a busy start to spring

i've slowly been making invisible progress on my new shelving project.

yesterday i went to macbeath hardwood company and i picked up 38 board feet of rough four quarter soft maple in ten foot long boards of assorted widths for $155. leading up to this purchase i spent a lot of time researching the terminology related to buying lumber, finding different lumber suppliers near me, and balancing the properties of different the woods and their cost. i finally settled on soft maple because it looks good and is reasonably cheap.

i've been designing my shelves using google sketchup, if you'd like to take look at how the shelves will look then install sketchup and click here to download my design. i'm finished with the design itself, but i'm still working on alternate views that can be used as printouts for when i'm in the garage doing the actual construction. hopefully i'll be able to start milling some of the wood next week.

sat afternoon ronda and i celebrated the arrival of spring in a time honored SF fashion, we went to the zeitgeist for burgers and beer. we met up with some of ronda's friends there and afterwards went for some martinis at martuni's.

today we did a bunch of random cooking. last weekend we cooked up three pounds of tasty corned beef from marin sun farms (our favorite meat supplier). we used half the corned beef last weekend for corned beef hash and we finished it off this weekend by making ruben sandwiches. rye bread, thinly sliced corned beef, thinly sliced swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and home made russian dressing, all cooked up in the panini press. mmmm...

after the ruben sandwiches for brunch, i tried out a new salsa recipie for papalote salsa. just in case you're not familiar with papalote, it's an awesome taqueria in the mission, and they serve a salsa that's more addictive than crack. i have to say the version that i made isn't exactly the same, but it's really freakin good.

i also wanted to make (but never got around to making) some sikil p'ak. i normally buy little $6 tubs of this stuff at the farmers market from primavera. the problem is that the little tub never last past two sittings (if it makes it that long). so i did some digging around on the internet and i came up with this recipie for sikil p'ak. i bought all the ingredients and hopefully i'll be able to try it soon.

since i was on a salsa kick, i also created a peppers file as a convenient reference for all my pepper cooking needs.

i also went roasted the second half of a 3 lb lutz beet that i picked up last weekend at the farmers market from tierra vegetables. i had never heard of or seen a lutz beet before, but tierra is one of my favorite people at the farmers market often times i'll just buy whatever they bring just to try it out. i roasted the beet by cutting it up into 1" square strips, putting it in a tray with 3/4 cup water and some olive oil, covering it with foil, and sticking it into the oven at 350 F for one and quarter hours. after that i pulled the skin off and cut it into chunks so that ronda and i can have it later during the week.

the long way

ronda and i have been living at our current house for almost two years now, and honestly, we don't have much furniture to prove it. well, i've decided that we need some shelving. so instead of behaving like a normal person and going out and buying a bunch of shelving, or even a normal practical and creative person who would go out and quickly create a bunch of shelving, instead i'm setting out to learn google sketchup so that i can design some shelving. even though the shelving will be pretty simple and basic, i'm hoping to create a detailed model in sketchup that includes all joinery, assembled and exploded views, component lists and measurements, and cut lists for lumber. i've found a really good blog that covers sketchup from a woodworkers perspective, and i'm slowing reading my way through all the old entries.  once i have the design finished i'll be sure to post it here on my website.

It's finally done...

it's finally done.  after 13 months (including a break of about 7 months) i've finally finished my bench.  last week i put the final coat of finish on it.  now i don't really have any need for a bench, but that doesn't really matter.  what matters is that it's done, and now i am using it as a side table to hold my drink while i write this post, and it's doing a great job.  here are some photos of it in different stages of development. now i guess i'll have to find something else to build.

backyard work and lots of pics

so the past two weekends have been spent mostly doing a lot of work in the backyard, and today i uploaded lots of photos.

the oldest photos that i uploaded were from our tour of marin sun farms, which is where we get most our meat, eggs, and whole chickens from. i also have some woodworking related photos. you can check out the zero clearance insert and router table that i built for my ts2400 table saw here. i finally glued my bench together, and ronda even snapped some photos of me mixing shellac flakes. thrilling, eh?

so i spent the past two weekends removing an old large brick bbq from the backyard so that we could plant more stuff in the garden. my landlord wanted me to save most the bricks, so i did, but the removal processes involved a 20 lb sledge hammer and produced a lot of rubble. the concrete and re-bar reinforced foundation was the biggest pain. i didn't photograph the bbq before removing it, but you can see the lack of it and piles of rubble here. with the bbq removed, we have some more room for planting stuff, so you can see photos of the garden here, here, and here.

dead tired

the weekend was ok. i actually assembled the bench that i've been working on for what seems like forever. i also kegged my first all grain batch of beer. i thought i fucked it up by mashing it at too high a temperature, but in the end it seems to have turned out ok. sunday night me and ronda went to dan's place where he smoked some salmon on the grill. it was really tasty and now i have to try adding trays of wood chips to the bbq to recreate some of that tastiness. today i finally managed to bike into work. the weather has been fine for it for a while, but i'm a lazy ass and motivating to actually bike into work is hard. course, now that i've finally done it i'm dead tired. i forgot how much fun it is to bike into a strong headwind while coming home and struggle to go 9 mph.

not really dead yet...

well, i haven't died just yet. although if you actually check in on this blog you might have though otherwise. this post is mainly just a waste of space to say "i'm here" and provide pointers to some photos that i've uploaded. there's some pics of me, ronda, and a couple friends at an overpriced weird bar in sf. there's some woodworking dross. then there's the end of the year holidays with xmas in florida with ronda's family and new years in la with mine. And just in case that isn't enough, early on in this year i went to a fucking great show at the independent that features two of my favorite bands, the pine box boys and the devil makes three. well, that's probably enough irrelevant shit for another month.

milled wood

after many weekends, lots of new tool purchases, and lots of planing i finally finished milling about 5 board feet of cherry into usuable pieces for a small bench that i'm buildling. exciting eh?

got dovetails?

i do. unfortunatly they are not particularly good, although the last ones are much better than the first. i've been practicing making them and i've gotten it down to just under five hours for one. i've also practiced making some mortise and tendon joints and those are a bit easier than dovetails. i'm planning on trying to make some half-blind dovetails next. once i'm comfortable with those joints i plan to actually try to build something. i'm basically making my way through a book about Woodworking Basics and i'm planing on doing the two projects listed in the book, a small bench and a bed sidetable. course it'll be a while before i finish practicing those dovetails so we'll just have to see how it goes.

unrestfull weekends

lately (since i moved) every monday when i go to work i'm super tired. the "restfull" weekends have been anything but. i don't really have much to show for the weekends, but somehow they leave me super tired. this weekend i made my first dovetail... starting down the road of a new hobby, woodworking. course it looks like something a two year old tried to make but whatever. i've got half a lifetime left to try and perfect it... unless of course i get bored.

dorking with wood

so i spent the past couple weekends designing and building a spice rack. (the design was centered around functionality and ease of manafucture... ie, i don't have too many tools or space to work with.) here's some pictures of the semi finished product. (it doesn't have handles or stain yet. also, it's an inch too wide, but without a table saw there's no way to fix that yet.) in the new year i'll start working on a second one and finish this one up. (we clearly have too many spices.)