I spotted this on BoingBoing. I’ve got a weakness for automaton and wind-up toys. I had read about this writing automaton so it’s fairly amazing to see it in action.

In the eighteenth century, 200 years before little ASIMO started to walk or to climb stairs, the great Jaquet-Droz built an automaton which could scrawl any sentence on a piece of paper and had a chilling repertory of human-like movements. Read the story an then check it out at the videos:

Yesterday morning, Christina’s movers arrived to move her things into the house. We had in mostly cleared for them, but I don’t think any of us anticipated the scale of the furniture when it’s transported into a 1907 house. Things from California are big.

Our cats have taken to living upstairs; we’ve moved the litter box and their food up there. Zamboni, Christina’s dog, is afraid of stairs, so is living on the first floor. Everyone seems to be okay with this arrangement so far.

Our neighbor, Mark, invited us all over to his house for lunch, which was so very, very nice. He knew our kitchen would be in disarray.

Then it was back home for more packing or unpacking. In the evening, Rob and I went down to -e-’s house for birthday party for Yanni. Walking down the quiet streets in the snow was wonderful. And there’s still snow on the ground today. Hurrah.

Sorry about the hiatus in updates, but I have the power cord for my computer again. A quick summary of Tuesday.

I thought I had fixed Sungura and he was mostly better, but of course, broke again. I just don’t have the right tools on tour to fix him.

But it’s becoming so normal to repair him that the real highlight was our load-in for the second show. I’ve already said that we don’t like stairs. Take a look at our load-in. We were on the second floor. Those stairs Joe is standing on go down two more flights. It was extremely unpleasant. If you ever invite a group to perform, please let them know ahead of time if you have stairs. This load-in added thirty minutes to our set-up time.