My mother wanted one thing for her birthday: a palm tree. A very specific palm tree.

She didn’t actually get it on her birthday, which fell on a Thursday, but we did get it to her shortly thereafter. A good thing, because mom was told she had cancer on her birthday.

She’d put it out in one area of the front yard, one that people come and steal plums from (because no one’s really known who the land belonged to).

Naturally, with cancer surgery and recovery and then the rainy season setting in, it was still in its pot, though put in its appointed place.

She last remembers seeing it this weekend, but noticed today that it had gone. Lacking locomotion of its own, that means someone nipped our palm tree.

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My mother recently discovered she had cancer.

It went like this:

October 19, she called the Kaiser advice nurse.

October 20, she had an appointment to see her Ob-Gyn.

October 26 (her birthday, unfortunately), she gets the news she’s got endometrial cancer.

Nov 1, she has an appointment with the gynecologic oncologist.

Nov 7, she has surgery.

Later that week, it’s confirmed by the pathologist that they got all the cancer.

Nov 20, she returns to work.

There’s so many bad stories about cancer out there, I figured someone could use a good one.

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A friend asked the other day what to use on wool, knowing my dislike of Woolite.

Simple answer: wool is hair. Use shampoo. Might as well use the same shampoo you use on your own hair: one fewer bottle to have hanging around the house.

I use a sulfate-free shampoo that’s designed for dyed hair, as I figure that’s about as ideal as one can get, but any shampoo that makes your hair look nice will work fine.

More complicated answer: sometimes wool garments say to dry clean because of sizing or dye. Most dyes these days are colorfast, but it’s worth trying a small handwash somewhere inconspicuous before dunking the whole thing in water. Garments lined in acetate are likely dry clean only due to the lining (or interfacings) rather than the wool per se.

Wash wool in warm water (about the same temp you’d shower in) and do not agitate it (because if you do, you’ll create felt and it’ll shrink).

Lay flat to dry.

Not so hard, really.

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Today is the tenth anniversary of my first husband’s death. Though I’ve been remarried more than half that time, there are certain days each year that don’t seem to get any easier.

This is one of them.

I woke up early, drank coffee, took vitamins, drank more coffee and soda with lunch, took more vitamins, and I’ve been yawning all day. The effects aren’t emotional so much as physical: the body remembers.

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If you’ve tried to install the postgres ruby gem like so:

sudo gem install postgres — –with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/include –with-pgsql-lib-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/lib

…and you get the error:

checking for PQsetdbLogin() in -lpq… no
Could not find PostgreSQL libraries: Makefile not created
* extconf.rb failed *

…then it’s possible you didn’t compile postgres with the –with-openssl option. Doing so made everything work perfectly.

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I’ve got a new Mac, a Mac Book Pro. As this came at the end of a very long, exhausting week, I’m glad it’s done.

Unfortunately, I bought it because I needed it. Saturday afternoon, after my mother was sprung from the hospital, I discovered that my Mac wasn’t charging. Fortunately, it ran off batteries fine (though it had no charge at the time). Several long visits to the Mac store and some plastic later, and I had a new Mac with everything migrated.

Now it’s time to send the old baby off to be repaired and enjoy the speed of the new baby.

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1. Delete all NBC channels, including Bravo, from the TiVos’ channel lineups.
2. Join NOW.
3. Subscribe to Ms. Magazine.
4. Dump all Tresemmé hair care products in the trash and write them a letter explaining why you’ve done it and why you’re not buying more.
5. Dump all L’Oreal Paris products in the trash and write them a letter explaining why you’ve done it and why you’re not buying more.
6. Write a letter to Macy’s.
7. Write a letter to Saturn, pointing out that 2/3 of the household cars are Saturns, but it’s oh so unfortunate that they decided to sponsor this show.
8. Write Corelle, saying you loved their incredibly funny runway ad, however….
9. Continue ad nauseum with each and every other sponsor.
10. Send copies of all letters to Bravo and NBC, with another set to the Magical Elves (PR’s production company). Point out that giving someone $100,000 after using the word “feminazi” to describe another contestant just doesn’t meet with some people’s reality.
11. Send apologetic letter to Tim Gunn about how the judges simply failed to “Make it Work” when it came to the final runway judging.

This wasn’t a fashion show, it was Jerry Springer. The show jumped the shark so hard it left orbit.

Or, as Marion Zimmer Bradley put it, “I want my disbelief to be suspended, not hung by the neck until dead.” Or words to that effect.

The only redemption edit Jeffrey could have gotten would have involved a hot poker, his tongue cut out with a knife, and a permanent vow of silence. Even that wouldn’t have been enough.

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So I’m taking a class in CSS to fill in holes and improve my understanding. A survey last night revealed:

• 75% of the class used Firefox as their primary browser.
• 50% worked primarily on a Macintosh.
• Of those surveyed, almost everyone said they liked either BBEdit or TextMate for editing HTML and CSS.
• Of those surveyed, none offered a good suggestion for editing same on Windows.

Thought that was interesting.

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Last year, when Kepler’s closed, they took the online ordering down, too. I’m glad to say that they now have online ordering again. I loved being able to look things up before going to the store.

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Or, “Migrating a blog is always more painful than you think.”

I hope you can see this. If all goes well, this blog has been migrated from WordPress to Typo, running Ruby on Rails over Lighttpd. I’ve seen a few feed hits coming through, but I’ll check when I wake up (yes, it’s almost 7 a.m. and I haven’t been to sleep yet…)

I’ve broken a lot of links, and I’m starting to go through them, so if there’s something you don’t see, realize that I am putting everything back together and it’ll take just a tidge of time, especially to get the redirects for the old permalinks up.

I’m changing the categories to be broader and instead going with more of a tag approach, as I think that offers finer granularity with less long-term hassle.

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Like Dick Morrell, I was also one of Rob Levin’s coworkers at Linuxcare.

How I’d best sum up Rob: he had an idea for what he wanted to do with his life — and he made his life work out so that he could do exactly that. The irc.freenode.org structure he created has been of immense help in getting communication working for numerous free software projects, including Ruby on Rails (though the core team has now moved to Campfire for obvious reasons).

Rob wanted to make open source happen by making communication about open source easier. He did that, and everyone who uses open source has benefited, albeit indirectly, from his work.

I talked to him not so very long ago about some of the changes he’d made in his life since we worked together, including moving from the expensive bay area to much-less-expensive Houston.

I’m sorry he didn’t have a longer life. I’m especially sorry Benjamin will have to go through the last ten years of his childhood without his father. And, of course, I’m sorry that Deb won’t have the husband she relied on. I didn’t get their relationship (they seemed so different), but then again, I didn’t have to.

I haven’t met many people in my life that had Rob’s single-mindedness of purpose. At times, I thought he was nuts. In the end, though, he made it work, and that’s not nuts at all.

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I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of Miss Snark before, but one of the coolest things a budding writer can read are the 110 reactions to cover letter and first page she’s posted.

One critique I particularly liked, where the story starts with the character asleep. So many new writers start with their character waking up (or asleep), forgetting that the beginning of their story needs to match the ending of the story, and there’s not a lot of time to waste. Don’t make it start the way the reader starts their day or it’ll be mundane. (And yes, I’m giving this critique almost exactly in Critters this week.

Look at each entry, and then her comments. You may not agree with her, but maybe you’ll learn something. I did.

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Somehow, the household wound up with a case of Bawls. I’m not normally one for hyper-caffeination, but I have to admit I really, really, really love the bottles themselves. I’ve always had a weakness for cobalt blue, so we have cobalt blue dishes and bowls. And now I have several mini-vases in waiting.

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Day 5: Wrap-up

Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s over — it’s a little surreal, honestly.
Boggs discussed the two primary differences between his chairs and the classic post-and-rung chairs.
1) His rear legs have a below-the-seat rear curve of 12 degrees. This helps prevent tipping — it’s a lot of work to lean back in that chair, so people don’t. Beyond 12 degrees, legs are more likely to break during assembly. The rear legs splay out to the sides as well as to the back, so each side has three different rung lengths.
2) The front corners are tenoned into slats, much like the stool covered in the FWW article (July/Aug 2001).
Typically, the back (above the seat) carries about 17% of the body load. The further the back tilts, the higher this number.
He designed his front corners based on Queen Anne country chairs with seats covered in bullrush. He tried to sell bullrush chairs, but, well, they didn’t.
In something flexible, all the weight concentrates on the point of inflexibility (e.g. where the rungs connect).
He puts no shoulders on rungs. The shoulders probably won’t hold up anyway, so it’ll be visually distracting. Plus, stress concentrates at the point of sudden change of dimension.
When turning rungs, he turns the tenon first.
“I’m ready to demonstrate seat weaving and y’all ain’t doin’ nothin’, so I don’t know what to do about that.”
99% of what he covered was also on the video he’s got out from LN; I highly recommend watching that if you want to use hickory bark.
Use your bigger rolls (of hickory bark) for the warp (front-to-back). Tighten the roll up so it’ll stay in a roll as you work.
Soak hickory bark in hot tap water for about 1/2 hour.
Use a girth hitch for the first hitch.
One advantage of a tapered (front-to-back) seat is that it gives you a chance to clean up the edges. Boggs weaves a tapered seat in about 45 minutes; an un-tapered seat in about 25 minutes. He prefers the tapered seats because they look neater.
Eyeball (or mark) the quarters to sync up the front and back when weaving a tapered seat.
Good tension for warp: when the bark stops on its own when you hit the bottom row.
If you have one rough edge on your bark, keep that on the same side as your hand so it’s easier to cut.
Bark from Boggs is rolled with the good side out.
Someone asked how he got the bark smooth, did he sand it? Lightly, he said. “What’s made that bark smooth is the back of people’s britches.”
When creating a knot, make the tongue for the knot about 1/4″ wide.
The whole bark of a hickory tree is about 1/2″ thick. Boggs takes the inner 2/10″ and cuts it into two layers. The inner layer he calls first cut (and doesn’t sell; it’s reserved for his clients only); the outer cut he calls second cut and that’s what we were using.
And we all assembled our chairs. Several people (but not me) wove their seats. I figured that would be easier to do after arriving home.
After class and after I packed my car up, I got to meet up with Steve Knight of Knight Toolworks and GregP — had a great time!
More pics will be up soon, but perhaps not until I arrive home. I’m TIRED.

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Day 4: It Ain’t Cabinetmaking

Now that the slats have been fitted, we put the bottom legs in a taper jig and bandsaw the taper on the bottom 10″ of the legs. Important note: bandsaw with curved part of leg up. Of course, you can also do this step with drawknife, plane, etc.

Scraper tuning

Brian goes over scraper tuning. Someone has a Veritas scraper (he said), but it had been punched out and was thin. Boggs asked someone for an LN scraper. He polished the back and front on a large fine diamond stone, then put the scraper in a block with a bandsaw kerf cut out to hold it vertical for sharpening the edge. Boggs uses a burr (this is, however, a controversial point).

He doesn’t use a file until the scraper becomes work-hardened and won’t sharpen any more, at which point he stops filing when the file stops chattering and starts cutting smoother.

See his video on the FWW site.

Let’s talk about drillin’ holes.

Read Boggs’s article about drill bits (FWW 138 or online).

In his opinion, the only reliable brad point bits are from Veritas.

Brian grinds down the spurs. The spurs only need to score deep enough for one revolution. Longer spurs are needed for faster feed rates. For joinery, you really need to go only about 10 thou per revolution, about the thickness of a business card. Most spurs come about 1/8″ long, which is too long.

A high clearance angle is one thing that makes a drill bit cut aggressively. Boggs prefers a lower clearance angle, but most are high because it allows a dull bit to still cut.

Boggs hones his 5/8″ rung drill bit until it’s about 10 thou under dimension. I’ve got to say, the holes drilled were absolutely gorgeous — completely clean on the sides and bottom.

We transfered the front rung holes and drilled them, then gathered for “Lesson 42, Part A”: figuring out where to drill the holes for the rear seat.

Basically, you need to drill parallel to the chord formed by the slat. Put one slat in each leg, then rotate the legs appropriately. Make sure the slat is all the way home. Sight down the line to a framing square (clamped to a block clamped to the other end of the bench) and see if the angles of the slats are the same.

Someone called this the “slat-o-matic” procedure. 🙂

(I know I’m explaining it badly, but it really isn’t that complicated, it just seems it)

At this point, someone was stressed about trying to get the joints too close. Boggs replies, “It ain’t cabinetmaking.” Chairmaking is somewhat forgiving, far more so than some tight joinery. Despite this, his techniques are quite concise.

Then we got to the discussion of how to figure out where to drill the holes for the side rungs, someone asked what the angles would be. Boggs pulls out the jig. “We don’t need no angles, we just need blocks.”

Maybe it’s just that I was mathematically precocious as a kid, but I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him. However, it turned out to be right.

“The catch, of course, is figuring out the blocks.”

He showed a finished chair, pointing out that the front posts were 16-5/8″ center-to-center, and the rear posts were 13-5/8″ center-to-center. That’s 3″ different overall, so 1.5″ per side.

Draw a line, draw perpendicular at the front center distances, then draw a line 1.5″ in (conveniently, a framing square is 1.5″ wide). Draw from each corner to the inner line the calculated length of the side. Now draw a perpendicular line to that, and calculate how far that line is from the first line you drew. In our case, 1.75 inches.

So, basically, if the front rung is elevated 1.5″ on one side and 0″ on the other, you’ll drill at the correct angle. If the rear rung is elevated 1.5″ on one side and 1.5+1.75=3.25″ on the other, then you’ll drill at the correct angle.

We got our fronts and rears glued together (but not to each other today), all with hide glue. Boggs was very impressed with the Behlen stuff. We used 3-lb deadblow hammers to assemble, but in many cases, we needed to use clamps afterward to draw the joints together.

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