Author Archives: bilborg

About bilborg

I am who I am, there's plenty of data on this site to tell you more. Briefly, I'm a husband, computer geek, avid reader, gardener, and builder of furniture.

Many Things Accomplished

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Our New Quilt of Many Colours

Our New Quilt of Many Colours

But first, look at the lovely quilt that my lovely Marcia made for our California king. The colors and design are gorgeous (and they pick up some of the colors in the painting over the bed). Awesome!

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I managed to get three coats of finish on the shelves over the two days. I patched some work systems remotely, and tested them once rebooted. I roasted coffee, went shopping, and gave myself a haircut. I walked the dog a few times.

And Congress stole an hour of sleep from me, and the rumour is that I don’t get it back for nearly 8 months … and then without interest. Bastards. And I did the taxes for 2012. Bastards. Balance our checkbook, eh? Bastards.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of  Spc. Cody D. Suggs, 22, of West Alexandria, Ohio. He died March 7 at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, as a result of a non-combat incident.

Terrifying weather…

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Everything is closed … well, lots of things, including the “we’ll not `close` the government ever again” Federal Government. Schools. Etc. Post office is working, and aggressively delivering in case the snow gets worse. Some will have to stick to the roads for it to be worse:

March 2013 snow

March 2013 snow

I shot that just after 8 this morning. As of a few minutes ago (just after noon) … no change. I’d be quaking in my boots … but wait, I don’t need boots, the snow isn’t sticking … and it’s warmed up to 36 degrees F. Yeah. Scary.

Musical … well, everything.

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I’d say “musical chairs”, but a lot more than chairs are involved. Marcia’s got some quilting work coming up that is approximately a billion times easier (using Top Gear maths, there) if she is able to use all the power of her fully operational Death Quilter. Errr, or something like that. But the only place we can do the full build out of her quilting frame is the library, because the other choices are someone’s woodshop, and the living room. So, here’s what the library looked like at 10:30 this morning.

Library before reorganization

Library before reorganization

The blue chairs, the occasional table, and the bookcase move walls, left to right. That table to the right? That’s going into the breakfast nook.  The table that’s in the breakfast nook? That’s going down the stairs, to hold up the embroidery machine, which currently lives on a corner of Marcia’s cutting table. The cutting table? That goes into the fabric room downstairs, once the quilting frame is migrated upstairs. Here’s the quilting frame in it’s original cramped quarters. Marcia and I had already brought the long arm sewing machine  upstairs.

Quilting machine frame in fabric room.

Quilting machine frame in fabric room.

The HandiQuilter frame actually has three 4′ long sections. At the time of initial install, we tried to keep everything confined to Marcia’s half of the basement, which meant only installing it as an 8′ system, and into cramped quarters at that. Marcia headed out to meet friends and I got to work. I prepared the library, then disassembled and migrated the quilting frame upstairs. I also pulled in the boxed parts that I needed to build out to full length. By two in the afternoon, I had the whole thing back together, no left over parts, in the library:

Quilting Machine in the Library

Quilting Machine in the Library

With that done, I did a bit of prep disassembly on the cutting table, and then had a late lunch while I waited for Marcia to get home. She helped me move the cutting table pieces between rooms, then I reassembled that in the fabric room. Then I disassembled the breakfast nook table, hauled it downstairs, and put it back together there. We put the embroidery machine on that. THEN I moved the previously disassembled round table bits into the breakfast nook and reassembled it there.

It was a long day of work, and a lot of stairs, too. We still have to find homes for a few displaced things, but progress on that tomorrow (I hope). Whew!

33 Days

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Last night, we finished our celebration of Marcia’s birthday (which was back on the 15th) with a viewing of the latest Bond flick: Skyfall. Good movie, excellent action, good pacing, and while it’s a tad predictable, it almost has to be with a franchise as venerable as Bond. The rest of the weekend was pretty full, too: woodworking, company party, shopping, washing of cars … a long list.

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33 days – that’s our interval since the prior casualty announcement from DoD. Wow! Still, today we got word that Staff Sgt. Jonathan D. Davis, 34, of Kayenta, Arizona, had died Feb. 22 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. I’d been hoping to keep up the streak of not having any casualties to mourn… Our condolences to the Staff Sergeant’s family, friends, and unit mates. Semper Fi.

Twitter-spotting #43

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“@TonikJDK: Fair warning. If I see someone wearing Google Glass I will run up and yell ‘Safe Search off, horse porn!!’”

’nuff said.

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“@tenderlove: I wish name tags were a hip thing. It would prevent many awkward situations.”

There are so many ways to interpret this. My first reading was that he wants nametags on peoples hips, instead of the standard left-breast position. After all, that would prevent the awkward excuse, “No, really, I was just trying to read your nametag, ma’am!” Then I realized that he probably meant hip, as in cool. But really … hip ain’t cool.

Hip was before cool, and hip may be again, someday, but today isn’t the day. Today we have hipsters, which is an utterly different species from the hipsters of yesteryear. Today’s hipsters are, among other things, utterly lacking in hips. You can’t wear skinny jeans much if you have any hips. And, hipsters ain’t hip.

Now, nametags. I’m not in favor of those. I’m utterly terrible with names. Some days I wake up, look in the mirror, and mutter, “Who …?” That’s just one example of how bad I am with names. Nametags would remove most of my excuses, leaving me with just “being a dumbass with a name-forgetting fetish”. And no one wants to cop to that. So down with nametags. Up with confusion and being called Bob!

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Finally, a big thank you to Jeri Ryan, who sent me to PetaPixel’s snowflake post, which led me to http://chaoticmind75.livejournal.com/, where Alexey Kljatov keeps his blog. Wowser!

George Lincoln’s Birthday

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Or something like that.

I neglected to check in last night – I actually stayed off the computer all day yesterday. I checked email on the phone a couple of times, for reasons about to become apparent, but that was all. Woodshop work, and Top Gear UK rounded out my Sunday.

Saturday was a big system upgrade project. We’d been preparing for the event for the better part of a year: endless cycles of build, test, and document. Towards the end I was losing sleep thinking about it each night. Finally the day came, and all of the prep work paid off. There was precious little that didn’t go according to plan, but I did spend about 12 hours welded to the laptop, working remotely. Whew! I was really looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Around 0100 on Sunday morning, truck and siren blaring by in the road. Sigh, someone’s had a fall, or a stroke, or a heart attack. Then, more trucks and sirens, and still more. Looking out a back window, I saw flames much taller than the house they were consuming,  about a quarter mile away from our place. While the sirens stopped, the engines at full rev running the pumps made the next couple of hours sleepless, too.

I drove past yesterday – the house is gutted, it’s going to be a scrape-off. Good news, though – everyone made it out of the house okay! All the stuff can be replaced, with time and money.

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Wonder of wonders, still no new casualties announced in the last week. Glad of that.

Clear and Cold

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Thankfully, we didn’t take the winter storm hit that nailed the North East – one of the “advantages”of being mid-Atlantic, I guess. It was quite windy, especially over Friday night into Saturday morning, that much did swing south, but other than a bit of rain on Friday, there was no precipitation for us. All it takes is half an inch of snow to grind this place nearly to a halt.

I will take note that my 328i really does do well in the snow and ice. Earlier in the week, I was joking that I’d have a chance to see how much of a big, fat liar the marketing folks are, showing me commercials with BMWs slewing around on snow-covered areas appearing to be in fairly decent control… We did have some frozen stuff on the ground for the morning commute, in the early part of the week, and the traction control systems on the car are simply excellent.

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I made progress on the shelving, mostly, over the weekend. I also picked up a piece of poplar, ensuring it was straight and true. With that, I fabricated a sled to use for truing up rough-sawn stock, like the cherry 4/4 lumber I’m going to use for the surface of my “desk” table in the new office:

Ripping sled for rough lumber

Ripping sled for rough lumber

At least one edge of most of the 4/4 lumber I have is raw edge, that is, the part of the tree from which bark is removed. The two main surfaces are nicely surfaced, and one edge is sort of straight. I screw through the two uprights on the sled (or with narrow stock, using a buffer scrap) to hold the piece stable. I run the sled through once, yielding a straight edge. I can then unmount the board from the sled, turn it over, and make the second side straight and parallel to the first edge. Now the board is ready for the jointer. Seven or eight of those, and I’ve got a desktop!

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Another week with no casualties announced by DoD! It doesn’t mean that we don’t have folks in harm’s way … but I’m grateful that we haven’t had any losses announced since 23 Jan! Thank you to every warrior out there – you do us all honor in the execution of your duty!

There’s a game on? Also, a Red Letter day!

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Ah, but you see, the Ravens ensured that I wouldn’t have to watch football this year. But this morning I did get rolling on the first shelving install (the new five-foot wide unit), following shopping…

Old shelving setup... w/dog

Old shelving setup… w/dog

Lexi always has to “help”, but actually through most of this process today she was a good girl, and slept on a chair in the library. I unloaded all of those shelves into stacks in the guest bedroom, then hauled the shelves downstairs. I’m going to make use of the white one in my storage room, for paints and such. The brown one is a bit crufty, and likely to sport a “free” sign on it, by the roadside, come the next sunny weekend day. Then I hauled the new shelves up stairs, and did final assembly in my office:

Final assembly of the new shelving

Final assembly

The shiny dark teal backers really look good! I got the deeper bottom unit together, then stood it up and down a few times while I adjusted the feet to match the floor: and the unit is level side to side, and canted just a bit back. Then I brought up the upper section, assembled it, and put it up top. It’s screwed to the lower section with countersunk stainless screws.

Shelving in place

Shelving in place

Now all that was left was to haul all the books back in, migrate my paperbacks over from their triple-deep stacks on the other side of the room (behind the camera in most of these shots), and load it all in:

New shelves loaded

New shelves loaded

Some of the media there is likely to move across the room to the four-foot wide shelves I’m going to build next, to leave room for more books here and there. But it’s big, stable, and I really do like it. It isn’t perfect, but I built it, and I’m happy about that.

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I’m chuffed to bits – DoD reported no casualties in the last week. I don’t think there’s been none since I started this ritual to ensure that I gave attention to the cost our troops pay for our foreign policies. Huzzah!