On Friday, January 22, 2016 at 6:39:33 PM UTC-6, Frank Reid © 2012 wrote:
That's all well and good, but how's the fishing?

Waving a stick in the air with a bit of string and a hooky thingy on the end of it? That sort of thing?

Haven't done that in about five years. Opportunities for such pursuits are somewhat limited here in S.E. Curdistan and I kind of got sidetracked into chasing birds, bugs, flowers and trees for a while. And then it was geocaching for about a year.

The latter was an illuminating experience. You know those areas you've haunted all your life.....the places you've covered every inch of for years and years.....the places you know really really well? Well, it turns out you don't. Somebody else has visited spots in there, a casual twenty minute's walk from your home that you never knew existed. And it cuts both ways. You have been to places virtually in other people's back yards that they have never seen. Mental maps are filled with very large holes.

More recently, I've been pounding on steel and rocks with hammers and chisels and fullers and flatters.....I've been sanding and scraping and planing and drilling and welding and screwing and bolting and stitching and all manner of fun things at a place called Milwaukee Makerspace. Last night I got knocked on my ass by a two thousand volt blast from a microwave oven transformer while trying to make Lichtenberg figures on a piece of two by four slathered with a baking soda solution. It worked....eventually.

Me and a couple of other guys are currently in the early planning stage of a project to convert a couple hundred pounds of Lake Michigan beach sand into steel using a fifty-five gallon drum, a bunch of refractory clay, and a few pounds of thermite.

What a hoot!

g.