Yet Another Small Project

I spent the three-day weekend sick (stupid cold) but not too sick to knock out a small project with the boy.  Like the sailboat project, this one was initiated by the five-year-old asking if we could build something in the garage.

He wanted to build a toy rocket but changed his mind to a jet because “a rocket would be too hard”.  I nodded, not in agreement, really… just movin’ the conversation along, you understand. I gave him the BoogieBoard and told him to sketch up what he wanted. After a bit he came back and described all the pieces and parts of his design to me.

About a million years ago, Mad Magazine put out an article about what toys would look like if they were faithfully reproduced (non-Euclidean geometry, misspellings, the works) from children’s drawings.  It was awesome and it still makes me laugh to think about it.  His drawing looked a lot like the “Jet Airplane” from this old article.

I got out my planning book and copied his sketch into it (well… I copied the idea of the sketch into it, anyway) while asking him dimensions and colors and making sure he knew what materials and tools we had on hand.  After a bit we had a basic design that looked like a Space-Shuttle-slash-Concorde hybrid, although a lot more heavily armed than one would normally expect of a passenger airliner:

“Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking.  Thank you for flying Kindergartener Airlines.  I apologize for the incredibly loud, grindy, and sparky takeoff.  You may have noticed that, while we possess the most advanced weaponry ever envisioned on a domestic airliner, we are not actually equipped with landing gear. Sadly, all of your luggage and many of your pets have dropped out of the resultant hole that was ground into the bottom of the plane as our rocket engine violently forced us across the tarmac. Again - our apologies.  Our flight from Norfolk to Atlanta will consist of seventeen minutes of non-stop hypersonic barrel rolls and loop-the-loops. Those of you that do survive the crushing g-forces will be required to assist the crew in dumping the remaining fuel and ordinance somewhere over northern Georgia before we slam this bird like a lawn dart into whatever runway happens to get in the way of our primarily ballistic flight path.  May God help us all.”

I had him go out to our wood stock and identify the pieces that we would need for the fuselage, wings, rocket engine, and… umm… air-to-air missiles (none of this “circling the runway waiting for clearance from the tower” nonsense for this fella… no sir). The main body is spruce, the rocket engine is yellow pine, the missiles are poplar, and the wings are aspen. Like you care…

I tried to get him to paint the pieces before assembly but he said he wanted to glue everything together first.  Impatience, really, but a good opportunity for a teaching moment.  While the glue was drying I had him get out the sailboat we made a while back and paint it without giving him any instructions.  After a while he started to complain that everything “was getting all messed up”.  He uses brushes like most five-year-olds do (paint brush = soup ladle) and the quality of the job reflected that.

“No worries, buddy,” I told him as I wiped off the blobs and evened out the color swirls.  “This is just the base coat, so it doesn't have to be perfect.  The second coat will look better - I promise”.  That cheered him up. I said “See… painting the small stuff first before we glue it makes everything come out nicer.” He shot the jet the worried glance I was expecting so I showed him the roll of painters tape I was holding. “For the jet we are going to use this stuff so paint doesn't get everywhere.  Next time, we will paint first.”

So “Paint before assembly if you can” and “How to use painter’s tape” are now in his mental toolbox.  I hope he uses those tips as he grows and builds more and more complex stuff with less and less help from me.

He loves the jet (and the boat, now that it has been “professionally” painted) but he said something about it that neither the wife nor I can quite figure out.  He says the jet is piloted by Martin Luther King Jr. because “stripes are Martin Luther King’s colors”.  He couldn’t explain why those colors in particular belong to MLK.  A quick web search really doesn't answer the question, but I might just be missing something.

Any ideas?

Happy (Belated) Epiphany Day!

I usually start the new year sharing a list of resolutions and goals with folks that stumble across this blog. Why do this? I'm not really sure. Apparently, one of my hobbies is to advertise my shortcomings, insecurities, hopes, and dreams to as broad of an audience as possible because, hey, saying out loud that you'll do something is just as good as actually doing it, right?

Umm... Right?

Sigh. Fine. I figured you'd be that way. You used to be cool, man.

Well, then, this year my main resolution is to stop lying to myself. Yep, it's a logic bomb powerful enough to disable any number of evil/misguided Star Trek AIs, but there it is. You don't like it, hey, that's on you, brother.  I ain't gonna learn Chinese, I ain't gonna completely master Pour Some Sugar On Me on the guitar, and I ain't gonna try out for the Duke basketball team.  I mean, of course I could totally succeed at any of these things if I really wanted to... It's just that those grapes are probably really, really sour anyway, so, you know, why bother?

What am I going to do? Pfft.  Who knows?  I guess while I have the time and energy to do so, I continue the filtration of stuff that I have found useful to collect in my skull over the decades into two piles: Useful Things and Trivia.  It's harder and more time-consuming than you might think - after all, my Trivia pile is about 1,000 times bigger than the other one.

Yours is, too…

You know, I’m going to stop this post right here and now.  Although you can’t see them, right now I am staring at three more paragraphs of borderline pretentious garbage festering right below this sentence.  I am not happy with them. I worked hard to get them ready for yesterday’s “deadline” but no matter how much I polished, it still felt like I was going to circle the runway for another 500 words before my point finally congealed anti-climactically somewhere in the middle of the seventh paragraph.

Negative?  Not at all! You see, appropriate to yesterday’s holiday I have had an epiphany: I can take one of these ill-formed paragraphs and massage them into a short book that should basically write itself.  

Books don’t write themselves, however, so I am forced to take a short leave to get this idea out of my head and onto “paper”. It might lead nowhere, it might lead somewhere, but I have to find out and I need time to do that.  A week to ten days should be enough to figure out if I can press on with it, shelve it for later, or simply shrug it off and just circular file the whole thing.  I told my editor in December I would have something for her by the end of this month.  I hope this counts.

So that’s it for a while.  I’ll post if interesting stuff crops up between now and a week or ten days from now - puzzle solutions, Rook travel bug updates, that medium-sized asteroid headed this way is finally detected by backyard astron… Ah… Yes… Ahem… Perhaps I’ve said too much…

Anyway, I don’t want to take my short hiatus without leaving with something so here it is: Yesterday, I discovered I had just earned my 2,000-day badge as “dad”.  How’s that for an epiphany?

More later.

Welcome to 2014, Everyone!

Jeesh... that looked a heck of a lot better before uploading it... Not a promising start.  Nonetheless, I still think that the guy from the Island of 1,000,000 B.C. would have either worshiped the talking reindeer, killed him and eaten him, or simply ran away instead of singing a song and offering to help find the big-eared kid.  No?  Yes?

Happy New Year, Everyone!

The Majestic Suffolk Seaboard Coastline Trail

A couple of days ago I went geocaching along the Suffolk Seaboard Coastline Trail. I didn't have very much luck finding anything (2 for 6, I think), so I took advantage of the outing to document some of the more eye-catching flora and fauna instead. Enjoy!

Immediately upon entering the trailhead I was greeted by a herd of Spotted Used Mattresses, sunning themselves majestically just southeast of the main path. I did not want to pass up a rare opportunity to photograph them in their natural habitat, but I made sure I was careful not to startle them to avoid interfering with any willomying and flolloping they might be engaged in. 

This flock of Bud Light Tall Boys was probably drawn to the area to feed on the ample offering of broken glass and shattered stereo speaker casings left on the manhole cover in the foreground. 

A cluster of Abandoned Sofa Sets and North American Armchairs stood shyly off to the left of a side trail and waited for me to pass.

This Broken Plastic Bin was caught bathing and slowly sinking into one of the many fetid still-water pools alongside the main trail.

I was fortunate to snap a pic of this clutch of Sofa Cushions while their mother stood a few yards away.

A Discarded Children's Swimming Pool stands guard five yards off the main path, precisely where I had spotted it six months before. This time, however, it was joined by a Disintegrating Lawn Chair and the remains of a Girls Vinyl Lunch Bag (not shown).

A Bright Blue Gas Can in repose. 

A gaggle of Balding Automobile Tires takes turns sipping stagnant ditchwater.  The Deflated Basketball must wait its turn.

A solitary Collapsed Plastic Chair sits on its rusted, crumpled legs.

Out of respect for their holy culture, I blurred out some of the more… umm… poignant writings the natives left here.  My translation may be off slightly but it suffices to say that, whoever Justin is, he is not beloved by all. 

Several outcroppings of Discarded Roofing Shingles line the path, beckoning travelers closer with their promise of flattened bicycle tires and tetanus.

Overall, I was very impressed by the level of abject neglect that has been achieved in the short period of time this trail has been open to hikers, bikers, and illegal hunters.  Space and good taste prohibit me from listing all of the interesting things I discovered along this 1.5 mile pin-straight trail segment, but I encourage everyone to don some blaze orange biohazard suits, come on down, and start their own photo-journal. After your visit, be sure to thank the Suffolk Department of Parks and Recreation for a job well done!

Personally, I can't wait to see what the next ten miles of this trail is going to bring!

Rook Update II

Well, it turns out the little rook I carved a dozen years back that lived out its life in various junk drawers and finally placed in a Geocache two autumns ago is once again on the move (click here for the previous update).

You can get more detailed info at geocaching.com and searching for item TB56TVF.  If you sign up for a free account, you can also see a map.  Here is a summary of its travels to date:

• 10/2012 - Dropped off in Hampton, VA
• 11/2012 - Found and taken to Washington D.C.
• ??? - Sent to Seattle, Washington (made into Travel Bug here)
• 06/22/13 - Released into the wild
• 06/23/13 - 08/22/13 Bounced around a few caches in the Seattle area
• 08/23/13 - 11/03/13 - ???
• 11/04/13 - Arrived in Germany
• 11/06/13 - 11/24/13 Bounced around a few caches around Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
• 12/06/13 - 12/08/13 Taken from cache to cache in the London, England area in search of a new home (Soooo close to its goal of visiting castles in Scotland)
• 12/08/13 - No suitable caches were found, so it was returned to the cache in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
• 12/08/13 - 12/25/13 - Sitting and waiting…
• 12/26/13 - Picked up.
• 12/28/13 - Placed in a cache in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Current Location: N 27° 45.050 W 015° 34.390 (map)

Total travel distance since its release date: 7783.1 miles.

Thanks to all the cachers out there helping to move it along, and thanks to ReesaRice for including me in its adventure!  

Cheers, everyone!

Merry Christmas!

Once again, we at The 36th Lock wish you all the very merriest of Christmases!  May the season bring you and yours all the joy you hope for!

Insulin, Schminsulin!

Well, well, well… Lookee what we got here… An early Christmas present from my sisters.  How thoughtful!  By the way, definition 1b in the Merriam-Webster dictionary states that “thoughtful” means “characterized by careful reasoned thinking”.  It doesn’t say jack about being “nice”…

It’s a box of “candy” (and some playing cards)!  Ok, ok, the quotes are unfair.  Let’s call it a box of nostalgia tinged with evil.

I think the best way to write this up is just to list the items you see in the order in which I would like to eat them.  As you go down the list, divide the last one’s yumminess by 2, so, for example, the sponge candy is twice as good as the Sky Bar and is 8 times as tasty as the Bit-O-Honeys.  Here’s the list:

1. Sponge candy (Awesome and almost impossible to get here!)
2. Sky Bar
3. Clark Bar
4. Bit-O-Honey
5. Rock candy (in the vials, there at the top)
6. Pop Rocks
7. Candy buttons
8. Wax bottles
9. The jumbo playing cards (you read that right)
10. Teaberry gum
11. Butter rum Life Savers
12. Necco Wafers
13. The cardboard box everything was shipped in
14. The Chowards Violet Mints*
15. The Chowards Violet Gum*

* Eaten at gunpoint only

They said the Teaberry gum was put in there only because the store ran out of Blackjack licorice gum.  I can only assume Santa bought all of the packs to give out in lieu of coal this year as a cost-cutting measure.  The Chowards items are… let’s say, terrific.  By the way, definition 1a in the Merriam-Webster dictionary states that “terrific” means “very bad” (yup… look it up).

This year’s theme for a gift box for a friend of mine is “The Most Inconsiderate Story Ever Told”, so it looks like the mints, the Teaberry gum, and the Necco Wafers have a few more miles left in their regifting destiny.  I think it works well with the fact that one of his gifts didn’t arrive when the USPS said it would so he won’t get it until well after Christmas.  I’m just payin' it forward, I guess…

I’m not gonna list the other items I’m giving him but I will share a pic with you.  It might look like a bunch of drink coasters and an envelope to you but it fits the theme quite well.  I might even tell you why someday...

A Right Bitter Old Elf

"Hey, buddy," I asked our five-year-old while I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to nearly draw blood, "What does this say under the Ho Ho Ho part on this Christmas card?"

"That's the sound reindeer make when eating their food, like crunching a carrot."

"Oh.  Ok...  Good job."

"Thanks!"

Here's the inside:

And a Messy Kweznuz to you, too, kiddo.

Jingle Snake

Parents: Only a few more days left until your kid's Christmas vacation.  Make sure they know the words to this holiday classic before school lets out so they can share it with their teachers and classmates!

After you listen to it a few times, check out the "Transcript" button below the video (to the right of the words "Add To"... it looks like a little menu).  I guess I missed the Sigourney Weaver part...

Map Project

In our TV room, two empty picture hooks hung above the entertainment center since we moved into this place.  As part of my continuing effort to de-blank some of the walls in the house I decided to put up a map.

Why a map?  Well, maps do a really good job of filling unused wall space.  They can be made to be any size you need, they are interesting to look at, and they are generally tone-neutral. Years ago I salvaged a discarded nautical map and built a frame for it.  It now hangs above my wife’s desk in her office.  The map works there and I was pretty sure one would work above the TV as well.

Around the time I was thinking about exactly what kind of map to put up in the TV room I started playing through one of the Lost Treasures of Infocom titles and I came to my decision pretty quickly:  I would recreate the Great Underground Empire map from Zork I.  This iOS app has all the stuff you would have found in the box in these 27 original games including rotatable 3-D images of the “feelies” (non-paper stuff that came in the the box as well as the box itself), maps, the manual, and even the InvisiClues! So, if you were born while the Apollo Program was still a thing and much of this paragraph isn’t simply gibberish to you, check it out.  Activision did a good job with this.

After looking the maps over, I felt that straight up copying them wouldn't work for a couple of reasons.  First, the original maps are broken up over three separate pages (the area in and around the House, the Maze, and the entire rest of the Empire), and each of those pages is a vastly different scale than the others. Second, the maps are arranged more for a portrait form factor and the area where the map would hang was landscape.  Finally, a direct transcription of the maps seemed a little “on the nose”, I guess, and the whole thing would have been less of a woodworking project and more of a photocopying exercise.

Still, I wanted to be as faithful as possible to the idea of the original maps so I kept the relative room shapes and sizes the same and, of course, the paths between the map regions all lead to and from the right places. 

In the original maps you see a lot of “To Forest 3” or “To Grating Room” - the authors needed to do this to keep the maps easy to follow across three sub-regions, especially if the rooms were quite far away (on paper, anyway). Since that would result in a huge amount of finely printed text - way finer than my wood burning tool was capable of and certainly more detailed than I was willing to shoot for in this project - I decided that I would use direct pathways with as few crossover points as possible instead. The regions themselves and some of the connecting rooms needed to be shuffled to accommodate this strategy, and some of the path lengths needed to get from one place to another became very long, but I think the overall scheme worked out ok.

Like I implied, I used a wood burning tool for all of the paths and all of the writing you see in the pics in this post, but that wasn't always the plan.  Originally, I wanted the paths to be copper to match the nail heads in each of the corners of the rooms because I thought it would look cool.  It certainly looked cool in my head, but the idea simply did not manifest itself well in the real world.  The metal-to-wood bonds were messy, the copper would not cut straight, the paths would curl up and each one needed to be weighted down so the glue could set, the turns looked sloppy (even by my standards), and sealing the map would have shredded any brush I used.

I did about 30 room-to-room paths before dejectedly deciding to try and remove the copper.  If I couldn’t do it, I would just deal with it and slog through the best I could.   I got lucky, though, and most of the traces came up without too much trouble - just an ugly residue left over.  By using a quarter-inch circular ridged stamp attachment on the wood burning tool I was able to scorch the dried glue away fairly easily resulting in a stepping-stone type path for most of the room-to-room linkages.  It looked ok, so I kept with that method where it was appropriate to do so.  The only places where I used a finer tip for the paths were the maze rooms, the Strange Passage linkage, and the link from the Kitchen to the Studio.

I made the frame out of oak, and, like most things, it took a heck of a lot more time to create the jig for doing the job safely and nicely than it did to actually dado 1/4-inch slots into the frame members.  The background is made from a 2’ by 4’ sheet of oak plyboard which governed the size of the map as much as the size of the blank wall space did.  However, plyboard of any type was not going to work since that stuff gets super splintery when cutting against the grain and I had hundreds of cuts to make.  I wanted something other than oak to make the rooms stand out a bit, grain-wise.  Based of cost and availability, I ended up with two choices for the rooms - aspen or balsa.  After experimenting a little with cuts, sanding, staining, and etching things into some test pieces with a wood burning tool the balsa came out the clear winner.

The balsa had the extra benefit of being soft enough to push copper nail-heads through without pre-drilling.  The nails were used to give the room labels a bit more visual appeal and also give them the appearance of being mounted to a plyboard that way (they are actually glued there). The less said about the tediousness and the hand-crampiness of chopping the heads off hundreds and hundreds of copper-coated steel nails with a pair of side cutters, the better.

After the rooms were glued in place and the paths were made

there was still a lot of “white space” to fill.  I wasn’t too sure what to do about that.  I toyed with the idea of duplicating the legends from the original maps but that would have required me to differentiate between narrow passages, one-way passages, etc.  Instead I took the rest of the balsa, cut it into various sized squares and rectangles, stained the pieces slightly darker than the rooms,  and glued them into place as a space-fillers that look very much like elements in a rock wall.  Perfect for an Underground Empire.

The whole thing was sealed this afternoon with a semi-gloss poly and is now drying in the garage. The whole project took about 25 hours to do and it looks pretty good sitting on the sawhorses in the garage. A couple of days from now (after it has finished drying and outgassing) I will hang it above the TV. 

If it looks good I think I will do some more maps of this type, but next time on raw canvas or parchment paper.  We will see.