| life update |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|10:28 pm] |
Hi there! What's going on? Yeah? That's great.
Anyway, I've been busy lately. I've started another project in Jonathan's basement, and I made out like a bandit last weekend at Goodwill:
Jefferson Starship! (though not the album with White Rabbit on it) Jethro Tull! A couple Fresh Aire records! A smörgåsbord of awesome.
Second, I've been on a well-nigh tool-buying spree. Seriously. If tools were candy I would have a cavity.
One of the things that I bought was a corded drill. I've been really pleased with the cordless drill that I got as a Christmas (birthday?) present a number of years ago, but the project that I'll mention in a moment required a corded drill.
I at first got one at Home Depot for $60, which is about what I was expecting. On impulse, I went over to Lowe's to see their selection. Good thing I did, because I spotted a nearly-identical drill on sale for ...$23. Well, color me happy/surprised/yellowy-pink! So I took the other one back. The returns guy agreed that I'd made the right choice.
One thing that the corded drill enabled me to do was put a hole in my ceiling. One of the very few things that I don't like about this apartment is how dark it is. The only built-in lights are in the kitchen (fine), two small hallways (dim), dining room (dim), and bathroom (fine). I presntly have six lamps of various sorts in my apartment, but none near the door due to lack of space.
So, for awhile I've really wanted a light in the ceiling there. Unfortunately, my building is made out of concrete, and my battery-powered drill just couldn't do it. But! With this one! I can! Ha! A ha ha! Ha!
...Well I was going for evil, but I think I got sneezy.
Anyway, here's the finished product, pretty cool, eh?
Thirdly, four of us (Jonathan, Anna, Martin, and I) have started "new food Tuesdays," where we rotate weekly amongst our various abodes, cooking a different dinner each time! So far we've done Thai, Japanese, and Mexican. This week was Italian at Jonathan & Anna's!
Martin: "Hnnk!"
*Hnnk* reminds me of,
We decided to make pizza, which would've been somewhat pedestrian except we decided to make MORE THAN ONE! We did a white sauce, red sauce, and dessert pizza!
Anna puts the dessert pizza in the oven.
It was revealed that, when he was young, Martin worked for a summer at Dominoe's pizza. We pressed him into throwing the pizza.
And it very nearly worked.
We were kept company by not one, but *two* kitties:
If you're doubting your ability to count because the one on the right seems to only have three legs, don't worry. You're fine.
The cat, who goes by the monikers "Man," "Dude," or "Dudeman," is missing his rear left leg. Still, he gets around quite fine, and is a noticeably intelligent cat. He followed Katie cat in and made himself home on the couch, which surprised me a bit because he's normally very skittish. But apparently he just wanted attention, because whenever I'd wander over to pet him he'd aggressively push himself into my palm.
At one point when they were both on the couch, I stopped petting him to pet Katie, and he moved over and sprawled right next to her. "C'mon, pet meeeee! I'm adorable!" I like him.
Anyway!
Here's the white sauce pizza:
The sauce was great, and involved things like white wine, garlic, oregano, and onion powder.
Jonathan here looks...tired...yeah, "tired."
The red pizza construction starts:
And just like that! Everything's done!
Eventually, we had the dessert pizza, which was delicious.
But, finally! The project! I was inspired by a screensaver, which showed a spinning, floating 3D Sierpinksi triangle, or "Sierpinski pyramid":
(The one on the left. The one on the right is an "inverse Sierpinski pyramid.")
Unfortunately, as you can see, each pyramid meets another at the corners of the pyramid, rather than at the faces. This makes the construction of it more challenging, because you can't very well use wood glue. Don't worry, I have plans. Great plans. Wonderful plans! Plans that I have no idea if they'll work!
So, as a warm-up, I decided to build a 3D Menger sponge:
Both of these fractal objects are described by their "level." In the above image, the objects from left to right are levels 1–4.
The caveat to this endeavor is that I wanted to make the model entirely out of the highest-level cubes. The number of cubes goes like this:
- Level 1
- 1 block
- Level 2
- 20
- Level 3
- 400
- Level 4
- 8,000
- Level 5
- 160,000
So obviously this plan makes small children fall over themselves in gleeful laughter very, very quickly.
I settled on doing a Level 3 sponge. But! In a flash of insight, we decided to drill holes in the middle of each block giving the illusion of it being a Level 4 fractal.
But let me tell you, drilling 3 holes in 400 cubes is not the easiest thing in the world. Here's what 400 3/4" cubes of birch look like:
A letdown? Yeah, maybe.
This is the ideal project for someone who owns a drill press. I do not. So, this past weekend while Jonathan and Anna were gone, I made myself an inverse drill press, which I'm still awfully proud of:
Eh? Eh? Pretty great, right? I would slot a cube in the wood tray and bring it down on the drill, then bring it back up, rotate it 90°, and repeat. The metal lips served to hold the blocks in place. I got pretty quick with it by the end of a half hour or so.
Lucky for all of us, Jonathan in his infinite wisdom borrowed his dad's drill press. See, the only downside to my design was that my corded drill sounds like a very tiny, very angry jet engine. The drill press, on the other hand, sounds like a slightly stuffed-up refrigerator. SO, we switched to that.
We got through them all in about an hour.
As an added twist, I want to stain half of the blocks in a checkerboard pattern. So, in between dinner pizza and dessert pizza, that's what we did!
(While watching MST3K.)
Jonathan noted, "Wow, it looks like a lot of individual spectra." A reference which maybe only ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rudybang will appreciate.
I also want to poly the unstained blocks, for durability's sake. We started on that, too.
I'm hopeful! The main source of variation in color that you see is due to some blocks being end-grain up. They're the darker ones.
Finally finally, it snowed here last night:
*shiver* |
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