:

I bought this awesome tool at Home Depot for doing edges: once I got proficient, it cut my taping down by like 80%.  I'm totally sold on this thing!

We are trying to get rid of some of the gold bling in the house, so I spray painted a lot of the bathroom fixtures...

Here is an intermediate pic of the boys bathroom: pre-beige days.

The boys bedroom (same color as the bathroom ended up being)

 I actually didn't get to the living room: I ran out of time.  I was painting our bedroom the morning of the move, and I have had to finish bits and pieces along the way...

Here is the upstairs bathroom while I was in the middle of cutting the edges.  We for grey over the stripes....

These are the woods right behind the house: we have a trail from the backyard which hooks up with a utility road through the forest.

This is at the beaver dam right behind the house:

Here is the kitchen/dining room right now.  We still have to "unpack" and find places to keep all of our crap, but at least it is a little more livable.

The 'Socks!

Went to our first Red Socks game last night: it was kind of late for Cora, but she went through a slap-happy thing and started dancin on the stairs in the aisle  whenever they played music, causing a significant amount of attention from slightly to fairly buzzed baseball fans.  We won, and the boys really had a great time: a success!

Kayaking in Harvard

Thanks to the Daines for letting us use their equipment!

Sweating in Japan

A few weeks ago, I went to Japan to tour the JAXA (Japanese NASA) site and attend a US-Japan Composites Conference.  Whenever I hear the word "Japan", it now conjures up memories of sweating.  My trip could be summed up this way: I was sweating, went in a store/restaurant/subway and dried of, sweated again, dried off again, sweated again, etc.  I would daily develop a film of sweat, not unlike the rings on a tree truck, which could be used to follow my travels that day.  I got a little sweat-rag as a gift from engineers at JAXA, and it was the most-used thing on the trip.  

Anyway, it was funny ordering food without knowing what it is, but here is one of my better meals:

and some food was not-so-great for a non-seafood-lover.  But I braved it anyway.

I was told by a professor that you are supposed to slurp when you eat your noodles.  I didn't really believe this, until I was sitting at a bar-type seating right in front of the cook, and everyone next to me was slurping as loud as they could, and the cook looked pleased with this.  I did my darndest to match their slurping, but my American upbringing seemed to keep me from my true slurp potential.

 I sweated around at a botanical garden in Sapporo:

I sweated on a boardwalk through the marsh:

I sweated near a nice little pond:

I sweated in the market in Sapporo.  My better half forced me to leave 1/2 of my suitcase empty, and then come home with some gifts for everyone, so the shopping pressure was totally on!  I found some kimonos for only 15000 yen, and so I bought some for the boys (though they were adult sizes, but who cares for dress-up clothes, right?)

One aesthetic impression I had of Japan is that there are signs everywhere!  Everywhere!  And not just normal signs, but cartoons and glowing letters, with multiple-sized fonts, and bright colors, and cartoon characters.  They even had cute little cartoon characters on their safety signs.

I sweated in a tram to the top of Mount Moiwa, then sweated on a hike on the way down.  Very pretty.  Unfortunately, this was on my way to the airport for a mega-flight, so I had to do a paper towel-shower in the bathroom at the airport.  I had to change planes in Tokyo, which meant I just started sweating all over again.

Love Japanese toilets!  I luckily had some experience with a model my dad has, so I was pretty skilled already about which buttons to use and which to avoid.

One of the highlights of the trip was being taken around Tokyo by Kaz and Maiko, some of our friends in Michigan.  Kaz took me to this cool festival down a little street, where the kids were doing these cute little dances....

I thought these hats were way cool.  They looked like fortune cookie hats!

... and the pure cuteness of all the kids dressed up....

 Kaz and Maiko in a cool little shopping area.  They are having their first baby soon, and they are going to be awesome parents!

We sweated up to a skyscraper to get a view of the city.

This was my fancy 50,000 Yen dinner with the JAXA crew.  It was an open bar, and they were seriously disappointed that I don't drink.  The table was floor level, and we were sitting below ground.  Being a little large for the Japanese furniture, I nearly broke through the paper walls getting out of the table.  I told them that I don't need alcohol to stumble around foolishly.  I think they were glad I didn't drink at that point...

At the restaurant, I bravely ate everything put before me.  Didn't know what it was most of the time, but I ate it anyways.  And I sweated.

This is the sweating streets near Shinjuku station.  During the summer, they don't wear ties or coats to work, and everyone is wearing a white short sleeve dress shirt and black pants.  I felt out of place with my crazy colored shirts.

This is the Maiji Shrine near the station.  It was a beautiful place to walk, think, and sweat profusely.

So my big debut in Asia was a sweating success: next time, I'd like to go at a different time of year or wear that futuristic vest from Back to the Future II with some sort of temperature regulation unit.