Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I finally got around to plugging my iPhone into my computer and upon copying the photos into my digital pictures folder, I saw that in addition to expected pictures of Nefarious shooting machine guns there are quite a few unexpected photos of me napping… Apparently if I’m asleep she not only takes pictures of me in that languid state (embarrassing ones at that — I am sparing you the many shots of my underwear and butt-crack that I am certain brought her considerable amusement) but also at times stacks objects on me to compose the picture more to her liking and/or humor.

That said, it is a huge improvement over past sleeping and waking stunts including writing on my face with a marker (which was achieved at least once without waking me), putting my hand into a bowl of warm water, and worst of all, splashing me in the face with a cup of cold water.

Before you write her off as the world’s worst kid, the last prank, the only one that moves from funny into cruel, was done at my request, because I wanted to know what it felt like — and it really is strange… hard to explain, I think because it takes your brain a moment to put an explanations to the sensations, so while it’s doing that, you get to feel the raw moment, free of context. Try it.

Our doorbell, as you can seeing photo five below (bottom center), is an exposed piece of metal because it’s missing the panel and button. I’m sure this is the reason why we often receive delivery notices on the door, but the driver doesn’t bother to ring — they’re worried that if they push it, they’ll be electrocuted. So one of today’s project was creating a new enclosure. I carved it out of oak, which is nice because it’s really hard, but not so nice because it’s so tough and stringy that it can have trouble holding fine detail unless you work slowly. Anyway, going through the photos below in order:

1. The freshly carved pieces, both from a single piece of 3/4″ thick oak. The button has a lip as well as a raised numeral “5″ (our address), and the box (which is carved, not built) just has a matching round hole for the button.
2. I stained the box with a weak cappuccino tint and outlined the button hole with primary yellow. The button is stained with a mix of sesame tint and whitewash, and the raised number five is painted with rubine red and fluorescent pink.
3. Here’s how it looks like from the back. There’s no hardware holding the two pieces together since the pressure from the switch holds it in position (although it can rotate — if this was a concern it would have been easy to carve slots to limit the movement).
4. This is what the DIY wooden doorbell enclosure looks like over top of the original naked switch. Definitely a big improvement, and a lot less scary for postmen. We tested it (it fit and worked perfectly) before permanently affixing it.
5. Here’s the wooden doorbell button and the electrical switch. You can see why it worried people! So after a year of delivery issues, it was either this or a pleading note and “anti-warning”.
6. I realized that I should waterproof it, so I finished it with a clear gloss layer, which darkened it and brought out the grain as well as making it shiny.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was a lot of fun to create something physical. I’ve created plenty of impressive virtual items — writing and online media and software and so on — but it’s never as satisfying as that which you can hold in your hands.

It’s been rainy today and yesterday, so the pool was closed keeping us home. That meant a lot of reading, which yesterday included — no joke — four and a half hours of The Deathly Hallows. Today we wrapped up with the chapter following the death of Harry Potter, so all that’s left for tomorrow is one last chapter and the epilogue. The last three books have all been video taped as well, so in addition to memories, I hope Nefarious will enjoy me reading to an age seven version of her many decades into the future.

While I was thinking about carving articulated dolls or marionettes or ventriloquists’ dummies out of wood, I doodled this ball joint. I wanted to see how hard it would be to carve a perfect sphere and its matching reverse, split into two halves, and was happy to discover that there was nothing to it. This wasn’t hand whittled or filed by the way. It was done with a Dremel clone (which I have oh-so-missed using every day when I was still a jeweler). That said, doing it with a file or knife wouldn’t be any harder. It would simply be more time consuming. While I’m mentioning tools, the enclosure and button up in the long photo sequence above was carved with my Carvewright (a computer controlled router) using just a 1/8″ bit (the others are misplaced), cuts and carving, and then finished with the Dremel.

Pardon the dirty nails (apologies to Caitlin for that most of all, who has suffered the worst for me) and hairs and so on. Eww, oh for the days when this sort of thing was invisible because a high resolution camera managed at best 640×480 and no one blinked when your 320×240 memories were smaller than the animated GIFs surrounding them. I’m sure there are still photos of Caitlin and I from back then since one of Stainless’s customers was a Kodak engineer or something and brought us toys, but I digress.

Considering some political art, I’ve been thinking about building a 3:1 scale (as in three times real size) handgun out of wood. Every piece would be shaped exactly like in a real gun, but it would be wood. Of course this would be a legal model, but it would show how making a functioning gun at home is getting easier and easier, and that one day fairly soon we’ll be able to “print out” a machine-gun and an infinite number of weapons crowd-sourced on the internet…

Other than that, I’ve mentioned before how much I like the NOS energy drink packaging (shaped like a horsepower boosting nitrous oxide bottle) — and I also like the way the NOS tastes, plus there was an IAM/BME member that worked at the factory back when I first discovered and posted positively about the drink which was sort of cool — but today when I was at the store I saw this similarly awesome “Rage” soda bottle, designed to look like a fire extinguisher… Awesome idea!

That said, I’m sorry to report that it’s just horrible, bright red and cherry flavored. I can’t express here just how awful it is. I really wanted to like this soda but couldn’t bring myself to… Sorry…

Nay, I think I’d go so far as to say this keeps me alive! So this evening, after a long day, Nefarious says to me, “you know, I really feel like watching a video,” and because I assume she means watching things on YouTube with me, I ask her what sort of videos? She says, “with that guy that looks like this,” and does a very strange mime of her holding her hands to her chin and wiggling her fingers. I tell her that I have absolutely no idea what she means, and she runs off to get a pencil and paper, saying she’ll draw me what she means. A moment later she returns with this Pictionary training session:

At first glance I thought it was Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean but then put it into the context of what Caitlin and I had just been talking about — it’s Dr. Zoidberg, which makes sense, since she’s always excited at the opportunity of watching PG-13 cartoons like Futurama. I guess that is my own private moment, and the joy in it is probably more clear to me than to readers who see my life through the telescope that is a blog, and thus the moment is most appreciated by me, but it’s in these small bubbles of laughter that everything feels wonderful, through and through.

We’ve gone to the public pool the last few days (which was most appreciated after a grueling afternoon of Canadian geography lessons and worksheets), and for the first time she’s passed the deep end test (meaning she can swim in the nine foot deep end, and that she can do it solo). She’s been swimming for a long time, but has never taken lessons, so even though she can swim the length of the pool underwater, until recently when you told her to do it in a front crawl, she had no idea what you were even talking about. However, she’s picked up the front crawl this summer (with some instruction, but mostly by watching others), so doing the two lengths followed by two minutes of treading water was simple. The lifeguard, who I think was a little dubious at first, kept throwing more requests at her, but she met every challenge successfully.

After that we had a ton of fun in the deep end with other kids, mostly diving over and over and over. Nefarious started with cannonballs, then twirls, then belly flops, then deep dives, and even managed to (after seeing me do a few) do a couple of mid-air somersault flips, although at that the lifeguard told us to cool it and go back to cannonballs. For some reason — maybe not enough winter swimming, or maybe damage from just that — I find the cold unbearable, even the relative warmth of an unheated-but-still-summertime-sun-saturated pool, so Nefarious took special glee in dragging me through the fountains and sprayers in the play area next to the pool, which are straight out of the ground pipes and hilariously torturous. But as much as she enjoys the bravado, I think the main reason she does it is that she’s figured out that forcing oneself to be sprayed with the chilly water makes the pool seem so much warmer by comparison. Anyway, it was a great time, and I’m so proud of how much her swimming has improved lately.

While there is much truth in the statement that the physical activity has been far from helpful with my physical reality, I am still quite pleased to say with conviction that as I knew they would, things have improved since Friday.