When I was a kid, we had a crow that hung around our house for years. My mom started feeding it table scraps, and soon enough it started to reciprocate by bringing us shiny trinkets and leaving them on the picnic table where my mother would put the scraps. The funniest thing was when it showed up with a key to OUR house!
Nice work, John. I too love spending time in my shop, making things both useful and sometimes not-so...
I totally take your point about challenging yourself and learning new skills. Recently I've been flogging myself thru learning sketchup 2015 so i can create handrail brackets for the reno we're doing on our 150-yr-old house. our local library can 3-D print them for me, and we're fortunate enough to have a foundry in the area that still does small batch casting. i love being able to add personal touches like that to our place.
This picture - remarkable as it is - really only gives the faintest impression of how BIG these guys actually are. My wife lived in the Arctic for many years and regularly saw polar bears in the wild. She heard a banging on the roof of her house one day and opened the door to find herself starting at a bear's belly: it was on its hind legs trying to claw its way up onto the roof! These guys have paws the size of a nacho platter, and their claws are much longer and thicker than a man's fingers. They're the only animals known to regularly stalk/hunt humans, and are incredibly stealthy for something so big. They've even been observed to cover their black noses with a paw to conceal themselves even better against the white snow. Oh, and they can run at around 40kph, even in deep snow. Yikes!
My mom had one of those lipsticks! My dad brought it back for her from a trip to Italy when he was in the navy, and it sat on her dresser for ages. i don't know if she ever used it, but we loved to play with it when we were kids.
Rings with inlaid wood are often beautiful, but unfortunately ephemeral. After a while, the wood has a tendency to dry out, crack/splinter and fall out of its inlay cavity. You CAN avoid this problem by making sure to regularly oil or wax the wood, but most people won't or can't be bothered to do so after maybe a few months. My wife and I experimented with such rings years ago, but gave them up after a while - too many customer complaints about the rings falling apart!
I totally take your point about challenging yourself and learning new skills. Recently I've been flogging myself thru learning sketchup 2015 so i can create handrail brackets for the reno we're doing on our 150-yr-old house. our local library can 3-D print them for me, and we're fortunate enough to have a foundry in the area that still does small batch casting. i love being able to add personal touches like that to our place.
keep up the good maker-work, and keep having fun!
Maggie (barfing on his nose)
Unkie Herb: "Eureka"!
White-on-white text? What the hell were you thinking?
I hope that whatever mega-corporation owns Lego doesn't sue him to death for it.