Found something new along the road in back of the plant on today’s morning walk. I’m not sure where these three different piles of whatever came from, but when I saw them I was instant reminded of this scene in Jurassic Park.
I have two framed pictures on the back counter top of my cubicle. I used to have the caricatures of the previous 2 Miatas (smaller versions of these), but back last year I changed them to the front views of the NB Miata, one of the Emperor and the other of the CTBNL.
The other day I got to feeling weird about the Emperor picture, so I got to thinking maybe I should put a side profile of the CTBNL in its place. That brought to mind the Miata Track Toy T-shirts from Blipshift, I bought the NC version because it came in silver, so maybe I should download their NB image and change the green they used into silver. While I was editing, I changed the wheels and added a roll bar.
So now I have a front view and a side view. Maybe the next time I’m bored I might go ahead and create a side view along the same lines as the front view of the car, draw a vector version in AutoCAD over the top of an imported photo.
the city, not the country
Mini Minnie lives in Washington state, so she has come a long way, but not really that far. The Purple Whale on the other hand has traveled 69,000 since May of 2011.
Remember last Friday when I said I had two things on my honey-do list before I put down the garage floor tiles? The tiles were installed on Sunday and those two items are done, but for the life of me I can’t remember what day I did them. Might have been Saturday afternoon or heck even Monday after work, I do remember it was during the day.
I don’t have my own little shop to work in, so I often do little projects either in the driveway or on the back deck. For cutting up that junk wood, the deck was used, because this way I could lay the long pieces of wood on the seat that runs around half the deck, stick the wood out about a foot, step on it and use the circular saw to cut segments off the the end.
The 12 feet of junk wood from behind the plant started life as a box top, so along with the 1/2 thick pieces I needed for my test, there was a border of 1″ x 3″ wood strips as support that had nails spaced about 4 to 5 inches all around. Rather than try and remove the approximate hundredty-million twisted nails from the 24′ of wood, I just hammered the bent ends down flat. Because of the nails I had to cut the 1″ x 3″ wood into about 60 pieces total.
After a little while I got a nice rhythm going; cut a couple pieces, release pressure on my foot, slide the board forward, repeat until done. About halfway through cutting up the second 6′ piece of wood a very large black bug dive-bombed by the front of my face and angled down towards my right hand. I let go of the trigger on the saw and dropped it to the deck.
There was a female cicada trying to mate with still spinning blade. After a few seconds the insect realized its mistake and flew back whence it came. I finished that board and started on the third 6′ piece and wouldn’t you know, my horny cicada took another shot at the saw. I dropped it on the deck again. This time when the bug flew back into its tree, I went inside the house and got my can of Raid Wasp & Hornet spray for the next time.
Sure enough, as I was finishing cutting the third piece, my love struck bug returned. I dropped the saw, grabbed the can and fired off a stream of insecticide at her. I’m not sure if I hit the cicada with any of the stream or she finally learned that the sound of a circular saw rhythmically cutting 1″ x 3″ pieces of wood was not a male of her species, but I cut the full 6′ length of the last piece without a return fly-ins.
