planet snewpy

surface transmissions (2012):

Cavalia

2012-03-26 20:59:14 -

We were fortunate enough to get a chance to see the Cavalia show while it was here in St. Louis. Created by one of the founding members of Cirque du Soleil, this show is an incredible mix of dance, acrobatics and horsemanship. It is visually stunning, and the athleticism displayed by the riders, acrobats, and the horses is awe inspiring. If you love horses, you should definitely see this show.

Home Cheep Home

2012-04-27 06:50:35 -

In the middle of our other spring project, the timing was right to get our new pets, but that started the six-week clock for building them a place to live. Because, trust me, you do not want these critters living in your basement permanently. My son helped me start the framing, and after a full weekend of work, we had the beginnings of a coop. After that, the weather stopped cooperating for a while, so it took a couple of weeks to get back to it. In the meantime, I stumbled across a ridge vent at Lowe's on clearance for $2 that seems to work pretty good on top. I guess we'll have to wait for summer to find out if it does a good job of keeping things cool inside.

Landscaping Project

2012-04-26 16:07:21 -

This has been a busy spring. Thanks to warmer than average temperatures in February, we got a jump on our normal outdoor activities and started a couple of projects. The first was a little landscaping of the front yard, which involved giving the existing flower beds a facelift with the addition of a retaining wall. Now that the project is done, I wanted to offer a bit of advice to anyone planning something like this. If you choose to do it yourself, and not hire it done, the single most difficult task is properly estimating the amount of materials you will need. My initial estimates of the amount of bricks and top soil that I would need were off by a factor of two. So while the $60 delivery fee that Lowe's charges is completely reasonable, to have tons of material delivered right to your driveway, it can quickly bust your budget when multiple deliveries are necessary (three in my case). As a reference, our retaining wall had about 65 linear feet, which is easy enough to compute, but it's almost impossible to know in advance (without a landscaper's years of experience) how many courses of bricks you will need to match the undulating topography of your yard and end up with something approaching a level wall. For ours, it took 220 bricks. That also equated to 180 40-pound bags of topsoil to fill in the space behind it.

Bird Versus Bird

2012-08-26 10:28:02 -

I've mentioned before how much we like all of the wildlife we see on our property, but yesterday it was the source of some dismay as we watched this juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk try to make our chickens into a breakfast buffet. It is times like these that I am glad I used hardware cloth on the coop. As they say, chicken wire keeps chickens in, but doesn't keep predators out.

CCD Barcode Scanner

2012-09-09 16:26:08 -

Are you tired of spending hours manually entering book titles into your own personal database? (Well, okay, if you're not a home-schooler, maybe you're not, but work with me here.) If you're like us, you spend a lot of time going to the library to pick out books for your kids, and, let's say for the purposes of this discussion, you also spend a lot of time keeping track of the books they read in some sort of database. What if you could just scan the books, like they do in the library, and have them magically appear in your own database? Well now you can!

Garden Irrigation Project

2012-09-07 17:57:05 -

In late April, we had a pretty impressive hailstorm, which led to us getting a new roof and new gutters. The timing was somewhat fortunate, however, since I had already started putting together a system for catching rainwater that we could use on our garden. I found a 300-gallon plastic tote on Craigslist for $100, and had the gutter company reroute the gutters on the back of the house and combined three downspouts into one that drains into the tank. I really had no idea how long it would take to fill up, and I was astonished at our first hard rain when it took less than an hour for it to fill to overflowing. Now I wish I had bought more than one.

More Basement Woodworking

2012-12-26 10:09:24 -

Earlier this year, I started building a cabinet in my basement on the wall opposite my new bar. As usual, I used Sketchup to draw up my plans, and I neglected to post these at the outset of the project. Sketchup is a powerful tool, and fairly easy to learn. Using it to create models of things you want to build is a great way to save time and money. If you take care to make precise measurements when you draw your model, you can use it to figure out the cost of materials, and later as a blueprint to verify your measurements are accurate. I am currently working on some new plans for a major project in 2013 -- stay tuned for more on that.