Google has been my search engine of choice for a good five years. i’m not yelling to abandon ship but snap looks pretty dang neat.

I wish i knew about this auction earlier. My dad told me about this technology a few years ago. I’m glad to see it starting to work down to the masses.

I had been thinking about how my father’s photographic style and my brother’s differ and i stumbled on this collection of photographs. There are so many inspirations. I love the interweb.

Print is nice too though – if you want to give me an independence day gift perhaps a subscription to readymade or makezine.

I have a line of projects that have formed in my head. I have a pile of them in closets and on the porch, in the yard, in the carport, and the boiler room. But today i want to the dump and salvaged for more stuff. You see, last week i was up there and noticed a pile of aluminum tent poles. Not just a few – a lot of them. Some were broken and there was a lot of shock cord showing – pointing out that they were probably pretty beat. But you know me. Gears started turning. I didn’t decide what to make out of them until after i was piling them into Cena’s car. I planned on turning this…

into a lounge chair. (Cue music.) So by about 1:00 i was going through that mess of poles and cutting out elastic and sorting by color and dimensions. I had to do a little rooting in my supply of never discarded “could come in handy sometime” lumber to find a few pieces of yellow cedar that would accommodate the curves that i had in mind.

If you look at the above picture you seel the chair was going to take after the Adirondack style furniture. I think the low angle for the back legs greatly increases the stability over what my amateur carpentry skills can create.

Of course, i decided to add some attractive accents to the frame before completing anything actually functional. I notched the base piece for the back supports and have pieces of metal attached until i figure out exactly what i’ll put on the sides of the finished piece. (You didn’t think i actually finished a project in one day did you?)

If you look closely at the picture above you’ll see that i marked the route for the curve of the back to give me a guide for the drilling. I fired up my trusty Makita 9.6 volt cordless drill and rifled through my dwindling set of drill bits. I selected a decent match, drilled one hole, looked at the number of holes that were going to be done and said “i have to go to the hardware store”. I bought a corded drill (finally!) for $55 and a bit set for $65. Do you think those costs should count against the project? My new drill handled the job like a champ. It was perhaps a little too aggressive. The smell of cedar filled the air.

I then tapped in 84 of the longest gold colored pieces into one half. I then tried to get the other board to line up with the staves. No way. I would have needed 42 people to make that work. So i pulled all of them back out and just put four in – in key locations i could handle getting that lined up. I then started to pound a piece through about every other spot.

I figured that going with every other would let me flip it over to catch the open ones – this is most important because not all of the segments are the same length. some stuck out an inch and most didn’t span the entire width. By having half started from one side and the other half start on the other i was able to make the chair very stable. So stable that i actually don’t need to add the bracing that i had planned on in the first place. Of course, we needed to test it out…

And here is the semi-final product. I want to conceal the holes and eliminate the metal plates eventually.

I have plenty of the tent pole pieces to do another chair. I’m thinking of doing a more upright seat though. And Cena challenged me to make a purse out of them too so i have that task ahead of me too. Wheels turning…

This project took nine hours of thought and work. I spent the $5 for the salvage permit, and besides the tools mentioned above i had everything else on hand – a couple of galvanized metal strips and some screws to connect the cedar planks. With the meal breaks and everything else excluded i spent about 4-5 straight hours working on this.

If you ever ask me “what’s up?” and i reply “not much” then i lied. i have been busy and there actually is a light at the end of the tunnel. Last night was the last bit of djing at Kito’s for me for a while. The Harbor Bar has asked if i’ll consider playing there. I’m taking a sabbatical though. Next Tuesday will see me wrapping up 4th of July reports and cleaning up our messes and then i’ll be done with that until next year. We’ll all be done with it for a while.

My grandparents have given me a subscription to Consumer Reports for a good 8 or so years. I love the magazine. First thing i do is flip to the last page and read the “selling it” section where they catch spelling errors, marketing goofs, and other follies. I’m often not even out of the post office parking lot when i have that page completed. Well, Cena just found a perfect one for their packaging swap. The container on the left is the one she is replacing with the container on the right. Same number of pills. Fortunately they were the same price too.

Here are some neat things on the internet like a google map combined with 2000 census info.

I do get pissy when someone out-barbie-crafts me. Of course, if you want to make me feel better you could get me this cell phone. This sign made me laugh so hard i started to cry. Have you grokked yet? I should give props to Hezz for the bacon bandages. They almost make me want wounds.

Not many people know this… but my cousin Dylan will be visiting me and in town on Saturday. He’s getting on the Kennicott in Prince Rupert on Friday morning and arrives in Petersburg at 2am Saturday. He’s only staying for about 24 hours before he gets back on another northbound ferry until he gets to Skagway. He aims to be on the arctic circle for summer solstice.