Daily Life

Sparkle Zone color. There’s a reason why we call this room of our house the ‘Sparkle Zone.’ +1

Testing, testing. One, two, three — Two outpatient visits to the hospital today for some tests. Ultrasound in the morning, and my annual cardiology checkup in the afternoon. All my results were good. In a little experiment, I used AI to obfuscate the personal information in the image. It makes a nice change from pixelating it.

Small Product Photography Setup — Once we’ve been using it for a while and know what we like and don’t like, I’ll tidy away the cables and power supplies. Until then, it’s going to be a bit messy.

Harbinger — The yellow light at sunset is a warning of the incoming storm.

Lanie’s been in Europe since December. It’s been my job to give her car a run out every now and then while she’s gone. One has to do these things in style 🙂 +1

Table saw cart — completed (for now). That’s another job finished. As I hoped, the dust collection seems to work well. I also made a zero clearance saw blade insert for the saw. 2

Family range time — We organized a family trip down to the Sound of Freedom in Ozark and had some fun. Katie is trying out a scope on a pistol. Gary is reloading. There was also a new AR15 to be tried out and sighted in, and some other new handguns we’d not taken down the range.

Building my table saw cart. One-minute read, +4

New workbench storage — I have finally updated the storage area above my workbench. There used to be five plastic cat litter boxes on the shelf. I made these five wood boxes in an afternoon, so the finish isn’t furniture level, but they fit the space well and look much better. 2

Hitachi C10FR Table Saw — My next project. It’s a very well-used worksite jobbing saw, and it is time to make some improvements.

Doorstop — another test shot to get a feel of the workflow with the new storage and table.

Knife — A quick test of the new photography table. Jim gave me the knife a few months ago. The piece of driftwood was washed up on the Baltic coast and is amazingly lightweight.

Set up for a quick test — I used a small hand-held fill in light for the test pictures. It has finely adjustable color temperature and brightness.

Sparkle Zone Storage Center, Stage Two, almost complete — Some final adjustments to the bottom doors to be made. There is still some minor work and finishing touches to be completed. Apart from that, all done. +5

A costly mistake… At $70 per door, and I ruined two doors before I realized my error. I forgot to allow for the Inset panel (at 3/16-inch) when selecting screws to mount the doors on cross braces. That brings my ‘Cock-up Account’ up to $200 in a couple of months (don’t ask).

Sparkle Zone Storage Center, Stage One, almost complete. Now for the fiddly bit of the end panel and the ‘fill-in’ panels. That big gap — that’s a special space, and will be Stage Two!

It fits — Carcasses fitted to the wall, this, and fitting the doors is the easy bit.

Will it work? Dry fit. Just eyeballing it to make sure we like the use of space, and checking I hadn’t messed up my size calculations.

Boxes — I was going to custom build the Sparkle Zone Storage Center, but we realized we could save a lot of time (but not $$$ — the doors alone were nearly $700) by bringing in ready-made units.

An empty wall equals storage potential. Recently we’ve been on the lookout for more storage space. We have also been looking for somewhere with space, that we can use for small product photography. The south facing windows of the ‘Sparkle Zone’ offer good light and, we realized, space for storage of our photography gear — and more.

Rumpled — I loved the play of light, how the duvet mimics the shapes of two people lying back-to-back, and the stories implicit in the folds and wrinkles of the duvet and sheet.

Backpacking gear to the rescue — Making breakfast and charging my phone while the power is out. We were lucky, we only went without power for 21 hours. +1

Nightstand. Lighter, knife, and wallet — Little quirks that may be missed when I’m no longer around. And yes, I do lay them out like this every night.

At what point does being sensible drop over the edge into being obsessional? Asking for a friend — who likes to squeeze the life out of a toothpaste tube. Sensible or an obsession?

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