http://patalogs.altitudeslickness.com/

QUOTED
“As far as gear goes, you don’t need any of that sh*t. Nobody needs that stuff. If it makes people feel better to have a garage full of the very best gear available, great—I’ll sell it to them. We’re going to keep making the stuff, make it as good as we can, as functional as we can, but I don’t have any illusions that it’s very necessary. If you want real adventure, you leave all that at home and encourage the birds to sh*t on your head. That’s when you start having adventure.”
Yvon Chouinard

This is so moving. She is the songbird.

If I am paying for your health insurance can I also “ask” you to stop smoking and drinking, and also “encourage” you to exercise regularly? Just wondering.

I must admit I am a pretty much in awe. Is this for real?
The link below is CNN video coverage of the new Immigration amnesty bill. It is 3 minutes and 32 seconds long.
CNN – Amnesty bill’s worst provisions

Flaming Lips covering “Borderline”. So good!

I got this in my email and found it to be hilarious for many reasons. They also offered some other items but I couldn’t get the image to shrink enough to display and still show it all so here is a link to the full size image. Enjoy.

This is pretty awesome.
http://www.swiss-miss.com/2009/03/extreme-sheep-led-art.html

Christmas Chisels

Originally uploaded by crookedshack.

Lie-Nielsen chisels for Christmas.

Well that would be a lot. I have been mucho busy with the house and with work and with side jobs and with a woodworking class. It has been pretty much non-stop. The first item was rewiring the house for can lights, switches, and outlets. In one day I along with the help of my electrician buddy and his helper put in 8 can lights and ran 8 switches – 6 of which were 3-ways, and re-routed a switched recepticle so that the switches controlled the can lights in the living room and the recepticle was always hot. It was one of the longest days for me since it started at 9am and I was just tightening my last wire nut at 11:30pm. What a great feeling though at the end of the day being completely done. Secondly I took on a side job to build 18 picture frames that were a lot more involved than I anticipated. It took a lot longer to complete them than I anticipated because I had to clue up the stock before I could cut it size and that was the most time consuming part of the project. In the end they turned out well but I felt bad that I had to charge a little more than I anticipated. I think the buyer is pretty happy with them though as I have not gotten a call from him.

Last week I spent the week in Whiteland, IN taking a class on Traditional Woodworking taught by Chris Gochnour. It was one of the most amazing experiences I have had to date and if I could make a living building things with hand tools I would gladly accept. It is so much more rewarding and personal to create something with hand tools. While some machines were used in the rough dimensioning of the wood, an unnecessary practice for hand tools, all of the joinery and the final dimensioning was done with hand tools. I am addicted and have cleaned up my bench so that I may use it again for hand tools. I am realizing too that I need to build a better bench but that will have to wait. I will post pictures of the toolchest once it is done.

Seja went for her 35 week checkup and everything looks to be ok. She is feeling more and more uncomfortable so we are looking forward to the birthday.

That’s all for now – Enjoy.

Blogged with Flock

Happy Birthday, Madeline. Our little girl turns two today. We were planning to have a party for her on Saturday but since our lives are pretty hectic right now with getting the house in order for a new baby in May, we opted for a low key mellow family get together. We got the cake again from Sugar Daddy and it was awesome (still is – it was a big cake). It was half chocolate and half vanilla with lots of good icing – Madeline’s favorite part as you can see from the video. All in all it was a good weekend and Madeline made out pretty well for just turning two.

Madeline’s 2nd birthday

Blogged with Flock

Our friend Ele has launched her new scrapbooking business and website Pixtorie. It is an extremely intuitive site to navigate with a lot of nice, and easy to use, technical features available for photos, layouts, and text. I have already set up a little online scrapbook of my own in less than 5 minutes. Please visit and set up an account to get started on your own scrapbook. Enjoy.

Blogged with Flock

I am testing the embedded video feature of Google Video. Here is a video of our little girl reading in her little cubby.

Update: As you can see it is not working. I will have to investigate.

Update: I got it to work.

I’m still here and I’m still on hiatus from the enjoyable aspect of the computer world i.e. this blog. But I had to take a moment and write about my trip to Atlanta, GA for the International Woodworking Fair 2006. What a great trip. There were aspects that I could have done without but the overall trip was wonderful. The bad part was the 8 hour drive to stay in an old downtown Super8, arrive at 1am on Friday morning only to be told that our reserved room had been given away. I had not intended to share a bed with my buddy Brad (who talked me into going to this thing) but the only room available was a single. Luckily it had a king sized bed so we didn’t have to get cozy. Our room ended up being comped and we were only there for about 6 hours so not too bad. The rest of the trip totally made up for all of that.

I saw so much at the show and met some really great people that I could have slept on the floor and it would have been worth it. My buddy Brad who drove and arranged it all – Thanks! – had taken a course at Marc Adams woodworking school last year and his instructor, Gary Striegler, was also at the show. We met up with him on Friday morning and he introduced us to a couple of the Kreg employees. Turns out all of these guys are extremely cool and a blast to hang out with. Gary got us oriented and took us to a couple of booths where I made my first purchase. I picked up a couple of GREX tools. A 23 gauge headless pin nailer, and a 1/4″ crown stapler. There were show deals which I saved on but the real deal came when Gary hooked me up with an additional 15000 pins for free. Thanks, Gary. I spent a little money on the trip but I now have some great new tools and the experience was wonderful. There may be something else come of this trip too, and if it does I will definitely be writing about it.

Blogged with Flock

Cats in sinks – This is awesome.

We have started a new project and I am really excited to be doing new construction again. Our last project was a remodel and while it was a great learning experience and I love the results it was the dirtiest job I have ever done. The new project is two structures that are connected by a porch/breezeway that will be used as guest houses/bed & breakfasts. The theme is contemporary rustic and the owner is giving us a lot of leeway as far as input. We are only in the early stages right now but you can see how it is looking here. We are doing all of the carpentry work on this project since it is small but we will be bringing in the help of our good friend Dan Dan the carpenter man for a lot of the high framing.

The structures are 16′ x 30′ each and sit over a 9′ basement. There are no stairs to the basement from the interior as they are going to mainly be storage basements with the option for finising later. The height of the walls from the basement ceiling is 16′ with a 12/12 pitch roof vaulted so add another 6 feet or so for a total interior height of 22′. There is a loft with exposed tounge and groove ceiling/flooring that will be in half of the 30′ and this will be the sleeping area. There will be a small bath and kitchen and the rest is sitting area. There will be decks coming off of each corner and possibly a hot tub on the lower level outside of the basements. The utilities will be housed in a hallway that connects the basements. This will also have a washer and dryer with two laundry chutes.

The footprints of each building are small so that will give us an opportunity to really kick up all of the extras. I’m pretty excited because I’m sure we will be building a lot of custom items. I will be posting pictures regularly and keeping a better journal of this building on my new site once it is set up. For now you can take a look at the pictures here.

Blogged with Flock