I’ve been doing this for so long that this one almost slipped by me. Thirteen years of daily blogging! I’ll keep this one short and just say thank you. Thanks for coming here and listening to me babble. Writing is therapeutic and has improved (I hope) my communication skill, but if nobody was reading, I probably would have quit a long time ago. I hope that every once in a while you get a smile, a chuckle or a new tidbit of knowledge from this site.
Queen Size Storage Bed
The bed project is partially complete! Last week I finished painting the bed and the drawer fronts, and over the weekend I assembled the drawer fronts and Tyla helped me move it in place. Overall, I’m pretty happy. By no means is it a fancy bed, but for a guest room, it works fine. It gives us a lot of storage.
My two main complaints are:
1) Plain white latex paint on the pine lends itself to a lot of scuff marks. I’m wondering if I should have tried to coat it with lacquer or poly.
2) The mattress fits well in the bed frame but since the mattress is round on the corners, you can see down into the bed frame. I think I might add some wood in those areas and paint it white to hide the view into the substructure.
But neither of those are super serious problems. I’ll build the headboard next.
Thank you Steve Ramsey for the initial inspiration for this design!
Steve Ramsey
At least 2/3 of my TV viewing happens from YouTube channels now. This isn’t news for millennials, but for an old-fogey like me, it’s still a bit of a novelty. I love being able to find content that is exactly tailored to my current interest and is made by people who are easily approachable.
I’ve written before about Steve Ramsey. He has a fantastic channel called “Woodworking for Mere Mortals.” He makes a project every week and it’s usually something that any of us non-professional woodworkers could handle. My current guest bed project is based almost entirely his design.
In one of his recent videos, he mentioned that he had some stickers left over and that he would send them out if you sent him a self-addressed stamped envelope. I love stickers and it seemed like a good opportunity to say thank you to him since I had just finished watching every single video on his channel. He not only sent me some stickers but he took the time to hand-write a note to me. When’s the last time you got a handwritten note that wasn’t a birthday card?
So thank you Steve for the stickers, but thank you even more for all the great content you produce! And thanks for taking the time to write me a personal note. I’m going to attach it to the inside of the bedframe so that I can find it down the road and smile all over again.
We’re Going To The Zoo Zoo Zoo
Since Elijah was born, it has been really easy for us to get into a rut of trading off watching him on the weekends and “getting stuff done.” While that is important, it’s also important to take time to grow together as family. This past weekend, I surprised Tyla by suggesting a trip to the zoo. I’m pretty sure she’d go every day if she could, but I’m usually the holdout.
The day was a bit wet and cool (the opposite of everything we’ve had for the last two months), but that was good because it meant that the crowds were really low and the animals were very active. When it’s hot, they just hide away in the shade. Every single exhibit we visited featured very active animals! Elijah knew a bunch of animals that he wanted to see and impressed me by walking through the pretty big tunnel by the meerkat exhibit. He’s really interested in tunnels right now so that was a big hit. If you ask him what he did at the zoo, he says “Walk through tunnel!”
The zoo no longer has elephants, but the new (to me anyway) tiger exhibit was pretty impressive. The zoo also has some lion cubs that were born last fall and they were really playful while we were there.
We only stayed about 2.5 hours because he has been getting up so early and was ready for a nap, but it was a good family event.
Meat Week – Brats
Brats are a staple meal at our house. It’s one of our favorite things to grill. My method is pretty basic: 2 minutes on each of the four sides for a total of 8 minutes and then I add a minute or two extra to get them up to about 160 degrees.
If you really want to have a great, juicy brat, your goal is to get it up to 160 degrees without rupturing the casing. As with all meats, you should let your meat rest on the counter for 30-45 minutes ahead of time to bring it up to room temperature. That gives you less of a temperature difference on the grill. Next, make sure your grill isn’t too hot. I keep mine around 375 or 400 for brats. And finally, there is a big difference between different brands of brats. I find that the brats from the butcher generally have a thicker casing than the ones in the grocery store. Johnsonville brats are delicious, but I have a very hard time grilling them without splitting them open or having little grease geysers erupt out of the brat. With care, I can grill most of the butcher brats with them spouting grease. If one or two does break open a bit, that’s ok. Use that one when you stick your thermometer in to check the temp.
Craft Classes
A recent thread on the woodworkers discussion list at work mentioned craftsy.com. As the name implies, it’s a craft site that provides lessons, kits and supplies. The part that specifically interested me was woodworking, but they also cover quilting, sewing, cooking, knitting, photography and more. A lot of the videos will cost you some money to watch, but there are a few free selections as well. The free woodworking videos include on one finishing (which I’m not very good at) and setting up a band saw (which I hope to purchase soon) so I plan to watch them. Yes, you can probably find similar stuff on YouTube for free, but if this site lives up to the promise then these should be more in depth and higher quality to justify the price.
American Jobs
At the big data conference in San Jose earlier this year, there was a speaker from the US Census. They deal with LOTS of data and do a fantastic job of making their datasets freely available with good documentation. A great example popped up recently from a PhD student at Harvard. He used the census job data to put a single dot on the map for every single job in America. You can see the full result here. This is such an exciting time in data analysis. We’re just scratching the surface of what kinds of decisions we can now make based on data instead of intuition.
Grilling Tips
I’ll preface this by saying that in no way am I an expert, but I do produce better meat on the grill now than I did ten years ago. Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way. All of these pertain to gas grilling because that’s all I do.
- Be a nerd. It’s ok to use a timer and a thermometer. I set the timer to count up and it’s an easy reminder of how long things have been on the grill as I wander around with Elijah or get distracted with something else. And the thermometer is handy because I’ve never developed a good eye* for telling when something is done just right. The thermometer is a handy way to know that we aren’t eating something too raw or that I haven’t left it on too long.
- Get a grill basket. It’s such an easy way to make a delicious side item for your meal. You can learn more in a previous post.
- Splurge on a good grill. I suffered with cheap gas grills for years because that’s all I knew existed. I thought all gas grills flared up all the time and needed tons of replacement parts every couple years. Then I finally bit the bullet and paid for a Weber Genesis. That was over 3 years ago, and even with year round grilling, it’s still in incredible shape. If you can’t afford one right now, at least stop spending money on cheap grills and save your pennies until can buy one. Grilling is so much more fun when you’re not hating your grill.
- Keep it clean. The joke is that all the leftover crusties “add flavor” but that’s just the lazy talking. I go over the grates before and after grilling just to keep things pretty clean. A couple times a year, I’ll take the grates out and give them a good cleaning along with the drip pan underneath.
- Don’t burn it off. I used to think that you should clean your grill by cranking up the heat and letting it burn off. I actually chatted about this with a representative from Weber after I got my new grill and was strongly advised against it. Those crazy high temperatures for long periods of time put a lot of stress on the various components of your grill and will lead to an early demise.
- Practice! Practice helps you get more consistent with your successes and besides, it’s delicious!
- Buy good meat. There’s only so much you can do with that 1/4″ thick slab of random animal in the discount bin. Visit your local butcher and experience the difference. Yes, you can spend lots of money, but there are plenty of good deals to be found too. For example, at Golden Steer in Bellevue, head to the left side of the display case and look at the various marinated options. They are some of our favorites and they’re also a really good deal for what you get.
* The exception to this was my time at Dairy Queen. After grilling thousands of the exact same meat patties, you figure it out.
Meat Week – Maui Beef Ribs
I’ve had an idea for a while of doing something called “meat week.” I’d grill something different every day for a week and blog about each one. It seems like a delicious idea, but I could never find the right week to do it.
The time has come, but I’ve decided to slow it down a bit. We like to make leftovers when we cook so that we don’t have to cook every night. So I won’t be grilling every night, but every meal we eat for a while will be from the grill and I’ll blog about it here.
Sunday was the first day and we grilled “maui beef ribs” from the butcher along with some potatoes, carrots and zucchini. The meat is their tri-tip steak that is sliced thinly and marinated. Deeeelicious! It’s only the second time we’ve bought that item and both times I’ve left them on the grill too long. They’re really thin so you hardly need any time on the grill.
Earthquake Hysteria
The other night I got curious as to why the impending earthquake is all of a sudden big news. Why is everybody freaking out about this all of a sudden? There are articles every year about this, so was there some new revelation or scientific discovery?
Nope. It can be traced back to a click-bait article in the New Yorker. This got picked up and went viral. News flash: There’s a fault line under Seattle. News flash: There are fault lines everywhere. Yes, any fault line could be the source of an earthquake, and yes, you should be prepared for the possibility, but seriously, settle down. You should also be prepared for a house fire, a car accident, a volcano eruption, measles outbreaks and missile attacks from North Korea.
Three local earthquake experts got together to do a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) and it’s a much better source of actual science related to the possibility of a Seattle earthquake. If you’re really concerned about this, note that three LOCAL experts wrote this. They study this stuff as a profession and yet they still happily live and work here.
So yes, it’s possible that we could have an earthquake tomorrow and yes, it might be devastating, but this possibility has existed for a very long time, and lots of data says that it’s not likely to happen for another couple hundred years. There are also threats of disasters. Do some basic preparations and get on with your life.
P.S. Luke 12:22-31
P.P.S. If you want to watch a good interview about this, check out episode 12 of The New Screensavers. That link will take you right to the start of the interview.