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.
Crosscut Hardwoods
I love the early phases of a new hobby because there’s so much to explore. As I’ve started learning about working with nicer wood, I’ve heard lots of people talking about Crosscut Hardwoods in Seattle. Elijah and I took a trip over there last weekend and my mind was blown.
It’s an unassuming building in the industrial district south of the stadiums. Walk in and you find a few huge rooms with more woods than you knew existed. Want some Honduran Rosewood? They have that. How about Fiji Mahogany or Port Orford Cedar? Got that too. You can see the full list on their site.
But they don’t just have lots of wood, they have it in a huge variety of sizes. You can get it milled different ways at really big lengths (20+ feet!) Once you’ve decided what you want, you pay for it and then they will cut it up a bit so that you can transport it.
They have lots more in addition to hardwoods including a big selection of specialty plywoods, flooring and countertops.
I was only there for a recon mission but I scooped up some interesting looking offcuts from their “pay by the pound” pile. To make really good use of this store, I really need to get a band saw and a thickness planer so that I can mill the wood into the exact size that I need for a project.
Miles Per Gallon
Seven years ago, I purchased a Scan Guage and I still recommend that you pick one up for yourself if this stuff interests you. It taps into your car’s computer and gives you access to lots of the sensor data. I use it most for tracking exactly how much gas I’m using and what mileage I’m getting.
For most of that time, I had the display showing me lots of information about how many miles per gallon I was getting, but recently I realized that’s a little messed up. Miles per gallon is a good measurement if your route is unchangeable, but it misses the mark if you can choose a route. For example, I have two main routes to work. One is 12 miles and uses the interstate and the other takes backroads and is only 9 miles. The interstate route generally gets me better mileage (though it’s generally clogged with traffic so it’s not a huge win.)
I changed the ScanGuage to start showing me how many hundredths of a gallon of gas that I was using on each trip and I discovered realized that the shorter route almost always uses less gas even though I get fewer miles per gallon. So if my goal is to use as little gas as possible, I should actually choose the route with lower MPG. It’s sort of counterintuitive and obvious at the same time.
Guest Room Bed
The bed in our guest room consists of a mattress on a box spring on a very simple metal frame. I decided it was finally time to build something a little nicer and give us more storage in the process.
The design is based very heavily on Steve Ramsey’s platform bed. I decided to redraw it from scratch in Sketchup to get some more experience using the app and also to scale it down from a king size to a queen size bed. Tim built a similar bed recently from a different design so I was able to use (hopefully) some of the things he learned along the way.
This design process went much better than my previous attempts with Sketchup and this time I feel like it was actually a valuable use of my time. I’ve included a couple screenshots of the complete design roughly showing the colors that it will actually be and then a view of the guts of it color coded to help differentiate things a bit. (The second drawing doesn’t include all of the slats that will run across the top to support the mattress.)
The design is based mostly on 1x4s with a few exceptions. This should keep it light (and cheap). Most of it is held together with pocket screws. Almost the entire underside of the bed is used for drawers. Some of them won’t pull out all the way and the ones by the head of the bed will be difficult to access, but why not make them full size?
I’ll paint it white when I’m done so I’m just using simple pine boards from Home Depot. We’ll see how long this takes me to complete. Again, there are a lot of firsts for me on this project which usually equates to me making multiple attempts at some steps.
Luxury Gun Club
As a homeowner, I’ve learned to stop and read those “Proposed Land Use” signs a little more closely than I used to. There’s one on the really tight corner as you head north from my house and go down the hill into Woodinville. After reading the sign and then looking it up online, I learned that there is a luxury gun club going in! My first thought was “AHHHH the noise is going to kill my property value!” But no, it’s indoor so it won’t be a big deal.
It’s called Securite and yes, it’s a “luxury” gun club. The concept art looks like lots of leather chairs, fireplaces, etc. It will be interesting to check it out when they are done, but I’ll probably stick with the shotgun sports at Kenmore.
Husband, Father, Brother-in-Law, Medic
My rationale for keeping this daily blog has changed over time, but right now, the main motivation is to record major events in my life and talk about things that interest me in between. We recently had one of those major life events that we’ll remember forever, and even though it’s a pretty dramatic story, I do want to capture some of my thoughts about it. Everybody processes this kind of thing in a different way, and I find a lot of value in writing it down.
The short version is that while we were sitting in church, my brother-in-law, sitting right next to us, was a victim of cardiac arrest. Our parking lot quickly hosted four or five ambulance/rapid response vehicles, a fire truck and at least one police car. Church members started CPR, EMTs were on the scene just a minute or two after the 911 call was placed, and a comibination of CPR and an AED not only saved his life but also prevented any brain damage. I’m intentionally leaving out a lot of details because, while this event happened in public, it’s not something that you would choose to show to a church full of people. But I do want to write my personal experience going through this as a family member, husband and father.
We say that we have “crazy” and “stressful” days when really everything is usually within a pretty normal set of boundaries. A big part of the battle when confronted with a truly life-threatening event is how quickly you can jump outside of those normal boundaries, realize what’s happening and take action. Our church members excelled at this. Before Tyla could finish telling me to get help, I took off running to grab a landline because I knew somebody else would call from a cell phone. By the time I came back on the phone with 911, another member was already asking me for the address and I saw others starting to call too. That first call had to have been initiated in less than 10 seconds and it played a key role in saving his life.
A couple members were already tending to the situation, checking his pulse, getting him in the rescue position, etc so my next thought was getting Elijah out of there. He’s too young to understand a lot of things, but he didn’t need to see any of what was happening. Thankfully, somebody else had already grabbed him and taken him away. He was pretty oblivious to the next 15-20 minutes of events and I found him later playing on the playground (under the watchful eye of some parents.) Thankfully some other people shuttled Tyla and Megan out of the immediate area too. Obviously if I was the only one there and responsible for medical care, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of worrying quite as much about my family, but in retrospect, I’m so thankful that they were spared a lot of the events that happened in that area.
The first paramedics made excellent time since they are less than a mile away, and seeing them brought a huge feeling of relief. I’ve been through a number of CPR courses including a multi-month outdoor first aid class, so I’ve seen all these steps before, but it’s so much easier to take instructions from a pro than to be thinking for yourself under that stress.
I use the word “medic” in the title loosely. I participated by helping to move him out of the pew, praying, and answering a few questions. The outcome would likely have been exactly as good if I wasn’t there. But not participating in the direct medical care was also unsettling. It was a surreal experience as I stood there pretty sure that I was watching my brother-in-law die wondering what I could possibly do to help more.
The story has a happy ending. We offer endless prayers of thanks for letting it happen the way it did. So many small changes to do the day would have created yet another fatality. The survival rates are abysmal, but this was a success story.
It was really odd going through this with a young child. I wanted to shield him from as much of it as possible, so even as we were driving to the hospital wondering what the outcome would be, I had my happy face on trying to keep Elijah entertained. How do you process the possible death of your brother-in-law while you’re feeding bunny snacks to your kid and queueing up his favorite music? While it was odd to have that mismatch, it was also really helpful to see Elijah’s smiling face as he bounced around the hospital. He kept the mood lighter than it might otherwise have been.
We were all back in church the next Sunday. I knew it would be weird, but I didn’t realize how hard it would be. As we got to the first Bible reading (the point where it happened the previous week), it was all I could do to stay in my seat. I have no idea what Pastor was saying because all I could see whether my eyes were open or closed was the look on my brother-in-laws face when he slumped over. It’s burned into my skull. It got easier as the service went on, but I’m sure it will be tough for many Sundays to come.
None of us know when God will end the clock on our existance, but we’re thankful that our family is still in tact with relatively few after-effects. All of these emotions that we have are tempered by knowing that the story has a happy ending. We’ll probably never understand why this happened in our lives, but “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” (Romans 8:28)
New Shop
My parents are embarking on a huge adventure this summer. They are building a new shop/garage beside their existing two car garage! The end result will feature a workshop area divided from a garage bay that is big enough to hold their Allis Chalmers WD 45 tractor and some other things. I dream about having something like this someday (or just a property big enough to hold it!)
While Dad is planning to do most of the work by himself, he did contract out the foundation. That got laid this week. It’s hard to believe they were able to cram three cement trucks down that 1/4 mile long dirt road driveway and maneuver them in the area by the house!