Cool Caddy

My Condiment/Beer Caddy

I came across the plans for this backyard barbecue accessory on a woodworking website. It is a clever idea with some fun woodworking challenges. After a long perusal of dozens of different woods, I choose walnut for my prototype. With a little Tung Oil, it really came alive. I made a bunch of mistakes that I will avoid in the future, but it still looks good enough to give to a friend. To sweeten the gesture, I filled it up with many of my favorite Caribbean sauces and a bottle of Ting. I prefer it as a condiment caddy, though I cannot swear it won't find other utility. I think I will make several of these for friends this summer :)

Kipp's Hipster Mid-Century Modern Console/Bookcase

Kipp and Rose bought a house a few months ago that was built and embellished somewhat eccentrically by a man who loved wood and mid-century (1950's) decor. After we put in a few hickory hardwood floors in the upstairs bedrooms, we decided to tackle a mid-century console/bookcase that he had found in a book. The floors proved to be challenging but they turned out great:

While we were doing the upstairs floors, they had a professional crew come in and install oak flooring in the living and dining rooms. Now it was time for the new piece of furniture. Even though the design of the console was very simplistic, there were some difficult parts to the process. The basic case is made from cherry plywood and the trick there was getting all four 45 degree corners to line up. We edge banded the plywood and tried out a few new techniques to add wooden fasteners to the case. The base is made of solid cherry with pocket screws connecting the runners and legs. Finally, we used my favorite formula for a stain - 3 parts tung oil, one part boiled linseed oil, and a few splashes of denatured alcohol. It really darkened the cherry nicely and it will continue to darken with age. We finished it with a few coats of wipe on polyurethane and some furniture wax. 

I have become a vagabond woodworker - having no real shop, I squat in the garages and basements of friends. Here we are working in Kipp's garage on his console and Patricia's sliding barn door.

Kipp is ironing here; anyway, he is attaching the edge banding to the sides of the plywood with a heat-activated veneer.

The edge banding is slightly wider than the plywood so we trimmed some of it with a flush trimming router bit. I did revert back to my favorite block plane to do the rest of it.

The case built with the dividers installed and the first coat of oil.

The base is a bit unusual, as the Scandinavian design called for it to be smaller than the case.

The finished console/bookcase attached and sitting pretty on top of the new oak floor in the dining room. 

Rose was ready and had it adorned in no time at all. I have to admit, even though it is kind of hipster doofusish, it looks really nice.

Kipp's next project is to gut and restore a mid-century stereo console he bought last week. I will probably help him with the internal woodworking bits. For me, I hope to get the last bit of wood to finish the sliding barn door, then move on to something new :)

International TESOL - Seattle

I was fortunate enough to attend the International TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) in Seattle, Washington last week. It was a massive conference - several thousand participants at least. I was honored to present on refugee issues with Samson and Bryce. We did a panel session that was well attended. Unfortunately, the other folks who were to join us on the panel couldn't make it.

I included this picture of a State Department meet and greet to offer an idea how big this conference was. There were a few hundred folks at this function alone!

Samson and Bryce ready to present

There were hundreds of presentations, and dozens during our time slot. Those who attended were engaged and we had a good time. Bryce was very gracious and I appreciated his vast experience with and dedication to refugees. Samson also did a great job and I was beginning to think that he knew half the people at the conference.....

One of the highlights of the week was meeting Jocelyn, Grant, Joanne, and Al for dinner the first night in town. We got together at a nice Mexican restaurant near our hotel and spent a few hours catching up. Good people!

It was a very interesting conference, and also my first time to bop around downtown Seattle. I liked it much better than I thought I would. I found a very nice little hotel lobby (actually it was Grant and Jocelyn's hotel, the Hotel Vintage) with a great fireplace and marble mantle. I spent several hours there just reading and decompressing. I am not very good at decompressing, so I appreciated the rare respite it offered me. One day, while wearing the jacket you see here, I noticed a younger man staring at me. He finally came over and asked if it was a UCO jacket. It turned out that he was a fellow alum - go Bronchos!

I had a lot of good food with good company during the week, but the biggest surprise was the English pub Jocelyn and Grant picked out. I ended up going back later in the week! I had Yorkshire pudding the first night and chicken pot pie the second. Oh, and I had the best dessert I can ever remember eating - bread pudding :)

This is me coveting Grant's chicken pot pie - I went back for it a few days later :)

Poutine

Ok, so this isn't the bread pudding, it is Jocelyn's brownie. The bread pudding didn't last long enough for a pic

I also got to reconnect with an old (she's not old, I am) Peace Corps pal, Jeanne. She came downtown to meet me for lunch and took me to Pike's Market. It was good to see her and we caught up a bit. I had gone there a few years ago to paint her house, and I may return next year to help her with her laundry room :)

Views from the restaurant

It was a productive week - I got a new Brooks Brothers shirt, a new IPhone and mini I-Pad, Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, and I got away from work for a bit. 

I appreciated walking past the Plymouth Church of Christ each day on my way to the Convention Center

I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation and networking the conference provided. I also came away energized as I was in the company of scores of good people doing good work all over the world! It saddens me to think that people here in my country think cutting these programs and building a bigger war machine is the answer to our problems.  People who teach English teach so much more - they model democratic ideals, support girls' and women's empowerment, teach young people how have elections and how to discuss ideas civilly, and they give America a warm, friendly face. I interacted with hundreds of folks from other countries (visiting for the conference) who had nothing but positive American influences around them. I don't think I need to say much more.

I would like to go back to Seattle to kick around downtown a bit more, to sit at the Hotel Vintage, and visit that pub again. It was the closest approximation to a feeling of peace that I have had a long, long time.

I Promised To Build A Wall - And I Did

A few months ago, I learned that Hazem, a family friend, had stopped working for a local garage and had opened up his own mechanic's shop. So I stopped by before Christmas with a friend to say hello. Before I had visited, I had told his brother Ahmed to tell Hazem I could help him build anything he might need like a desk or other kinds of organizers. When I got there, Hazem had some ideas. It seems that the mechanics that rented the space before did only referral work from dealerships and there was no real customer lounge or waiting area providing a barrier to the open work space. Hazem wanted a narrow entrance that separated the shop and provided a comfortable place for his customers, keeping them away from the more dangerous work areas. After a little consultation, I came up with a plan and Sindi and I got started. We got a lot of help from Hazem and Ahmed along the way:

This is the main entrance for customers. The blue pole is one side of a lift, so we really didn't have a lot of room for the waiting area.

Sindi learning how to frame a wall.

Getting ready to raise the wall.

Because one end of the wall is unsupported, Hazem welded a plate to attach the wall to the lift column.

The boys (Hazem and Ahmed) cutting out the door frame.

Ahmed priming the wall.

The new wall and a small table from the entrance.

Hazem and Ahmed in the new customer waiting area.

If you look closely, you can see Hazem throwing confetti in the air. This then lands in the wet paint and gives it a nice look.

The new floor and stuff on the table.

A coffee table.

A seating bench that will soon have a cushion on it (I think Hazem is bartering some mechanic work for a new cushion).

The look from the entrance.

From the other side.

Proud shop owner taking a break.

This was a fun project - a work cart for Hazem. It was a secret, and I even brought it to his shop to paint it, telling him it was for me. He liked it and mentioned more than one time how handy something like that would be :)  The front has ten organizers and six drawers. Patrick and Tony helped me design and build it. 

The back has a retractable air hose and a heavy duty surge protector.

I really love these parts organizers from Harbor Freight (the German version is more than $30 each!). I like the fact you can take out individual containers.

Patrick distracted Hazem while I applied the letters on the side. We then brought him over and when he saw his shop's name, he knew he had been duped. I think he is very pleased with it.

I was happy that Patrick could be there when we gave it to Hazem. He and Tony did a lot of work on this project.

I really enjoyed all the aspects of this project. There is a good reason why there aren't many closeups on some of the work - I am still perfecting some of my skills :)  Hazem is a good guy, and helping him with his new business was a lot of fun.

Mike And Terry

As is my occasional custom, I venture out onto the information superhighway and try to find folks from my past. Although it often leads to nice things like old new facebook friends, it also leads me down some darker alleys sometimes (http://philosopherking-michael.blogspot.com/2010/05/true-crime.html). The other night I went looking for a couple of friends from college, and I found them. They died within a year of so of each other recently, so I missed connecting with either of them.
I met Mike in my freshman English course. He was small and a bit odd looking - I think he had been born with a minor birth defect. Mike loved Science Fiction (SF from here on out because I may have to type it a hundred times...) and he was an unabashed nerd. I had never thought much about the genre before that point; I had only recently acquired a marginal interest in Star Trek reruns. Mike exposed me to a wide range of SF, not only in TV and film, but in literature as well. We discussed potential Star Trek plot ideas and even wrote some short stories. Soon, I had joined the SF book of the month club and was even going to a few events on campus. My SF phase lasted several years, and I am positive I would have never gone through it if I hadn't met Mike.
Mike and I hung out often, and he soon introduced me to Terry. Terry was a big, nerdy, bohemian. He was larger than life in many ways, totally Mike's opposite. He was loud and funny. I didn't quite know how to take him, but I liked his outwardness. Mike, Terry, and I would spend our evenings at the bowling alley playing video games, and they often swung by  the Taco Bell I was working at to help me close (and dispose of leftovers). To this day, I couldn't tell you anything about their politics or if they had any interest in sports. I just remember hanging out and talking about ideas as only you can in the context of SF. Years later when I watched a clip of Rod Serling discussing SF as a social medium, I really understood my attraction to it. In SF, you can deal with subject matter in a less threatening context and really get down to the essence of an issue. This was probably my first step towards a lifetime of fascination with phenomenology.
I lost track of Terry and Mike after a few years - they were a few years ahead of me and I supposed they graduated much earlier than I (me and my seven year plan).
I thought of them often over the years, wondering what became of them. I was pleased to discover, through their obituaries, that they remained lifelong friends, didn't change much, and had families. Their love of SF seemed to grow exponentially, and I could only imagine how they must have lived through the past 40 years with all the innovations in technology and media. Terry's extra middle name was listed as "Orion." I was saddened, though, by the reality that I couldn't reach out to them and let them know about their impact on me those many years ago. Much sadder than I would have expected.  But, after some reflection, I was also pleased by the retroactive awareness that I enjoyed their friendship and that I had a very eclectic group of friends as an 18 year old. I miss my entanglement in that nerdy fellowship. Mike and Terry were two very unique individuals, and very authentic. I would like to be remembered that way myself.