I played a piece on the piano at church on Sunday for the post service music. It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve ever posted a video of something like that so here you go. This is actually from one of my practice sessions earlier in the week. It’s a combination of Christ the Lord Is Risen Today and Hallelujah from Handel’s Messiah.
Shop Tour
I often find myself flirting with the idea of starting a YouTube woodworking channel, but I think that’s unlikely to happen. Still, I thought it would be fun to dip my toe into the water with a shop tour. Plus it’s a chance to show you all where I do my projects. It’s a good chance for you to hear how everything in my shop “works great”. I apparently say that a lot.
If you want to see pictures of my projects as they happen, follow me on Instagram @martenswoodworks.
Little Mt. Si
On Saturday, Logan, Elijah and I headed up Little Mt. Si. Tyla messed up her ankle a bit and decided to stay home. We got to the trailhead at 9am and there was already no parking. Thankfully someone pulled out right as we pulled in.
It’s too much hike for Elijah to do all on his own so I packed him about 3/4 of the way up and then he walked about 2/3 of the way down. He’s technically still under the weight limit for the carrier we have but wow, that’s a load. It’s funny though that carrying him doesn’t seem as heavy as when I used to load a couple water jugs in my pack to train. I think it’s because I always knew I could stop and pour out the jugs.
It was my first time on the hike and I enjoyed it. The trail was packed since it was a nice day and there is still snow on a lot of the higher elevation trails. We were on our way down before the big rush came, but we had plenty of company at the top of the mountain. The view, unsurprisingly, isn’t as great as it is from the top of Mt. Si, but it was still nothing to scoff at.
Thanks to Logan for suggesting a hike and picking it out! Hopefully there are a lot more hikes coming up this summer.
Garmin Fenix 3
I pulled out my GPS watch for a hike and while it was charging, I was surprised to find out that I’ve never done a blog post on it. So here’s a “long term update” on the watch even though it doesn’t get used a lot.
Last fall I picked up a Garmin Fenix 3. It’s a ridiculously fancy watch. The key features that I use are hooking it to my phone for text message and phone call notifications, GPS tracking of my hikes, and tracking my skiing. It also has some cool golf features (distance to hole, etc) but I haven’t played golf in a long time.
It’s expensive. It was around $500 when I got it, but thanks to a health benefits program at work, I sort of got it for free. But if you are really active and like to have a great GPS tracker with you at all times, this seems like a pretty good fit.
Last weekend, Logan, Elijah and I hiked up Little Mt. Si and I used the watch for that hike. It was really nice to have a good feeling for how far along in the hike we were (I knew the total distance and the total elevation) and then watch us follow the track back.
When it’s all done, you get a website showing all the data from the hike and you can share that with other people. Here’s a link if you want to see it: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/1776138597
So yeah it’s cool. It’s fun to put random watch faces and different apps on the watch. Would I ever pay for it? Nope. I don’t wear a watch day to day and I don’t do enough activity stuff to justify it. But is it fun to use? Yep!
Discovery Bay
For Memorial Day weekend, we packed up the car and headed west with Tyla’s family to stay in a condo on Discovery Bay. It was great to get away for a while and we had a couple fun day trips to Fort Worden State Park and Hurricane Ridge. In the evenings we filled our time with board games, including our first attempts at 7 Wonders which quickly jumped near the top of my favorites list. The weather was beautiful for the entire trip!
Does Bacon Make You Rich?
A lunch question ended up posing the question in the title. We were talking about which countries ate bacon and which ones didn’t. Then we had a hunch that the US and European countries near the top of the list so you could probably make a clickbait news story about how countries that eat more bacon make more money.
When we got back to our desks, Durmus had actually run the numbers. Unfortunately there’s only a 0.43 coefficient of correlation between per capita bacon consumption and per capita GDP. It was worth a shot though. And I had no idea that the Chinese ate more bacon than Americans! Step up your game people!
| Country | Weight per Capita (lbs) | GDP per Capita |
| China | 90.1 | $15,400 |
| Montenegro | 88.6 | $17,000 |
| Taiwan | 87.5 | $47,800 |
| Korea, South | 81.4 | $37,900 |
| Serbia | 81.4 | $14,200 |
| Belarus | 73.8 | $17,500 |
| United States | 64.3 | $57,300 |
| Vietnam | 56.3 | $6,400 |
| Norway | 55.4 | $69,300 |
| Canada | 55 | $46,200 |
| Australia | 54.4 | $48,800 |
| Singapore | 50.5 | $87,100 |
| Chile | 49.5 | $24,000 |
| New Zealand | 49.2 | $37,100 |
| Russia | 46.7 | $26,100 |
| Japan | 44.6 | $38,900 |
| Bahamas, The | 40.7 | $24,600 |
| Uruguay | 40.2 | $21,600 |
| Mexico | 39.4 | $18,900 |
| Ukraine | 34.7 | $8,200 |
| Philippines | 33.7 | $7,700 |
| Panama | 32.5 | $22,800 |
| Ecuador | 31.5 | $11,000 |
| Brazil | 31.2 | $15,200 |
| Cuba | 26.6 | $11,600 |
| Macedonia | 26.3 | $14,500 |
| Argentina | 24.9 | $20,200 |
| Dominican Republic | 21 | $15,900 |
| Angola | 18.3 | $6,800 |
| Colombia | 17.2 | $14,200 |
| Croatia | 16.8 | $22,400 |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | 13.7 | $11,000 |
| Kazakhstan | 12 | $25,700 |
| Guatemala | 11.5 | $7,900 |
| South Africa | 10.8 | $13,200 |
| Armenia | 10.8 | $8,900 |
| Honduras | 10.1 | $5,300 |
| Venezuela | 9.8 | $15,100 |
| Haiti | 9.2 | $1,800 |
Happy Memorial Day
Vinyl Cutter
“The Garage” at work is like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for makers. There are lots of different tools that you can use for free (after you take a training course and usually provide your own materials.) I’ve been having lots of fun with the laser cutters, but recently I got trained on the vinyl cutter.
Our vinyl cutter is kind of like a huge (~36″ wide) ink jet printer that has a knife on the end instead of ink. You “print” on rolls of vinyl that are sticky on one side. When you cut the sheet, you’re just cutting through the vinyl but not the paper that covers the sticky side. You then apply another piece of sticky paper to the top of the vinyl. Peel off one side of your sandwhich and leave either the positive or negative space that you cut out. That made no sense because I don’t know what most of the things are called.
But blah blah blah, it’s fun! The computer side of things is roughly the same as the laser cutter. Files need to be in vector format and I can easily reuse most of the drawings that I did for the laser cutter. The first project was the sign for Tyla’s Mother’s Day gift. I headed back and did a couple more.
The first was vinyl for both sides of one of Ellijah’s toys. He now has a custom semi trailer!
I also printed a “No soliciting” sign for our front door. We get a LOT of door to door sales people and I have a standard policy of never buying or signing anything at the door. I used to have a dinky little piece of paper taped to the door but this looks a little nicer. It’s not quite as obvious, but some people ignored the old sign anyway.
I’m looking forward to spending some more time on the vinyl cutter. It opens up a whole new set of project possibilities.
Taking A Breather
How many things have you done every single week day since July, 2002? Aside from things like breathing, eating and putting on clothes (maybe that doesn’t even hold true for everyone), I’m hard pressed to come up with a list.
There is one big one though: blogging. I’ve consistently put up a new blog post at least once per weekday for the last 14 years and 10 months. To my knowledge, I’ve never duplicated a topic. That’s a lot of unique content. A LOT. Like six Moby Dicks. Except six Moby Dicks wouldn’t be unique. The printed version of my blog takes up a lot of space on my bookshelf and I haven’t even done books for the last 2.5 years.
I’ve been diligent in not missing even one day of the schedule because people are a lot more likely to stay engaged when the schedule is consistent. And while I do this mainly for myself, it’s a lot more fun knowing that there are people reading my ramblings.
Along the way, I often wondered when it would end. I came very close many times along the journey, but then I’d get a flood of new ideas and the posts would continue. These last couple months have been a slog though. I sit there a couple hours before the normal post time with a blank cursor trying to think of something to write. I’m not usually very proud of the posts when I am scrambling at the last minute to come up with a topic. Is it really keeping the streak alive if I’m just writing a filler post to keep the streak alive?
So, what does this mean for the site? I’m not naive. I know that once people stop a regular writing schedule, it very often devolves into a dead blog, but I’ve got almost 15 years of momentum behind me so I’m hoping I can keep it going, but I’m not going to hold myself to a daily schedule. I think that some weeks I might have one post and other weeks I’ll have 5. I’m just not going to force myself to put something up every single day. Hopefully when you do find a post here, you’ll find something that you have a higher likelihood of enjoying. If you want to get notified of new posts instead of coming to the website to check, you can subscribe via RSS or follow the Studio711 Facebook page.
Also, please consider following me on Instagram. I’m really enjoying that platform and I post a lot of content that ends up there and nowhere else. I have two accounts: @benwmartens for daily life and @martenswoodworks for woodworking posts.
It’s hard to click the publish button on this one. It’s such a long streak, but keeping it alive for the sake of the streak doesn’t seem like a good use of my time at this point. I guess we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out if I really let a day lapse without a blog post…
Chalk Roads
Elijah and the neighbor kids enjoy riding their bikes along chalk roads which basically just consist of two parallel lines (or something resembling parallel depending on who draws them). When you’re hunched over holding chalk on the ground and walking backwards, it doesn’t take long to start thinking about ways to make it easier.
On Sunday, Elijah and I headed into the shop and whipped out a little gizmo which worked amazingly well. It’s a broom handle with a 26″ long straight board across the bottom. A little over an inch in from each side, we drilled a hole to hold one of his big pieces of chalk. Then I cut a little slice through the end of the board and through the hole so that a bolt with a wing nut and clamp it shut and squeeze the chalk. The cross piece is a scrap of mahogany. That’s overkill and extra fancy, but it was a scrap that probably would have ended up in the trash and I wanted a hardwood for the clamping part.
It was a bit of a random attempt and I think the clamping part could be improved, but it worked awesome! Elijah could even do it by himself.
We’re going to need more chalk.