An Artful Surprise!

It's a truism that art often leads to interesting and unexpected results.



A CD, it's case, one or possibly two used gel shoe inserts and other assorted contents melded into this agglomeration inside my firedancing bag. While it's entirely accidental limited palette motif has a certain visual appeal, I think I'd find myself in a rare instance of agreement with the Bush Administration that perhaps it shouldn't be allowed on a plane. Or anywhere else there are people. Or animals. Or maybe even bacteria.

It would just be wrong.

Ethically Challenged Recycling and Power Tools

My good friend Chris finally had time to show me how his table saw, which I'm currently providing a home for, works. We rounded out this momentous event with a > $200 trip to the Home Despot for various pokey-things, clampages, and other wood-diddling paraphernalia, and some nice high-end pine to which to apply them. For greater men it would clearly have been Miller Time, but we rejoiced with simple tea and cider instead.

Along with arrival of my Japanese hammer, chisels, and saws, I now have everything I need to start my first Japanese Shoji screen project. I'm going to add screens to the windows in my bathroom, whose current exclusive purpose is for spying on my neighbors' pool area while dripping wet. Not only will the shoji greatly improve light usage, they will also reside in an area seen mainly by myself and people who are already sleeping with me *despite* knowing what a slob I am, thusly reducing the likelihood that someone might be put off by the mistakes I'll likely make in my first-ever real woodworking project.

Finally, now that I have a small SUV, my life-long wet dream of randomly picking up huge pieces of garbage off the street with which to clutter my home has finally come true. Even without examining too closely the irony this event's simultaneity with my project to get rid of 3/4ths of what I own, there still remains the ethical dilemma of exactly how done with something someone needs to be before I can "recycle" it. Case in point, modifications to a local restaurant proceed apace, and large amounts of used wood litter the area near the back dumpster. However, the wood isn't *in* the dumpster, and could clearly be used for other purposes, either by myself or someone *not* myself. I thought about, well, *asking* someone, but not only was no one there when I showed up to pinch some of the pieces at 2 AM, but what if they had said "no?"

Seemed like a bit too much of risk to me.