Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

As always, I can’t be bothered to proofread, so apologies in advance for illegibility due to ignorance of the rules of spelling and grammar. Just because I like the picture, I’m going to start this entry with this picture that I took through my front door’s peephole:

Both the health of my corporeal being and my cable internet have been leaving a lot to be desired lately, so it seems quite a lot of time has passed since I last posted. That said, I’ve been a lot less active than I’d like to be, so I don’t really have that much to report in relation to the time that has passed, but I’ll give it a go because I have been making some fun stuff. I’d hoped to have a little more energy because school has started, reducing my work hours, but changing my alarm to get me up early has been draining enough to compensate for any reduced demands. I did have one day off when Nefarious went to visit her mom, which I think is the first visit they’ve had since March, so that was very eagerly looked forward to by everyone (Nefarious drew a wonderful sweet picture that happily predicted the visit — she definitely has riding in her blood, and as she ages I definitely see more and more of her mother in her — it’s remarkable how genetically predetermined our personalities are). She definitely came back aglow.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll find the right rhythm soon.

I picked up a cheap mini wood lathe (which has already broken and is getting returned) and to test it out and remember how to use it — not counting jewelry making on a little Unimat, I haven’t used a wood lathe since elementary school — I made a rough chess-piece-sort-of-thing out of unsuitable wood (very fibrous stuff that shreds itself on the lathe) and a little wooden change bowl out of a 4×4 board that I kind of like and will probably keep. I also made a couple of wooden rings for amusement, one with a BB mounted in it and the other with a piece of scrap plastic, but those were hand carved, not done on the lathe.

I also picked up five or ten pounds of silicone molding materials, as well as some candy making and soap making supplies, so this weekend I’ll probably do some experiments in that realm. I’m not really sure what though, but I imagine I’ll begin with lollipops in the form of grotesque heads or something, which I’ll make out of Sculpey and then take a mold off of. I’m quite looking forward to this. Given how crippled I feel these days, I’m happy that I still have the strength left to fill the gaps with projects — Nefarious and I finally finished off the chipmunk painting we started ages ago.

Since winter is coming up, Caitlin made me a nice hat.

Anyway… I feel like this is not a very good post, but I don’t like neglecting my blog for so long. If it wasn’t for that must-post compulsion I probably wouldn’t post at all any more. It’s really getting to be very difficult to meet the physical demands of day to day life, and it’s a steeper hill to climb every day, and it’s harder and harder to do it. I hate looking in the mirror and seeing how much my muscles have atrophied, and I hate feeling so weak, and most of all I would give almost anything to make the pain stop but that’s just not going to happen. I really want to get off this ride, I’ve had enough of it. I don’t want to do it any more. But it’s not like I have any choice in the matter, so I keep on doing the best I can, and I keep on being amazed that even through all this, moments of joy still do find a way to bubble up to the surface. The results of the genetic testing that was started back in April are finally in, so perhaps I will get some good news at month’s end when they talk to me about them.

Which reminds me — as you know from I think the entry before this one, I got about five hour of tattooing done recently. The odd thing was that during the tattooing, I didn’t bleed at all. Not a drop. No lymph, no blood, nothing. Shane might as well have been drawing on me with a marker. The healing was just as odd, because there was never a scab of any magnitude on the tattoo. Nothing at all. Nor did the tattooed skin flake off or anything. It was as if Shane teleported the ink into me. No bleeding, and instant healing. It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen a tattoo do.

PS. What is a BUFFGOAT?

I have the munchies and Caitlin tells me that the Loblaws around the corner is open until ten, so I think I”m going to go get a cherry pie. Yum. At least that ends the post on a high note!

This is long, and I have many better things to do tonight than prufe reed.

Because it took me some time to get the video rendered and uploaded (after I gave up on brutally slow Quicktime Pro, this free video conversion tool saved the day), this is being posted a day late, so let me interject a story from today at the pool. While Nefarious was doing her swimming test (since she’s under age, she has to prove that she can swim lengths and tread water before being allowed in the deep end) I got a phone call from a friend, and after a minute the life guard says to me, “You can’t have that phone here. Electronic devices are not allowed around the pool.”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard this rule, so I asked her why, and she replied that “cell phones interfere with things and that can be dangerous.”

“What do they interfere with? I don’t understand,” I ask her.

Again vaguely, she says, “we’ve had a lot of problems in the past with them, so they’re banned.”

“Could you give me an example of a problem that the phones cause?”

And then she says defensively, and I kid you not, with a straight face emphasizing her belief in what she was saying, “If you were to drop your cell phone in the water you could electrocute everyone swimming here.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing openly at her and told her that she was lying, and as I walked away she yelled that if I didn’t believe her I could go into the office and they’d show me the rule on paper. I called her bluff and did just that, since the office was a non-inconvenient ten feet away, and all the other lifeguards looked to see which of their coworkers had sent me in. I don’t know if she’s the chubby outcast of the group, but they very invalidated her authority and told me that she was an idiot and just to ignore her, and that I could use my phone all I wanted as long as I wasn’t taking photos of other people’s kids. The reason behind all this ineptitude is a long entry of its own.

Oh and don’t worry about this exchange having jinxed Nefarious’s test — the lifeguard barely even watched her, and at the end, just said to her “Ok, get out of the pool”, and nothing else. I just took Nefarious into the office and told the lifeguards that we were there to get her green deep-end bracelet. That said, we bumped into a friend of hers that is not yet able to pass the test, so they spent most of their time playing in the shallow end (about three feet deep, maybe a tiny bit more in areas).

* * *

I’m going to begin by telling you what I’ve been working on lately.

First of all, as I mentioned before (and I know I still owe you a diagram), Nefarious designed a set of cutlery for each of the four Houses of Hogwarts, and I started by creating the Slytherin salad fork and spoon, with a snake wrapped around the fork, and a skull on the handle of the spoon. They were carved out of 3/4″ oak (making the skull a little “flat”) based on her drawings, and then the back and all the detailing was done by hand using a Dremel. After the pieces were sanded — and yes, I admit that I gave up before really finishing this perfectly and that it’s really primitive — I rubbed them with olive oil (and no other finishing agents of any kind, since these need to be food safe). It was amazing how much the oil brought out the color and darkened the wood, to say nothing of the feel of the wood. Given that this is the first spoon and fork that I’ve ever carved in my life, I’m pleased with the outcome.

[For more detail click: manhole covers fork and spoon]

Next I had the idea to make some hot plates (or whatever the mats that you put under hot pans on the table are called) that looked like scaled down versions of manhole covers, with a special eye to the artistic Japanese manhole covers. I made one “normal” cover, which I finished in an iron oxide and dry brushed with silver, as well as three Japanese inspired ones in various finishes. One was done in the same silver-tinged iron oxide, but with “highlights” painted in some of the design, almost like a stained glass window. Another was completely painted, colorfully, with silver (“liquid mirror” paint) borders, and the last was stained cappuccino rather than painted, with the highlights done with olive oil and a tiny amount of translucent white — essentially natural wood. It was all done very roughly, because these were just feelers to decide whether it was worth pursuing. I’ve seen enough that I’m inclined to go ahead and make some nicer ones (with the new bit, which will quadruple the resolution, which is an incomparable improvement), which I promise will look much better. Because 2D pictures don’t really do 3D work justice, here’s a video of the projects, with me rambling for far too long (with stuffed nose if it’s not obvious) about them. Another idea would be to do album covers.

And yeah, it really needs a de-S’er… Yikes!

Like I said, rambling for far too long, but at least it’s HD. With a stuffed nose to boot. But I do really, really like making things and have so, so many things that I am dying to try out… and every time I see my Arduino, I remember so, so many things that I still want to spend more time on.

Other than that, it’s been a difficult couple of days. I felt surprisingly OK when we did our day-long walk through the CNE (admittedly a mix of morphine and the pleasure of being out at the fair go a long way from keeping your mind off physical pain), but it takes my body an awfully long time to repair itself from the damage that this did, so I’ve been rather incapacitated with the never-ending pain and weakness and regular trips to hide in the bathroom, not for my guts (or onward), but to re-guard my emotions so I can keep most of how difficult this is from my young park and pool companion. Caitlin has offered to take me wheelchair shopping. Anyway, I did have some highlights eating a delicious raspberry cake that Caitlin made, but today is the first day that I’ve started to feel mostly functional again [edit: speaking a bit too soon, judging by my current immobility], but yesterday I still made it to the park and saw something that struck me as odd — what looked like a four or five year old boy, nude, as his diaper had just been removed, eagerly breastfeeding. The woman had a Angelina Jolie-like coven of multi-racial children that seemed to be her family, so I’m not sure what the story there was…

Weird stuff, but who am I to judge. I told someone today about it (another parent that I bumped into at the park, so we talked a little) and they were really cold in their response, so I’m not sure whether they were aggressive pro-breast feeding people and they thought I was criticizing them, or if they were just upset that I’d bring up what they might think is awkward to talk about to a relative stranger.

Nefarious drew me this wonderful picture, and I put it next to my computer.

That it was in part an attempted bribe in no way diminishes its sweetness.

She says “tell everyone I drew that when I was really little!”, because she thinks it’s not her best work, but I love it and it makes me very happy.

School starts again in a few days. It’s going to be weird after a full summer of Nefarious being home with us for the vast majority of that time. I wonder if I’ll have more time to indulge these sorts of projects, or if I’ll just use it to sleep… I’m ashamed to admit that my track record indicates the latter.

* * *

Oh, and thank God for five days of rain and thundershowers on the forecast! I really hope they’re good ones, because it’s been horribly hot here. I blame the out of control ambient temperature for having, with much billowing smoke, melted the flexi-cable (connecting the engine to the bits) on my router. I wasn’t doing anything abnormal that should have caused it to melt like this, so I’m assuming that the high temperatures contributed to pushing this sheath past what it was designed to handle.

Nefarious, who has been begging me lately for a blog of her own (her concept of blogging is likely a little more fantastical than reality, because mine is strictly and tantalizingly off limits, other than carefully selected pieces so that she sees how proud I am of her accomplishments), has asked me to post about some of her projects here on her schedule, not mine.

We had a bread knife “go bad”. It’s kind of hard to explain, but what I think happened is that the rubber absorbed dishwashing liquid (probably due to being left sitting in water) and then started to break down, becoming a sort of crumbly goo. Caitlin threw it out but I rescued it from the garbage. Originally the plan was just to cut off the gross bits to make it usable, but Nefarious volunteered to fabricate a completely new handle. I’ll explain the reason in a moment, but this is the Sword Dagger of Godric Gryffindor, an “inspired by” replica she made after printing out photos of the movie prop.

The reason she made that is as part of an ongoing series of cutlery that she dreamed up. Although there may be variations, there’s a knife, fork, and spoon for each Hogwarts house founder from the Harry Potter series — Gryffindor as I already mentioned, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. When I post the final version of this stuff after they’re finished, I’ll include the really cool drawings she’s made of them. I’m really happy to see her drawing out plans and diagrams, so I’m totally encouraging it by helping out. Anyway, this one here are the salad utensils of Salazar Slytherin. Obviously they’re just roughed out so far, and there’s still a lot of carving, sanding, and oiling still to do.