Category Archives: Uncategorized
Departure Day
Well, departure day is upon us. The weather isn’t quite as bad (yet) as predicted, our plane is on its way and for the moment looks imminently flyable. Our bags are packed and should qualify for check-in size, and with any luck TSA will allow us to carry our hiking poles and tent stakes as well. If we get out of here on time we have a few minor things to get at REI in Anchorage, and will probably do dinner and a movie before going back to the airport for our redeye to Boston. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, since our PenAir flight hasn’t actually landed here yet – one step at a time!
A woodworking experiment
About a year ago my parents mailed me a Henckels fork they’ve had for years. The handle was rotting off and could I replace it? After reviewing a lot of online material on the art of knife-handle making, I felt ready to give it a try.
The fork, with the original handle removed
Olive wood block with roughly shaped handle blanks
First the old handle had to come off. I used the side that was still intact as a guide for the new handle. After that I continued shaping the handle halves until they roughly matched the tang on the fork, then I glued and bolted them in place.
Handle mounted, glued and bolted to the tang
Here you can see that the wood isn’t quite flush with the steel yet – I did the final shaping and sanding of the handle after gluing and bolting it.
Fully shaped and sanded, but not yet finished
Left is the handle after I finished shaping the halves, and had cut off and filed down the bolt heads. I had some problems with this part, namely using the grinder too fast, filing too much away on one bolt and getting another one so hot that it actually burned the wood around the bolt hole. Anyway, I couldn’t easily fix that without starting over from scratch, so I left the blemishes as-is and continued.
Finished product
Right is after four coats of tung oil and some buffing. Not too shabby. My parents liked it well enough that they’re sending me another fork to fix, so I’ll have the opportunity to learn from my mistakes!
Cats don’t camp well
I’ve acquired some new gear in preparation for my trek across Wales, among which is a bivy sack. Rather than taking a tent I’ll carry just a lightweight tarp along with the bivy (and sleeping bag and mat, of course) in the event I’m unable to make it to a village or simply cannot find an available bed. I thought I should test the combination in my yard, to make sure I was comfortable, warm and dry enough, before using it in the bush and so set the tarp up one morning with plans to sleep underneath it that night when I returned from work. It was a good day to test the gear – just a tad windy with scattered showers, so I was able to confirm that the tarp could withstand the wind and shed rain quite readily. By the time I got home that night the rain had stopped and I had only a light breeze with which to contend. I blew up my mattress, grabbed both my and the dog’s sleeping gear (he has a portable bed for camping trips) and headed for the yard. Biscuit came as well, enticed I’m sure by the novelty of doing something outside, in the dark, late at night – couldn’t miss that now, could she? The dog plopped down on his bed, I snuggled into my layers of various synthetics and, finding the temperature and comfort levels imminently acceptable, promptly drifted off to sleep. I was awakened moments later by the cat, walking in circles around the tarp and yowling plaintively. She’s used to sleeping with me at night – in a bed. I invited her into my sleeping bag and surprising enough she crawled in, only to dart out a minute or so later. Mummy bags aren’t really big enough for a human and a cat. I went back to sleep and was again awakened by pathetic meows and cold, wet paws on my face, though the billowing of the tarp sent her scurrying off almost immediately. Again I drifted off to sleep and again I was awakened, this time by Biscuit trying to find a purchase on the slick, loose bivy material. She finally found a space to curl up, behind my knees and surprisingly close to the dog. She must have been pretty desperate to sleep so close to him and as soon as he changed position she shot off into the yard. I kept thinking that surely she’d go inside after a while but no, a fourth time she woke me with her dreadful, pathetic cries. I realized I wasn’t going to get any sleep no matter how comfortable I was with Biscuit around, so after pushing and shoving the dog out from under the tarp – he really likes “camping” – I grabbed my stuff and went back inside, Biscuit trailing happily behind me. Clearly she isn’t nearly so enamored of camping as is Vitus.
Orchids in Alaska
I have six orchids which I’ve collected over the past three years, some of them bought and some of them obtained through plant trades. I almost killed two of them, one last year and one the year before, but brought those two back and have otherwise managed to keep all six plants generally healthy. Last summer one of them bloomed, twice, an event about which I was quite excited since I never really thought I’d ever be able to get a tropical orchid to bloom in the Aleutian’s sub-Arctic conditions. Well, this winter a second plant, one of my paphs, has bloomed. I actually thought it was simply new leaf growth at first, since the plant’s leaves have a touch of purple when they’re young, but it turned out to be a single, large, voluptuous flower. It has so far been open for about a month and shows no sign yet of drying and dying.
A Big Apple
I got my first PC in something like 1991. It had Windows 3.1 on it and I promptly managed to cause problems for myself by deleting File Manager. For those of you who are too young (or too old) to remember Win 3.1, deleting File Manager then would be like getting rid of Windows Explorer and My Computer today and unless you have a really good grasp of DOS commands you essentially can’t access the inner workings of your computer. Deleting File Manager caused rather a problem and one which I felt obliged to solve on my own, since I’d been stupid enough to create it. Thus began a lengthy love-hate relationship with Microsoft, Windows and PCs in general. From that rather inauspicious beginning I learned about reformatting and partitioning drives, rolling back drivers, and PCI cards, PCI-Express cards, PCMCIA cards, CF, SD, EIDE, SATA, DDR, SDRAM… I’ve learned that dust is the biggest enemy of the common PC and that memory modules which have been secure in your motherboard for years can suddenly, simply, become insecure. Motherboards, by the way, come in different shapes and sizes and you’d better know whether you have an ATX or a BTX or a micro-ATX form factor if you want to get a new case. Fans die, and when they do your processor will probably follow soon thereafter. Hard drives die too, typically with little warning and never, ever right after you’ve backed up all your data. Those little beeps when your PC starts are a secret code telling you which part is going to die next, something I had to figure out once in order to get my PC working again though I can’t for the life of me now remember what was wrong. Anyway, I’ve put a lot of time, money, aggravation and even occasionally enjoyment into my PCs over the last 20 years – fixing my PC became a hated hobby, something at which I was quite adept but which brought less and less pleasure.
Two weeks ago I started having problems with my current PC. Beeps here, failures to shut down there, error messages about memory locations, the occasional reluctance to boot – all those telltale signs that I was going to be spending a lot of time figuring out what was wrong and learning some new way to fix it. I sighed. I shouldn’t have to fix my computer every couple of months. I was tired of having to fix it every few months. I started thinking about how nice it would be to just turn on my computer and have it work. Shari’s computer does that. It turns on, it works, it turns off. No blue screens, no “oh shit” moments, it just works. I talked about the memory error messages I’d received with my computer guru buddy Brandon. Oh, says he, you need to stress test your memory modules to ensure that the voltage tolerance is correctly set for the combination of memory and processor. You should have tested your memory modules before you used them. Are you sure you have the right kind? Or some such bullshit, at which time I thought to myself, “THAT is exactly what I mean.” I don’t want to have to spend all that time just so it’ll turn on. I just want it to work.
And so, I bought a Mac. a MacBook Pro, to be precise. It flew over the Pacific to Anchorage today and in fact was probably on one of the flights whose contrails I watched floating in the sky above me this afternoon. I think it has to go to Tennessee next, and then it will be flown back to Anchorage and then back half-way across the Pacific to get here. I don’t care how little sense that makes. I just keep telling myself that when it finally gets here, it’s going to work when I turn it on and I won’t have to fix it.