Category Archives: Projects

During a recent trip to a theme park, I discovered that a couple of the nickel metal hydride batteries that I brought along for my digital camera didn’t work for more than a minute or two. Preferring not to be in that position again, I decided to test the capacity of all my rechargeable AA’s […]

A few months ago I was given a Kill-A-Watt electricity usage meter as a gift. It’s a small device with a digital readout that you plug into a wall socket. When you plug whatever you want to test into the unit, it shows how many watts it’s drawing. I’ve been measuring most of the items […]

On Thursday the delivery guy unloaded 20 cubic yards (about 7 tons) into our front yard. I spent about 20 hours total on Friday and Saturday getting it hauled back to the playset using the new garden cart that Dad bought and Nathan’s two-wheel wheelbarrow (which I have to say is MUCH easier than the […]

Ok, I’ve given up on counting days, but I put in a number of evenings of varying length (including four night under artificial light until 10pm). The playset main tower isn’t entirely complete, but it is now able to be played on. I’m in the process of building the swing beam. The next step is […]

I finally got around to putting some information about Evan’s clubhouse bed online. I spent a good portion of my holiday break down in the garage cutting, painting, sanding, etc. and now that I’m sidetracked by another project, I figured I might as well share the information I have. Visit the Clubhouse Bed page for […]

Ok, I’ll call this the update day 3 and a half, since I can’t really count the short amount of daylight after work as a full day. I did work until 9pm last night using spotlights, but anyway… Dusty has been helping me, and we’ve finished the main framing, basically. It’s taken quite a bit […]

I planned on spending most of today (sunday) working on the playset, but we got a phone call in the morning from the in-laws. They came up to visit Evan, and the side effect was that I had a couple of sets of extra hands! My father-in-law, sister-in-law Megan and I managed to get the […]

I spent some time on Saturday working on Evan’s playset, and I didn’t have a ton to show for it. Much of the time was spent trying to figure out what I was going to be able to do on my own. I took it pretty slow, thinking before cutting, since the placement of the […]

In order to add a degree of public accountability to the project, I’m posting my progress on building a backyard playset for Evan in hopes that I’ll finish it as soon as possible. So far I’ve got my plans drawn up as well as almost all of the materials purchased and hauled to the house. […]

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been researching and experimenting with standalone DVD recorders- the ones that work like a VCR, not the drives that work with your computer. I’ve long had a project to convert all my old home videos to DVD format, but my progress has been very slow, since using a […]