Yes, no,no,yes,no,ye-no YES!

This weekend Lindsey and I were supposed to attend Pennsic War Practice (an SCA event). It's not big, but it's close, I have some friends there and we made a podest profit last year. Rossana would be staying behind to oversee work being done at the house.

At 2am last night I had some kind of strange premonition and I checked the event website. In all previous years, you would just show up. All you needed was a valid PA sales license. Not this year. The property owners now demand that all merchants carry a 2 million dollar liability policy. Also, you had to pre-register for the event. I felt ill. I fired off an email to the merchant coordinator asking if there was anything that could be done. In the morning I tried to call the Autocrat (who runs the event). No luck.

Lindsey arrived and I explained the situation. It just didn't look feasible. Plus some guys never showed up at the house to do prep work and I might be of more use at the home front. We spent the day doing errands, writing off the event. Then I got a call from the merchant coordinator. It seems like we could do the event if we showed up with the paperwork. Crap. The insurance requirement had forced several smaller merchants to withdraw from the event. There were about half the normal number of vendors this year. Fewer merchants means fewer places to spend money. This can conceivably lead to increased sales.

So at 10:30pm we threw a show load into the van. Lindsey is doing the show solo. She's worked without us before, but with a minion of her own. We still don't know if our insurance will cover the event. It's a crap shoot. We're trusting that everything will go the way we hope and no one will be a dick. Keeping fingers crossed.

More gooder...

Remember that blasphemous video "PG-13 300"? Well there's something even gooder now. Flight 300

I really give it to these guys. A lot of work went into this.

Flickrvision

Totally addicting. See what people are uploading to Flickr and where they are uploading from.

Chair Day!

The event went off pretty well. There were about 10 of us cutting, ripping, routing, chiseling you name it. We put in a solid day and got 8 chairs cut and test assembled. We couldn't get them finished and stained, we simply ran out of energy and time. With one more work day we can get these done and I know they will look great. The days of ugly Wal-Mart chairs in our camp are numbered.

Here are pics of the event.

Website wierdness

The site is redierecting for some reason. I'm check into it.

Beam me up. Har har.

When contemplating a home improvement project, there are three distance phases:

• Phase 1- Concept
  
  "Honey, if we're going to stucco the house, we should have stone lintels over the windows like an Irish cottage. That would rock."

• Phase 2- Modification due to budget
  
  "Holy crap, there is NO way we can afford stone. But I found this cool company on the Internets that makes faux wood beams. They'd be perfect"

• Phase 3 - Settling for something else (due to the intrusion of reality).
  
  "They want HOW much just to ship a fake wood beam? Ok, what have I got sitting around the yard that I haven't burned yet?"

I really put entirely too much thinking into what should have been a pretty straight forward problem. How do I make it look like the windows have antique beams above them. I contacted companies that sell old barn beams and tried to figure out complex cuts so that they would fit into the window frame. I stressed myself out because I couldn't make it work. Eventually I had to walk away from the problem. Too much thinking. Thinking bad.

They yesterday I picked up a scrap piece of 6X6 left over from the roof project. I held it over the window and heard the sound of Angels blasting trumpets. I could use chunks of WOOD!!!!

I know, it seams pretty obvious to YOU. But I'd been trying to figure out ways to cut materials to replicate a lintel exactly. Using an actual beam would not be perfect, some of the existing window frame would be visible, but it would certainly work, and time is a big factor here.

And since our budget won't allow for buying real 200 year old hand worked beams I had to come up with my own. The solution was simple and very effective. A super tough wire wheel on a 4" angle grinder. The wheel strips away the softer wood fibers, leaving the harder wood in a great raised pattern. It's just like sandblasting. I also took chunks out at random spots and rounded the edges to give the appearance of having been hand worked with an adze.

Voila! Instant antique beams. They look great and didn't cost an arm and a leg. Rossana loves them and now wants to know if I could do the same to the main beams for the roof. That would be about 20 times the work. Plus the beams would be dark whereas the rest of the roof is pretty light colored. Maybe I could use a lighter stain. We'll see. I'm just grateful to get something off my to do list.

Balls

According to Wikipedia, today marks the anniversary of the attempted theft of the crown jewels of England in 1671 by Thomas Blood (yes, that was his name).

Have a read, it's short and simply amazing. This guy not only tried to steal the Crown Jewels, he told the King the jewels were only worth 6,000 pounds, not the 100,000 they were valued at.

Then he talked his way into a pardon!
He're to you, Thomas Blood. And your 15 pound balls.

Point of no Return

This is me taking an air hammer to my house. This seemed like a good idea at some point. The theory is to round the edges of the doors and windows so that when the stucco is applied we soften everything up a little. Knowing this doesn't make it any easier to take a chisel to a perfectly good brick wall. I mean, I'm past the point of changing my mind here. That ship has sailed.


Then there are the repairs to the roof. When the orginal repairs were done, a huge industrial strength ruber sheet was installed to prevent leaking. Alas, it wasn't installed quite right. When we get too much rain, the water creeps over the edge of the ruber and seeps into the cinderblock leading to small leaks. But small leaks take their toll. Plus the material doesn't drain away from the house enough and the topsoil isn't thick enough by our garage. So we're digging, adding new material, sealing it, covering it and laying new topsoil. Joy. The first job was so close, but just didn't get it right. Everything about this house is a learning experience, sometimes a painful one. The good news is that they're bringing over a kind of mini Bobcat front loader. I'm hoping to get them to level out some of the pits in the yard and clean up by our burn pile. I very much doubt they will let me operate this machine, but a man can dream can't he?

New Orleans Redux

I'm still writing up my recallections of Pirate Con in New Orleans last week, some of it is understandably a litle blurry. I didn't see any of the 9th ward this time, although I did find an old friend who I'd lost track of who now lives there with his wife. They spend six months in their own house while they gutted and rebuilt it. They had water but no official power. They hooked up an extension cord to a neightbors house. That's hard core.

So what do I read today? That most of the foreign aid for Katrina victems was uncollected, refused or wasted.

Do you know what a lot of the attendees did early morning Saturday at Pirate Con? They went to a grade school in the area with much needed school supplies. $60 million dollars and it isn;t getting to where it needs to. This is what makes my brain hurt.

People laugh at Denis Kusinich for trying to get Cheny impeached. Why is this crazy? If anyone focused on any ONE of the disasters this administration had been either responsible for or has exacerbated, they would quickly come to the realization that we and our country are being forced into a flaming nosedive by a corrupt idiot. It's just that there are SO MANY fuck-ups, mistakes, miscaculations, missteps and wrong turns thay we just can't catch our breath. You can't keep up! Is that their strategy?

BONUS ROUND

It seems seven of eight "Successes" in Iraq in fact, aren't. Have a read. Your money and blood at work.

Good touching

I can't make this stuff up. Thanks to Monkey over at HappyBubble.com

I give you: Busty Mouse Pads

Ugly Americans

The last weekend of North Carolina was a mixed bag. Saturday was great. We kicked ass. Good crowds, Midas touch. Then Sunday hit. Torrential rain during the night and on and off during the day. No one shows up. They call the show at 12:30.

Then the sun comes out. Of course.

But it doesn't matter. We break down, load out and get on the road early enough to get home last night. We had to fight our way through snowstorms in the mountains. This was Snow Giant country and the wind pushed us all over the road. But we made it. It feels good to sleep in ones own bed.

During the trip we listened to 'Babylon by Bus'. This is the true story of two slackers who's primary occupation was selling 'Yankee's Suck' t-shirts in New York to earn enough money to travel. At some point, they got it in their bright heads to go to Baghdad and try their hand at humanitarian work the CPA (The Coalition Provisional Authority). What follows is a strange tale of good intentions gone wrong, stupidity, drugs, booze, hope, violence, despair and death.

There are a number of books examining the War, but this one provides a unique ground level view from outside the system. It is Baghdad as seen through the eyes of 2 twenty-eight year olds. Not soldiers or politicians or reporters. What's more, these aren't peacenicks or hippies or experienced volunteers. They are in short, ugly Americans with a tendency to be assholes.

I highly encourage you to check out this book. It can be found used on Amazon.com or on audio CD from your local library.

A picture is worth...

This was posted in a comment threat over at Fark.com and I just had to pass it on:

Oddly Hypnotic

This is a small Japanese dancing toy that will dance to any beat you play for it. Honestly, it dances far better than I ever did. In a real word bar situation, it could probably pick up chicks to. Chicks dig cute.

Kittah!

This is the kind of responsible behavior I think we can all approve of. Cats using public transport.

I hate this state

And I' m sure the feeling is mutual. Last year we bought an expensive GPS navigation unit. One of the KEY selling point I used to convince my wife to agree was that we would be able to get around Raleigh NC without having a seizure. This city is a massive clusterf@ck of roads, most leaading anywhere but where you want to go.

The GPS got us to the site, which wasn't hard as its right off the highway. But when we entered the address of the motel and told it to take us there it simply sat in stunned silence. We tried several options, but nothing worked. The road system is so bad here that it made my GPS break down and cry. We found the motel ourselves and yesterday morning on a lark I asked it to find its way back to the Fair site. It clicked and whired and what do you know it found a route. In fact it was a faster way to the site than we currently use. So last night I asked it to take us back to the motel and again it just sat there whirring and sobbing.

I can't blame the computer. Really. I absolve it of any wrongdoing. It's this city.

The show is off to a good start. Good weather and good attendance. Next weekend however we will be open during Easter weekend. They want us here FRIDAY from three until ten pm. That's messed up. I plan on bringing something thick to read. And maybe a sleeping bag.