Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Garden Boxes

A couple of our neighbors have pretty successful raised garden beds, and this year, Tyla and I decided to jump on the bandwagon. There’s a natural spot for them where the cherry trees used to be beside our driveway. It’s even plumbed for drip irrigation already.

This was the first time I’d ever built boxes like this but I used our next door neighbors for inspiration. It’s basically two 2×8 boards stacked on stop of each other with 4x4s as the corner. I dug down to level the boxes out and then pounded 4x4s into the ground to keep the boxes in place. The ground was very soggy so all of that was pretty simple. The hardest part was just keeping the box aligned correctly. It was rainy pretty hard for most of my project so I skipped a lot of the steps that probably would have saved me time like staking a line to help keep everything straight. Elijah thought it was a pretty fun project and helped for a bit before it got too wet and he went inside. He was the smart one because I ended up soaking wet. I finished them off with 1x4s around the top partially to hide my mistakes and also as a place to set tools and sit down while weeding.

I used cheap pine for this. I didn’t want anything treated since I’m not sure that is food safe. I should have probably used cedar but that was about $250 extra and I wasn’t willing to pour that much money in. We’ll let these go for 5-10 years until they rot and by then I bet I’ll have other ideas anyway.

The next step is getting the drip irrigation plumbed to the right spots and then filling the boxes with dirt.

benmartens February 24, 2017 Home Improvement

Elijah’s Box

Home Depot has Saturday morning projects targeted at kids. I thought I’d try to take Elijah to one since he likes to work with me in the shop.

The project was a photo box which I realized would make a perfect Valentine’s Day gift from Elijah to Tyla. I obviously helped him a lot, but he did do a lot of the hammering and decoration by himself and I tried very hard to restrain myself and let it look like a 3 year old made it.

We motored through it pretty quickly but he still lost interest toward the end. I think we’ll wait a little longer before trying another one, but he was very proud of what he had made and was excited to give it to Tyla on Valentine’s Day.

benmartens February 23, 2017 Family

Best Of YouTube

Bad Lip Reading makes it into the list again with a recap of the NFL for 2017. “My brain is so loud.”

Adam Ruins Everything is apparently a show on TruTV, but there are a bunch of clips on YouTube and that’s how I’ve been watching it. Learn why that electric car might actually be worse for the environment than a regular car and why that lady who sued for hot coffee from McDonald’s isn’t as crazy as you probably think she is.

The White Rabbit Project is on Netflix, not YouTube, but it might tickle your fancy if you liked Mythbusters. Tory, Kari and Grant are back together again and they are sort of testing myths but it’s a little different format. It’s not as good as Mythbusters, but if you liked those three, this is at least a good one to have on in the background while you do other things.

benmartens February 22, 2017 Links

500 Unique Beers

Congrats to Luke who has won the race to be the first one in our group with 500 unique beers logged in the Untappd app! His 500th beer was a Castor from 3rd Sign Brewery and he only a 3 out of 5 stars.

I’ve already done a post with some stats about our beer drinking, but here’s another one. It’s the average score that we give to beers. You can see that I’m a little more stodgy than the others, or maybe I’m just more willing to try beers I know I won’t like just so I can log them in the app. (I’ve included Logan this time since he has started using the app too.)

User Average Rating
Ben 2.87
Dad 3.53
Logan 3.15
Luke 3.16
Total 3.22

How about which breweries we like the most? For this I only considered breweries that 2 out of the 4 of us have tried. Here the top 10:

Knee Deep Brewing Company
Laughing Dog Brewing
The Alchemist
7 Seas Brewing
Epic Brewing Co. (Utah, Colorado)
21st Amendment Brewery
Arrogant Bastard Brewing
Founders Brewing Co.
ABC Brewpub
Everybody’s Brewing
Bell’s Brewery, Inc.

I was going to have a chart showing the type of beers we drink the most, but we all had pale ales at the top of our lists.

Ok, I need to go find a beer. I’m thirsty. Slainte!

benmartens February 21, 2017 Food

Neighborhood Brewing

When I’m out walking with Elijah, we regularly go past a neighbors house down the street and around the corner. He has his garage door open a lot and it’s obvious that he has some fancy brewing equipment in there. One day I finally stopped in with Elijah and just said, “You’ve got quite a setup here. Do you mind visitors?”

The guy’s name is Kevin and he is indeed very excited to have visitors. He’s in the process of launching his own brewery and has amassed some very nice equipment. His garage has about 10 taps, a small bar, some TVs and his brewing equipment. I’ve sampled some of his beer and it’s delicious! This is not your typical home brew setup.

He said he hasn’t really started marketing anything yet, but you can follow him on Facebook at Global Beer Company.

benmartens February 20, 2017 Commentary

Weber Warranty

Almost five years ago, I purchased a Weber Genesis E330. It’s an expensive grill and it was one of the best purchases I’ve made. Cheap grills work fine and I’m thankful for the ones I had before this Genesis, but their optimum lifetime is only a year or two and then it’s just frustrating. I’ve used this Genesis heavily for 5 straight years and it works almost as well as the day I put it together in any weather conditions.

This year I decided it was time to replace a couple parts so I called Weber to order some new burners. In less then 2.5 minutes, the representative was sending me 4 new burners for free because I had just squeaked in under the 5 year warranty for those parts. She even through in a new locking wheel for free.

I love this company! This grill is going to easily last me another decade or two. If you’re in the market for a grill, consider a Genesis. Yes, it’s a big initial investment, but over it’s lifetime, you’ll save money and you will enjoy grilling every time you fire it up.

benmartens February 17, 2017 Commentary

No Blog Books

I have books sitting on my shelf containing all of my blog posts from 2002-2014. I love the idea of having these all stored in paper form, but the reality is that they NEVER get pulled off the shelf. But I think I’m going to stop making them…

First of all, these books take a long time to publish. I wrote a program that pulls each post from the database and puts it into a Word doc, but it’s very rough and I have to go through each post to clean it up. Then I also add in all my tweets and Instagram photos and whew, it’s a solid couple weeks of effort per book.

I told Tyla I wasn’t going to do this anymore and she thought, “AUGH! What if you die? How will we save all your posts?” So here you go: if I die, someone with WordPress knowledge should ask Tyla for our master Last Pass password and then export it all to a text file. I’m pretty sure you can handle that. And if not, all these pages are probably stored on archive.org anyway.

This blog is unlikely to live forever. I’ve had many thoughts over there years (and they’re increasing in frequency) about dropping the blog and regaining a big chunk of time. It will happen some day. Maybe then I’ll decide that it’s wort the effort to finish out the book series to have a complete set. But until then, I’m going to save a bunch of time and some shelf space and not make dead tree versions of my ramblings.

benmartens February 16, 2017 Site News

Netflix

Every week I listen to a podcast called Cordkillers. As the name implies, they cover all kinds of stories related to getting your TV over the internet. I’ve made it on to the show a couple times with letters that I’ve written. The most recent was episode 155 (link directly to my email) and they seemed to enjoy discussing my comment. They had been talking in a previous episode how the Netflix market was saturated and anyone who had ever thought about getting Netflix already had it. I wrote in to mention that we’re happy with Amazon Prime Video and YouTube.

And then the day after they posted that episode… I resubscribed to the Netflix streaming package. I picked it up every once in a while to watch shows and then drop it when we go a month without watching it. It’s so nice to be able to add and drop services on a whim in this new world. It’s so much easier than adding and dropping cable!

benmartens February 15, 2017 Commentary

Table Saw Assembly

My new Grizzly 1023RLW table saw is assembled and ready to use. It took significantly longer than expected largely because I’ve never done anything like that before and I had to do many of the steps three or four times to get them right. Luckily, I wasn’t in much of a hurry so I was able to take my time and get it right.

I took some extra time to raise the saw up 4 1/4″ to a more comfortable height for me. That’s 3/4″ higher than I had my old table saw set at. I’m a big guy and it’s nice to have things at a level that doesn’t hurt my back when I’m out there for a couple hours.

This thing cuts like a dream. It’s silky smooth on start up and powers through boards like they aren’t even there. I’m looking for excuses just to cut boards!

benmartens February 14, 2017 Woodworking

Butcher 101

So you’ve never been to one, but you’re “butcher curious”. Here are some recommendations for you. If you’re in the same area as me, go visit Golden Steer Choice Meets, and if you’re not, just walk in and introduce yourself. They’ll probably be happy to help you out.

I’ve blogged about my Golden Steer Favorites before, but my list has changed a bit since then. Here are the top three things I recommend that you buy:

  1. Maui beef ribs – Thin strips of meat marinated in their maui sauce. Grill for a couple minute or two on each side and enjoy.
  2. Chicken bacon ranch burgers – These are preformed delicious patties.
  3. Boneless rib eyes – This was the winner of our blind taste test of steaks. You can’t go wrong with this choice.

They regularly have new items to try out too. Our latest purchase included a few prime rib burgers. They were pricey but supposedly fantastic. We are still waiting to test them out ourselves.

The bottom line is that your local butcher knows their meat and they would love to share that delicious knowledge with you.

 

benmartens February 13, 2017 Commentary