Treading the Pandemic

For posterity's sake, I'm going to note that two different vaccines have been announced within the past week as having been 90-95% effective, and that it's entirely possible that, by this time next year, we'll be back to "normal." Then again, an asteroid that's hiding behind the sun could also hit Earth, so who really knows.

Mal's stomach stuff continues to be a thing we have to stay on top of. It's looking like about 1 generous tablespoon of Miralax is a good dose for him, and we still have to wrangle him to the restroom or he just... doesn't go. Hopefully the maturity/behavioral part of this will be on his plate soon enough. Between the hour a day James and/or I spend with him camped out in the bathroom, the twice a day we have to cajole him to let us brush his teeth (actually, he does okay at night; it's the early daytime brushing that he resists, for some reason), and keeping track of time to remind him to get a snack around 9 PM so that we're not dealing with making macaroni and cheese at 10:15 at night... it's a lot. But he's happy and pretty healthy, so that's a good thing.

We've been spending a lot of time outside lately. It's one of the two really beautiful times of the year in Austin, so we're trying to take advantage of it.

Construction on the houses in our immediate area is finally wrapping up, and I think we'll get a break in the heavy machinery and its assorted noise pollution soon. We can't actually see any of the building from the house right now, but there's one house going up behind our back lot that seemed to have a lot of trouble breaking up rock to put in the septic tank last week.

I've been really thinking about environmental waste and harm a lot lately. I'd decided somewhat recently to only buy sustainable/natural clothing, but then realized we were talking $70 for a casual shirt and $175 for a pair of shoes. So I instead committed to buying second-hand clothes whenever possible, then finding more environmentally-friendly alternatives where it's not possible. In fact, except for the Sonic underpants in that top picture, everything Mal has on in the photos above is either from Kid 2 Kid or a hand-me-down from one of his friends. And we'll pass them along when we're done. 

As countries move to zero-net carbon policies, I'm hoping our own nation will soon follow suit. Along with that, I hope builders (like the ones I mentioned above) will find better options than cement slabs. It's bad for drainage (even though our town has a maximum 40% impervious cover ordinance) and making it is bad for the environment. Plus, it traps heat.

James has been looking at building a work shed and found an alternative based on French drains and gravel fill, I believe. I'm on an alternative housing committee for our town and am hoping that eventually, we can move the whole city to zoning ordinances that would favor more environmentally-friendly alternatives in house-building. 

Speaking of which, the meeting has just started (still waiting for everyone to join the Zoom), so I'm out. Have a good week!

Thoughts on wood and grain

I started writing this on Oct 18.

I bought "real" wood on Sep 12 and started working on it on the 13th.

So I spent somewhere around 30 days putting together a really simple vise.

 

It isn't some be-all/end-all. It's honestly pretty ugly, and it flops around a lot.. But I think it should be flat enough to make my life significantly easier.

And then I spent most of the past couple of days carving out a thing called a "shooting board."

This tool is difficult to describe.

That may be why it's so tough to track down anything concrete about them on the internet.

Which is dumb, because it's actually really simple (in concept).

You start with a flat board and a tail-piece that holds other boards in place. Add another board on bottom to hold it all in place on your workbench.

It looks like the best picture I have at the moment is where I glued up the bottom lip:

The entire point is that you run a really sharp plane across the board's "end grain" to make that part flat.

Wait, What's End Grain?

Wood grain, in general, is something that I've never really considered before.

Oh, sure. I've looked at wood and admired the beautiful patterns in the way it grew.

But, when I was working with power tools, those were mostly just distractions from the actual point.

Draw a line in pencil.

Chop.

Flip the block over.

Chop.

Done.

This is a very fast (and expensive, noisy, and dangerous) way to get things done.

There are times I'd prefer the extra noise and danger.

They're getting fewer and farther between as I get better at doing these things by hand.

When I was working with power tools, I never thought about the variations of things like end-grain.

I mostly thought of wood the same way I think of masonry blocks. Or metal.

It's just chunks of stuff to slice and dice. You cut it precisely, and then you make all the pieces fit.

Wood is totally different.

It isn't really a living, breathing entity.

But it used to be.

And it's still doing a lot that looks like that "breathing" part.

At the very least, it absorbs moisture, which makes it expand. And, when the relative humidity drops, the wood shrinks.

It just never will achieve the kind of micrometer precision you get when you work with metal. 

There are a couple of important details that go along with that basic fact, though. 

One is that metal expands and contracts far more than wood due to temperature changes. This is both good and bad. A metal ruler is generally much less accurate than a wooden one. You could not make an SR-71 Blackbird out of wood, partially because it simply will not expand in predictable ways when it gets hot from the friction of blazing through the atmosphere.

The other is that "high-precision" power tools are really very sloppy compared to hand tools. A hand saw will make straighter, smoother cuts with less tearout (more on that later) than a table saw. You can make boards straighter, flatter, and squarer when using a hand plane than is possible with the machine version.

And that's just the gross physical characteristics. It doesn't consider different experiments I've seen where people compared the way the finished product actually looks. Planing by hand is slower than using a machine, but it's far faster than sanding. And every comparison I've seen (admittedly, not a large, statistically significant sample) looks far better than the equivalent that was machined and then sanded.

But Back to End Grain

The "end grain" is really the part where the respiration happens.

I could very well be totally wrong about this. And the details don't really matter. But...

The end-grain is the chunky part at the end of a board that looks ugly.

Each board is a bunch of fibers that run from one end-grain to the other. It's like a bundle of straws. It's the part that breathes the moisture in and out.

The end-grain is the open mouth of all those straws

 

A big portion of wood cutting is about severing those fibers. When you cut 2 feet off the end of a 2x4, it's a lot like holding that bundle of straws in one hand and slicing through them all with a knife in your other hand.

This is a "cross cut" and is also known as "cutting across the grain."

You can also cut the other direction. Maybe you want to trim that 2x4 down so it's a 2x3 or a 1x4. It's like you held that bundle of straws upright and cut down through the length.

This is a "rip cut," and it can get tricky.

Even with straws, there's going to be a tendency for the knife to slip into the space between and just sever whatever holds them together. So you wind up with a couple of bumpy surfaces rather than a nice "clean" cut where you sliced through the straws precisely and evenly.

Wood's a lot messier than straws.

The fibers are a lot tougher, and they tend to wander around. Depending on the knots, the kind of wood, and the way that wood was cut from the tree, they may wander around a lot.

When you're cutting with a saw, it's very easy for that wandering to force things out of line. When you're using a hand saw, you wind up with a crooked cut, even when you started totally straight.

 

When you're using a power saw, the wood might kickback.

When you're cutting this with something like a plane or a chisel, you have a lot more control.

But then we get back into the twisty nature of those fibers. Odds are, they didn't grow straight up and down. The tree is thicker at its base, so the fibers are going to be at least a little bit slanted.

If you're cutting back toward that base, it's like the fibers are rising up to meet your cutting edge. This is known as cutting "with the grain."

If you're going the other direction, it's known as cutting "against the grain." (I always wondered where those phrases came from).

Cutting against the grain is more difficult. And it can lead to tearout.

 

Tearout is also a problem with power tools. I assume that it's generally a bigger problem, since solutions include things like slowing down and taking shallower cuts.

I've dabbled with wood working since I was a little boy, but I've only learned this in the past couple of months. Before this, I didn't know enough to frame the questions, even if it had ever occurred to me to ask.

If I'd stuck with power tools, I'm not sure I'd have ever learned about the difference between cross cuts and rip cuts, much less the difference between going with vs. against the grain.

Working with hand tools is a much more intimate experience. You spend enough time with each piece that you start to learn about its individual quirks.

Or, at least, I am, so far. Maybe I'll get better enough in the future that it all doesn't take so long.

A Dreamy Sign of the Times

My "nightmare" last night shows the dystopian times in which we live: I was waiting in a VERY long line at See's Candy and realized that I wasn't wearing a mask. I'd been in line quite a while and was almost to the front. I looked around and realized that literally no one else was wearing a mask, either, which both made me feel a little better that I could finish my transaction, and also worse because I didn't want them to assume that I'm one of those people who doesn't care about public health and safety. Then a customer coughed right in the face of the cashier, who immediately disappeared and another employee took her place. Mal was somewhere in the store reading a book, too. I don't remember whether he had a mask or not.

A Social Media Memory

 When I was cleaning out a drawer the other day, I came across this.

This is a pendant I got to commemorate two years of breast-feeding. I believe I got one for one year, and for eighteen months. I wasn't sure when we'd be done, so celebrating 6-month increments was how we did it.

By the time we hit eighteen months or so of nursing with Mal, and he showed no signs of lowing, I got involved in an extended breast-feeding (EBF) group online because I knew we might be in it for the long-haul and that encouragement was pretty important to keep going until he was finished.

I'd kind of put a foot in the door of breast-feeding "activism" earlier, as Mal wanted to nurse pretty much every few minutes, so we ended up doing it everywhere.

The Austin airport.

The Ladybird Wildflower Center. Church. Every restaurant we visited (which wasn't many because Mal cried A LOT and after that, he moved around A LOT). Church. Parks. On a dolphin-watching tour off of Port Aransas.

Again, basically everywhere. And I was fortunate enough not to have anyone ever bat an eye at me about doing this in public, but I know some women get unsolicited "feedback," so I felt it was important to make sure that parents have the right to feed their very small children when and where they want to. 

All of that to say, I hadn't been able to nurse D, and was pretty happy that it was working out with Mal. Even though he wanted a go a lot more frequently that I would have picked. And even though we ended up doing it a lot longer than I would have elected (right at 4 years, though I don't have a pendant for that, because... that's just a long time, folks).

So.

I got a 2-year pendant and thought that was momentous enough to share on Facebook. I received exactly two comments before removing the post. The first was, "Wow! You can get stuff for breast-feeding? Because I did it for 7 years straight between three kids. My husband should have bought me a car." And, "I never got a medal! Where's my medal?"

Meh. I didn't need anyone to be like, "You're a hero!" but an, "Oooh, that's neat!" or even a NOTHING JUST KEEP SCROLLING would have been acceptable. It was my post. People make everything on social media about themselves (me included; one thing I've hopefully improved upon in the past two and a half years) instead of just celebrating with people who are celebrating, and being sad with people who are sad, rather than trying to one-up everyone's situations.

So I took down the post. It hurt my feelings. Rained on my parade, if you will.

If you ever tell me that you started attending Toastmasters and just gave your first public speech, I will high-five you. I won't muse that I don't find it nerve-wracking to talk in front of a bunch of strangers, because who the hell cares? You get your wins, and I get mine, and I'll be happy for yours even if they're wins that aren't challenges to me, or that I don't understand (like running an ultramarathon).

It's like we think we have a responsibility to provide input into everyone's lives, since they post pictures or updates in their social media. You might feel badly for your child because they have a cough, and inevitably, someone will mention apple cider vinegar or some kind of homeopathy, or insist that you do this or that, instead of just well-wishing. If you're having a problem with something, at least one of your friends will explain that you got yourself into your pickle by doing it wrong in the first place. Sure, they'll wish your dog happy birthday, but it's emotionally overwhelming to me to deal with all of the other stuff. 

But I digress...

Basically (Mal's favorite word right now), 1) celebrate each other's victories, will ya? 2) Thank the sweet, sweet baby Jesus we're two good years past what I was afraid would be an entire childhood of nursing. 3) I like talking to people in real life and don't miss social media in the least. I missed it not at all at first, and it just seems less and less appealing as the months tick by.

Oh, was there an election last night? I'm avoiding news about that, too. I'm learning how to protect my emotional well-being; I'm getting pretty good at it. But I won't tell you how to do it for yourself, because I trust that you can make your own choices.