wed dec 7
It’s Pearl Harbor day and, as the sailor said to his friend, “There seems to be a little Nip in the air.”
We were in Burlington and we bought some fancy coffee beans at the local organic food store. When we ran out of our regular beans, Mary re-loaded the grinder with this new stuff and pressed “grind.”
Nothing came out. She dragged out the old grinder and pressed “grind,” and the beans mostly bounced off the blades , and it took forever to make a pot of really weak coffee out of really coarse grinds. Mary blamed it on the grinder, and I took it downstairs, brushed it out, and blasted it with compressed air, and then tried it again. Still no beans.
It turns out the fancy artisan single-source estate-grown local-roasted Guatemalan beans we bought are roasted until they’re hard, dry little balls that slide like teflon off the hardened steel grinder blades. (Or maybe they were trying to make a hazelnut blend out of real hazelnuts, but forgot to add the coffee beans.)
So the next time you wonder whether all coffee beans are alike: No. Stick with Starbucks.
According to my focus group, I am hurting myself way too badly, way too often, and I really ought to be more careful. That’s exactly what went through my mind when my utility knife slipped and I chopped my thumb in half yesterday.
I hope to die a death by a thousand cuts. Here is #605
My better half, sticking out of a christmas tree.
thu dec 8
I’ve been composting with worms for about a year now and (it probably sounds dumb, but) I’m getting better at it. One of the lessons I learned this summer was: drain off the “compost tea,” lest it should collect in the bottom of the stack and drown all the worms. So what I do is I leave the spigot open and let the tea dribble into a cottage cheese container and, when it gets full every couple of days, I chuck it out the door into the garden.
Well this morning, I got out of bed, and Mary was in crisis mode. She dragged me to the window and tells me she has skipped her morning shower and postponed the laundry, because the septic system has exploded, and there’s shit on the snow all around the manhole! Calm down, dear. Breathe. It’s just yesterday’s cup of tea from the worm farm.
Warm worm tea.
sun dec 11
Yesterday was the Sutherland Welles Holiday Party. It went well. As usual, Holly had volunteered to bring a dessert, and she brought 4 of them. When the evening wound down, Jon collected their stuff to take home with them and the remnant of the cheesecake slid off the tray and landed, face up, on the floor. The ‘5 second rule’ applied, though, and we scooped it up, put it back on the tray, and they got ready to take it home with them. At the very end, after holiday handshakes had been traded all around, Jon picked up the covered cake dish with the cheesecake in it, headed for the door, and the bottom fell out and the cheesecake landed, face down this time, on the floor again. I told him I’d take care of it, and they headed home, sans cheesecake. I threw it out.
Cheesecake: Top view.
Cheesecake. Bottom view.
Christmas is right around the bend and I had no idea what to do about it. Usually, I try to do a production run on something weirdly beautiful, and then bask in gratitude and admiration for as long as it lasts. But inspiration refused to strike this year until a week before Christmas, when I decided to make a bunch of steel cages.
I knew I needed at least one, and when that one came out good, I went for broke, and scoured all the local antique stores for antique bottles. I didn’t notice until too late that one of the bottles was tapered, so only 10 out of 11 of them worked. So if your cage doesn’t have a bottle in it, just brag to yourself: “I’m number nine!”
(If you read this before your bottle shows up, then ‘sorry.’ There’s been some delays getting them shipped out.)
It turns out that brazing is a lot like welding, and it takes practice to get good.
So if your bottle is badly brazed, it’s because I had to start somewhere.
The base centering jig needed 11 pairs of tapped holes.
I totally forgot, until it was too late, that I’d bought a tapping head for my mill at the last auction I went to, and ended up doing it the hard way.
Idiot.
I did this 11 times and only ruined 1 mill.
I kept one for myself.
Every once in awhile, I take a screen shot of my c3pr project so that, years from now, when my 15 minutes of fame have faded, I can look back and remind myself of how hard it was to get obvious things to work. For the last year of so, when I’ve worked on c3pr at all, I’ve struggled with a new ‘vision component,’ processing real pictures of real ping pong balls, in real time, and tried to make it work seamlessly with my flight simulator and trajectory controller. It’s been really hard.
Here are a couple of screen shots.
Tracking the ball in flight, it works pretty good 90% of the time, but once my algorithm goes haywire, it stays haywire. I gotta work on that.
In the flight simulator, the ball is modeled as a falling sphere in gravity and a viscous fluid, while the cameras are seeing a ball on a thread, swinging like a pendulum, so you KNOW they’re not going to match. Making the math fail gracefully has been a challenge, because there are so many ways it can go wrong.
fri dec 23
The menu for Christmas dinner, I’m told, is beef stew. (Mary’s good at beef stew, but it seems like more of a Last Supper type of dish, to me) She wants to load the stew with carrots from the garden, so a few days ago, she had me dig some up. The ground was beginning to freeze, so I brought in some 2″ thick slabs of frozen dirt, with carrots sticking out of them, frozen on top and fresh below the frost line. I left them in a bucket in the sink to thaw. They were a soggy mess, and she needed the sink for something else, so I moved the bucket out to the garage, where they froze and thawed, along with the weather. Tonight, she got started on the stew, and needed the carrots, but they’d turned to mush, so she wanted me to dig up another bucketful. I headed out there with a 5 gallon bucket, a shovel, and a flash light, and did some digging in in the snow in the moonlight. The frost was deeper than it was last week, though, and I could not come up with a single carrot.
The girls, getting gifts.
tue dec 27
“I haven’t had this much fun since my dog died.” I guess I’m going to have to wait a while before I can use that one in a conversation.
Celia is here for the holidays and she’s brought Tara, her dog, so that the local vet can do some minor repairs on her jaw, paws, and leg, all in one sitting. Everything went well, and the dog is handling it better than the people. The dog didn’t die, and it’s been a fairly fun visit.
I waited for the snow cover to thin out and then moved the motorcycle down to the basement so I could work on it.
I learned a valuable lesson: You don’t ride in mud and ice. It rides you.
sat dec 31
The kids are here while Maggie is in New York with her sisters. We took them bowling last night, and Suri was feeling pretty confident, and bet me $5 that she would beat me. I’m not much of a bowler, but I can beat a 9 year old, so I tried to make it fair by spotting her 5 points for a gutter ball, but I still creamed her. It finally dawned on her that she was going to fork over 1/4 of her net worth for a gambling debt, and she was munching sadly on her bacon cheeseburger while I finished my beer, and I offered to buy the bacon off her burger for five bucks. Lesson learned.