So I engaged in the annual ritual of apple tree pruning the other day. It is the second year in a row I have done it. That makes it annual. When I planted the trees, two summers ago, annual pruning was not a thing that was on my radar, but every time I would look …
In today’s installment of Adam Savage’s One Day Builds, Adam re-created the first thing he ever engineered with a releasing mechanism: a ping pong ball launcher. He first made one as a 16-year-old high school student. It involved 3 rubber bands, a spoon, a length of coat-hanger wire, a hinge, some twine threaded around a …
Read more “On Reunions with Lost Selves – or – Whimsy v. Vogons”
I woke up yesterday thinking about what I wanted to write. And today, same. Yesterday I stayed in bed for a while, enjoying being able to puzzle through ideas under the warm sheets, knowing it was -15F outside. Today, I didn’t lounge – even though it was even colder outside. I got out of …
I drove past a small boulevard tree the other day, maybe 8 feet tall with a 1.5-inch diameter trunk, which was completely engulfed in a plastic sheet. A big sheet. I’ll bet it was 10’x 25’. Heavy too. Probably 15-20 mil thick. It was the day after a winter storm that had brought 12 hours …
We have snow on the ground again in Fargo. It seems like it came late this year, but mid-November is a fairly normal time for the first snowstorm of the season, historically. It only seems late because we have gotten early storms the past two or three years – which made our most notorious season …
My office door isn’t plumb. That bugs me. It isn’t far out. You can’t see it. Really, its only noticeable if there is weight on the coat hook on the back of the door. Because then it falls partially-closed. Not fully-closed mind you. Not even mostly closed. Just closed enough to look sloppy. If my …
Garage Monkeys. That is how Pirsig and Crawford describe them. Each writes about a different species: Pirsig about repair techs who lack arete and Crawford about the middle managers who stand between vehicle owners and vehicle repair techs. They are adjacent parts of the modern automotive service-shop organization and both offend something at my core. …
I want to write about grading – but not the kind of grading that results in scores or letters A-F (excluding, for whatever reason, ‘E’). I have something to say about a kind of grading few people think about anymore – and even fewer understand. If you have lived your life on paved roadways, you …