Jim Dabrowski

Another day, another senseless school shooting, and another round of politicians offering their “thoughts and prayers” while not actually doing anything about the epidemic of gun violence in this country. I’ve reached the point where all I can conclude from this is politicians want these shootings to continue.

Why they want this, I don’t know. I know if they actually wanted to reduce the number of people murdered every year by gun violence, they would take action by passing sensible laws to restrict or otherwise control the flood of arms and ammunition into our society. But they don’t. Hence I can only conclude they don’t want to. They want this violence to continue.

I know, they talk about second amendment rights and how they can’t do anything, but that’s bullshit plain and simple. We don’t let people in this country buy fully automatic weapons and that’s constitutional. Why not restrict the ownership of other types of weapons as well?

Because they don’t want to.

We already have laws that prevent certain people from owning guns and those laws are perfectly constitutional. Why not pass more laws expanding who can’t own a gun?

Because they don’t want to.

They’ll say laws like that don’t actually reduce gun violence but that’s a lie. Reduce the availability of guns and you’ll reduce gun violence. It’s that simple.

My own congressman, Paul Ryan, is the goddamn Speaker of the House! He sets the legislative agenda for the entire House of Representatives. He decides which bills come to the floor and which do not. Furthermore, he announced he’s retiring at the end of this term so he has nothing to fear from constituents or doners and yet…he’ll do nothing. All I can conclude is that he, like all the other politicians in congress, for some sick reason, wants this senseless slaughter of children to continue. I don’t understand it.

I don’t care what party any of these people belong to, they’re all at fault because they all clearly want this to continue. If they didn’t, they’d do something about it.

It is that simple.

JIm

Well, today we got some good news and some bad news.

The good news: Got a call from the lead guy, Jerry, telling me things are going great. They got the inspection from the city today and all is well. They are happy with all the structural work and things can move ahead. Even better, the workers are ahead of schedule even, way ahead of schedule. Things are great.

The bad news: According to the schedule, the next step is to have the electrician and plumber come in and do the work they need to do. But, since we’re way ahead of schedule, they aren’t ready to be here until week after next. So…a bit of a “lull” in the project. If they can get the folks to come out sooner, great, but usually they’re pretty booked up so…be patient.

sigh

Take care all.

JIm

More walls coming down and beams going up.

So, I missed Day 4. That was last Friday. I got home from work that day, took a couple of pics and then headed to the airport to go to Vegas to watch my older brother get married. That was fun, but no time for writing blog posts. So, today is a two-fer.

Recall, prior to Friday, the kitchen looked like this:

When I came home, it looked like this:

We’re opening up the wall to the family room to make the whole thing more open. To do that, they built a temp-wall to hold up the ceiling while they removed the old wall and put in a new beam to hold up the second floor. Like such:

and such:

That was about it from Friday.

Then today I come home and things are looking a bit more open.

A big improvement. Our family room is hidden behind that wall of plastic. A good look.

Then they turned their sights to soffits. Remember, way back when, when the one wall looked like this?

Well, now it looks like this:

We’re still gonna put cabinets in that opening. But for that, you’ll have to wait a while. I don’t want there to be any spoilers.

Take care all.

JIm

And the walls come tumbling down—well, sort of.

Continue to make slow but steady progress I guess. That whole wall, for the most part, is coming down and will then be open to the family room. Looks like they’ll need to move some plumbing I’m thinking.

Then in the foyer they got that top layer of tile off.

Maybe we should just leave it? Kinda trendy and plaid-looking with the old tile and the left-over grout. OK, maybe not.

That’s it for today.

JIm

I’m shocked. I honestly think never before in the history of home remodeling projects has a project been reduced in scope and price. But yet, that is exactly what happened to me today.

I generally approach this project with the thought that if the project lead ever calls me in the middle of the day, it’s gonna be bad news. Why else would they need to call, right? So today I get a call from Jerry and I’m thinking, “oh shit.”

phone rings

Jim: Hello.

Jerry: Hi Jim, this is Jerry, how you doing today?

Jim: Fine ’til you called. (Yes, I really said that, I know, I’m a jerk.)

But then he goes on to tell me that he actually had good news. Remember that tile over tile over concrete thing in the foyer? Well, turns out, he decided if he removed it all the way down, he would have to rebuild up the subfloor by 2–3” which seemed silly to him. So he had the bright idea to only remove the top layer of tile and then tile right back over the old layer. This means no jackhammering, no rebuilding up the subfloor which saves both time and money from the original quote! Yay me! So, all he has to do is fix up that area they already dug into and they’re good.

Will wonders never cease? Let’s hope so.

As for the rest of the kitchen, they basically got all the tile off. That was about it for the day. I’ll leave you with one glorious picture of a plywood floor and talk to you later.

JIm

Here it is! Day 1! The start of our kitchen remodel. I hope to post every day about how the changes went so everyone can share with me the joys of a full kitchen remodel.

First a reminder.

Before:

And after:

And I must say, this is going to be interesting:

They mentioned there being concrete below the tile in the foyer but they didn’t quite notice the layer of tile below the current tile, and then concrete below that. No word yet on if this’ll cost us extra. They were already anticipating having to jack-hammer all the concrete out—maybe that extra layer of tile won’t matter.

That’s it for day 1. Stay tuned!

JIm

Almost ready to start!

So we had our “final walkthrough” a couple of weeks ago, which really wasn’t final, cause we’re gonna have yet another “final walkthrough” just before they actually start – which is Tuesday, May 1. They wanted to start Monday, April 30 but Dena and I will be travelling back from Idyllwild, CA and we didn’t want them to start when no one was here. We figure someone should be here to let them in.

So, what have we been doing in the meanwhile? Cleaning out the kitchen! We have to get everything moved out so they can start demoing.

First we had to get everything out and our kitchen looked a bit like this.

Then today, Greta, Tom & Traigh came by to take our appliances. Turns out, they’re remodeling their kitchen as well and our appliances would go just fine in their new kitchen. So what the heck. They also took some of our countertop since they’re building a peninsula as well. Who knew you can just saw through a countertop with a circular saw? So our kitchen looks a bit different now.

The smart reader out there is asking, “What are you doing for eating?” Well, we moved into the basement!

We have this beautiful bar with a mini-fridge and a nice room behind it so we decked it out and we’re basically gonna live down here for the two months while our kitchen is being redone. It’s a bit cozy, but it’ll work.

That’s it for now. The next step is we meet with them this Thursday for our final-final-walkthrough and then they begin the following Tuesday. Once that happens, I plan to blog every day showing the progress and adding some pithy commentary (I hope). Keep coming back, should be fun!

JIm

Eh. Had our “final walk-through” with the builders. The lead guy came here with the lead builder-guy who will be doing most of the work. They pretty much agreed that, yep, work needed to be done. About the only new thing that came out of this meeting was our start date: May 1.

sigh

So hopefully we’ll have our new kitchen in place by July 1.

That’s it. See ya next time!

JIm

Signed the contract today. Sent off 25% downpayment. We’ll see what happens next!

JIm

This is test of the emergency blogging system. If this had been an actual blogging emergency we would have provided information about what do to next. This is only a test.

Today we met with our project manager, Jerry, for our kitchen remodel. We went over the final estimates and the contract. He gave us a nice overview of how the process will work and what they’ll do. He says to be ready for some stressful times. I think we are.

Here is a picture of the new floor plan I talked about in the previous post.

Ignore the way the seating is drawn in there — otherwise its all correct. One big island, fridge built into the wall where we currently have pantry-style cabinets. Take out most of the wall between the kitchen and the family room. Gonna be messy around here for a while (9 weeks!) and Dena and I will be living in the basement that whole time. Should be “fun”.

We actually had a few questions about the contract after we read it over and sent off an email asking for clarification on a few issues. Mostly minor, we’ll see what they say. I’m not too worried. Next step is to get the revised contract signed, give them a bunch of money to start and off we go!

JIm

We decided to remodel our kitchen. Mind you, our kitchen looks fine the way it is…

but there are some problems. Mostly they stem from the fact that all the cabinet doors are falling off. You see, the previous owners seem to have had all the doors removed, stripped and restained to the color you see here. While that worked fine, one problem we’re finding is that the side walls of the cabinets are that cheap particle board and when you remove screws from it and then try to re-screw the hinges back into the same place, they just don’t stay. So we end up with a number of them looking like this.

To make matters worse in one place, they wanted a big cabinet, so they just cut out the center partition that holds things up and we now have this happening.

So we want a change.

Having watched plenty of HGTV over the years, we knew we wanted a design-build company to come in and help us decide on how it should look and then actually do the work and subcontracting.

We first found a local company who seemed interested, but after getting some preliminary renderings from them they went dark. No responses to our “We like this. We want to hire you. Please contact us.” emails so we gave up on them.

Then we went to Property Revival. They’ve been pretty good so far. We started with them almost a year ago. We’ve spent that time going over every little detail about what we want. Most of that time is Dena and I changing our minds on countertops, cabinets, faucets, sinks, etc. But we’re finally done picking things out and should be ready to start soon.

Here is how the kitchen is laid out now.

We’re going to remove the peninsula and replace it with a big island. We’re also going to remove the wall between the kitchen and the family room to go with a more open concept.

Soon we should be signing the contract and having our final walk though and then getting on the calendar. I plan to keep blogging our progress as we go. So stay tuned. More to come (and soon I hope).

JIm

I’m back to boating! Got off my butt recently and got started on it again. From the last blog post from, gosh, 2013 I was working on the nibbing strake on the foredeck. Wow, made a bit of progress since then.

First off, I got the aft deck completely planked.

Then I stained the whole deck

Why stain the deck now you ask? Well, the next step is to add the stanchions back on, finish planking above the waterway and paint all that white. By staining the deck now, I think it’ll make it easier to mask the deck and paint all the rest white. At least, I’ll find out eventually.

Next I had to re-attach all the stanchions I cut off before (see earlier post about creative destruction). So I built these guides I stuck to the outside so I could use them to make sure the stanchions all lined up properly.

As you can see, I think that worked. Also note my beautifully stained deck is now completely covered in blue painter’s tape. This is because once all the stanchions are on and the final two rows of planking are installed and the new rail put in place, I’ll have to paint all this white. And I’m gonna use spray paint for that.

Last but not least, I’m cutting notches (I’m sorry, scuppers), in my planks.

You see, the next row of planking has to go even with the waterway and there are supposed to be little tiny notches, I mean scuppers, cut into those planks on either side of nearly every stanchion. So, I laid out the planks, marked where all the stanchions are, measured and marked where all the fake stanchions will go between all those currently in place and now I’m cutting notches. I’m actually using a small file to file out those notches. Each one you see there is about 1/32” wide. Kinda small.

That’s it. Last of the updates for now. I hope to keep on working and keep on blogging about this. Feels good to be back into this.

See ya!

JIm

Thursday night I said to my wife I thought the Bears were suddenly 5+ years away from being competitive. Another couple years of Pace & Co., they’re fired and the Bears are back to looking for a new GM, head coach and several more years of rebuilding. Trading away 3 picks to move up one spot for a quarterback that would likely have been there for them at #3 made no sense to me. After a few days to mull it over and read opinions, my feelings have changed.

It’s clear the Bears, specifically Ryan Pace, think that Trubisky can be The Guy. By that I mean they believe Trubisky has the potential to be a 10+ year starter for the Bears who will play at least as well as guys like Matt Ryan, Matt Stafford, Carson Palmer and Eli Manning. A true “franchise quarterback”. Now I agree we can all debate this. Pre-draft you could take nearly every top quarterback (Kizer, Watson, Trubisky, Mahomes) and find some analyst that had each one picked as the best quarterback in the draft and find others explaining in detail why each of them will be a bust. None of that matters. What matters is that Ryan Pace and the Bears clearly made the decision Trubisky was The Guy for them and they were going to get him in the first round no matter what.

From this base, the decision to move up to the second pick makes more sense. They were sitting at three and knew they were going to draft him, the only question was whether they would have to trade up to get him. The Browns made the obvious choice at #1 and picked Myles Garrett which left the Bears wondering what was going to happen at #2. According to Adam Jahns the Bears heard from multiple sources that the 49ers were in serious talks with other teams wanting their #2 pick. Should Pace sit at #3 and hope no one jumped ahead of them and possibly take Trubisky, or should he make sure he got his guy? As Pace himself said in the post draft press conference, he wasn’t going to sit on his hands and trust to fate, he was going to do what was necessary to get the guy he wanted. I can respect that.

What about Glennon and Cutler? Why sign Glennon if the plan all along was to draft a quarterback in the first round, especially when they already had Cutler (a proven starting-caliber quarterback) under contract?

It’s easy to argue they should have kept Cutler, drafted Trubisky, let Trubisky develop until ready to start then release Cutler. The cost to the Bears for Cutler in 2017 and beyond was pretty low and the contract was such that they could cut him nearly any time and owe him nothing. But let’s face it, Cutler was a pretty polarizing figure in Chicago. Half the city hated him, half the city loved him, and that proportion shifted every Sunday depending on how many fumbles, interceptions and touchdowns he had. If the Bears kept Cutler and drafted Trubisky, there would be an immediate “quarterback controversy” that would only grow louder and louder with every injury, interception or fumble. Those are distractions the team doesn’t need. Instead, the Bears released him and got Glennon.

Why get Glennon? According to this guy, word is Pace thinks Glennon has the potential to be The Guy in Chicago as well. Now again, we can all question this, but our opinion doesn’t matter, only Ryan Pace’s opinion matters. If he thinks Glennon has the potential to be The Guy you go get him but sign him to a team-friendly deal. His pay for 2017 is reasonable given his history and they can cut him any time after this season with not much dead money.

So where does that leave the Bears? In pretty good position in my opinion. There are four ways this can play out, three of which are net positives for the Bears. Glennon can turn out to be a genuine, starting-caliber NFL quarterback. If he does, the Bears play him all of 2017 and let Trubisky develop. If it’s looking like Trubisky is The Guy as they expect, we could see a real quarterback competition in training camp in 2018 or the Bears can trade Glennon away and get something for him. If Trubisky takes longer to develop or is looking like he will not be The Guy, they keep Glennon as their starter and begin to look for The Next Guy. Let’s say Glennon turns out to be the mediocre-to-bad quarterback many think he is. Mid-way through 2017 we see Trubisky become the starter and we’ll get to see if he is The Guy Pace thinks he can be. Only in the case where both Glennon and Trubisky turn out be busts do we see the Bears with another top ten (or maybe top 5) pick in the 2018 draft, possibly with a new head coach or even a new GM.

Like I said at the start, my initial reactions Thursday night were WTF and SMH. After a few days and a few deep breaths, I am beginning to be more optimistic. Only time will tell if Pace is right. Until then I’m going to remain hopeful and continue to cheer on the Chicago Bears.

Hmm. Lately again I’ve seen this quote floating around on Facebook and other social media sites:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” – Ben Franklin

It is often used by people to justify their standing up for their individual rights against an oppressive federal government. I decided to do some research to get some historical context and came up with this: What Ben Franklin Really Said. Turns out, it’s really being misused in most circumstances.

When Franklin wrote that, he was writing to the Governor of Pennsylvania. The state legislature was attempting to pass a law raising taxes on land owners to pay for a militia to help defend homesteads on the border against Indian attacks. The Governor (at the request of the Penn family) kept vetoing the legislation. The Penn family offered to pay for the militia out of their pocket if the legislature would agree they did not have the authority to levy such a tax. This was what Franklin was arguing: Giving up the essential liberty of self-governance to obtain temporary safety was wrong. The legislature had the right and the duty to act in the best interests of the people. Seems to me, the most parallel situation today is our Congress’s unwillingness to challenge executive orders ostensibly designed to protect our borders and keep us safe. If there is such a threat to our safety and security, then Congress ought to be passing laws to increase border protection and raise the taxes necessary to pay for such protection, rather than ceding that authority to the President. The Democratic Congress was derelict in its duty when it allowed then President Bush to launch wars for our protection through executive orders rather than through a congressional declaration of war. Republicans in congress showed some spine when Mr. Obama was in office and they were willing to challenge some of his orders, but now that they have “their guy” in office, they too are willing to cede their responsibility to the President. All those people who want change in Washington need to remember this in 2018 when all of congress is up for reelection. Vote for people who will stand up for our constitutional rights and who will do their job rather than running scared from a President with a twitter account just because he belongs to your party.

JIm

Well that was embarrassing. I wanted to post something here yesterday, fired up my computer, looked in my Sites directory, saw all my files and realized I had no idea which tool I used to build this site. I’ve obsessed for years trying to find the “right” tool to use and have tried many, many tools. Eventually I apparently picked one but now had no idea which one. Looked around my site and my last post was from over a year ago. sigh This morning I realized that I might have blogged about it. So I looked at a past post and found my blog reboot post wherein I mentioned that I used Jekyll. Yay! Of course, for some reason Jekyll wasn’t installed on this machine so I had to reinstall it, but that was easy and now I’m back up and running so when inspiration strikes, I can post. (I’ve also updated the footer on this site to remind me what tool I use to do this.)

We killed our cat yesterday. Well, more accurately, we had him killed yesterday. Such a blunt way of putting it, yet it’s accurate. In polite society we say we “had him put down” which sounds so much nicer yet amounts to the same thing. His name was Scaliwag (and it bugs me that all my spell-checkers insist his name should be spelled ‘Scalawag’ instead) and he’d been a part of our family for about 15 years.

We got him when he was somewhere around two or three. Dena had a patient who had been a cat breeder and was getting out of the business. We agreed to adopt Scaliwag into a family that already had 2 other cats: Broccoli and Cauliflower (kinda messed up that vegetable-naming thing we had going on). He fit in OK for the most part. Broccoli was an adult boy black-and-white while Cauliflower was a young tortoise-shell girl. Scaliwag was a young, lean, active and somewhat skittish Siamese with beautiful, sleek tan fur fading to black at the paws and face with strikingly blue eyes. A really beautiful cat.

Scaliwag was never much on friendship. While the other cats would come and play with us, walk on us and otherwise demand our attention, Scaliwag never cared much for that. He was, however, a lap cat. If we ever sat down on the couch with our feet up, he was there ready to hop on our laps and make himself comfortable. He was a good cat.

He outlasted Broccoli and Cauliflower. He died from kidney disease and she a year later from breast cancer. Losing him hit our family the hardest. The kids were still little and it was their first experience with death. He was also the first pet Dena and I had gotten together and was always my buddy. They were eventually replaced by Lion, another young, rambunctious, boy cat, this time dressed in orange tabby. Scaliwag took it all in stride, adopting to the changing family while continuing to sit on our laps and otherwise ignore us.

Something changed recently and he stopped being himself. Feeding him became more difficult and he started to lose weight. He developed congestion that would make it difficult for him to breathe. Lion became more aggressive to him and he began to hide more and stay away from us more. He just wasn’t himself, though he would still sometimes come and sit on our laps. We weren’t very good parents at this point. We let this go on too long. At first, too much denial, telling ourselves it would just get better. Later, too much guilt for not having taken him to be seen earlier and still hoping it would get better all while he got worse and worse.

Eventually we got the courage to have him seen and did what we could. Got some medications, tried some new special food but none of it really helped. We thought he was getting better, but he wasn’t. For his last several weeks he lived in the back of Dena’s closet and almost never came out. We would take food to him and find him laying on a towel soaked in urine. He would no longer even use the litter box sitting right beside him. We eventually realized it was time.

We took him to the vet yesterday. They were very kind and understanding. It kind of surprised us that we were both in tears over this cat who never really fit in to our family and kept himself aloof from us all those years. The vet administered a sedative and I took Scaliwag and sat down with him on my lap. I petted and cried and told him it was OK. He kindly accepted my words, my petting and my lap and quickly and quietly went to sleep.

Goodbye Scaliwag, we’ll miss you.

Scaliwag: born 1998?, died August 14, 2015

It’s taking pleasure in the little things in life that helps keep me happy.

My dad was an electrician. As a result, growing up I would help him with various electrical tasks around the house (usually amounting to “hold that damn flashlight steady!”) and I learned some things. Then, as I grew older and got a house of my own, I would have him come by and help me with various things like putting in light fixtures, changing switches, outlets, etc. Little things.

Throughout all that, I still never quite got a grasp on electricity (and I don’t mean that physically). Despite having a Ph.D. in computer science, I still struggle with the simple concept of the flow of electricity through a circuit. Something about it just eludes me. Despite my father’s trying again and again to explain it to me and teach me through numerous projects, I just don’t get it. I can wire up a switch, outlet, light fixture, fan, etc. but it is still pretty much rote memory in me without quite understanding what I’m doing.

A few weeks ago we put up ceiling fan in our bedroom. We moved into our current house over a year ago and the house had no ceiling fans in any of the bedrooms. Having had them in our old house, we really wanted them here in our new one. So I installed one in our bedroom. However, when I installed it, I didn’t quite know how to wire it up so that the light would be controlled by the switch on the wall and the fan would be controlled by the pull-chain regardless of whether the switch was “on” or not. So for a while, I lived with having to leave the wall switch on and then come bed each night in a dark room flailing around with my hands towards a running ceiling fan trying to find the pull-chain to turn the bedroom light on. Not a good solution.

Well, finally the light-bulb came on. (Yes, that pun was intended.) After talking with my brothers and sister and hooking up another fan in my daughter’s room, I finally figured out what I had done wrong in my room and thought I knew how to fix it. So, yesterday (on Labor Day) I got up there and rewired it and TA-DA! I can now control the light from the switch on the wall and the fan from the pull-chain on the fixture. It exciting being able to walk into the room, hit the switch and see the light come on all while the fan is still running. No flailing necessary.

Like I said, it’s taking joy in the little things that make my life worthwhile. I think my dad would have been a little happy with me.

JIm

OK, I think I’m a jogger.

Over a year ago, my wife decided she needed to exercise more. Unlike most people, she actually went out and did it. She decided she wanted to run a 5K to start, bought the Couch to 5K app for her iPhone and started training. My daughter decided to train with her and the two of them were happy joggers all summer. I resisted their entreaties to join them. Come fall, my daughter went off to college and stopped running while my wife kept at it, ran her first 5K last September, has done several since then and is now in training for a half-marathon (yikes!).

Last May when my daughter came home from college for the summer, she decided she needed to get back running. After pestering me for some time, I finally decided to join her (I couldn’t resist her pleas) and she and I completed the same app and ran our first 5K in August! Now, my daughter is back at school and I’ve decided to keep running. She suggested posting my runs on Facebook so that we could nag each other to keep running. So, I picked two apps: Map My Run and Run Keeper to try out. (My wife said these were the two leading apps.)

I’ve used both apps today on my first non-Libby run. Here is what Map My Run looks like:

And here is what Run Keeper looks like:

Thus far I like Run Keeper more. The app seemed more intuitive to me, presents the data more clearly and overall I just like it. I know that’s not much of a review but I plan to keep using both for a while and write a more in-depth review later.

Stay tuned.

JIm

Welcome to my blog reboot.

This blog has completely languished for a long time. No, I haven’t been working on my boat either, hopefully that comes next. No, I’ve been experiencing paralysis by analysis.

I wasn’t really happy with MoveableType as the engine of my blog. Call me stupid but I just couldn’t get the hang of tweaking the templates and the CSS to get things to look the way I wanted. So, I decided to move to something else, but what?

There began my long, lonely search for a new thing to generate my blog. I knew I wanted a static blog and I wanted one that had would generate some clean, neat HTML and CSS that I could understand and tweak as I desired. I looked at a bunch: Jekyll, Pelican, Octopress, Nikola, Cactus and many more that I can no longer recall. (I actually kinda wish I had kept track and kept notes, it would have made a great meta-review of static blog posting enginges.) In the end I chose wintersmith. What you see is the result of this search (update a year later: no it’s not. I just switched again, this time to Jeckyl).

I like wintersmith. There are some things I don’t like about the organization of the files. I would prefer it if I could have all my files organized in a hierarchical directory system organized by year, month and day (the articles currently all just reside in one big directory) and I don’t fully get the templating system enough quite yet to tweak it completely to my liking. But, I can live with the directory structure, I probably won’t be posting more than one time per day anyway and I can learn the template system over time.

So now hopefully I will start to actually write here on a regular basis. Next step is to get back to work on my boat. I’m embarassed at how long it’s been since I’ve worked on it.

JIm

OK, I succumbed to the whole “May the 4th” thing and decided to get my geek on and watch Star Wars tonight. My mistake. When we moved last summer we decided to set up the home theater in the basement and leave the TV in the living room as just a TV (with an AppleTV hooked up to it). Up until now that arrangement has worked just fine.

Tonight I wanted to watch Star Wars. No problem.

Oh wait, problem, my TV upstairs doesn’t have a DVD/Blu-Ray player hooked up to it and I don’t feel like sitting in the basement.

Oh, wait, no problem, I’ll just stream it from my computer to the AppleTV. Cool.

Oh wait, problem. My recent MacBook Pro doesn’t have a DVD drive in it. Damn.

Oh wait, no problem, I’ll just use my older MacBook computer that I use for work. That has a DVD drive in it.

Oh crap. That machine is too old and can’t stream to AppleTV. Grrrr.

Ah hah, I’ll just use Apple’s drive-sharing feature and share the old machine’s DVD drive with my MacBook Pro and stream to the AppleTV that way. I’m so clever.

No dice. My MacBook Pro froze up in trying to do that and I had to force reboot.

I know, I’ll drag out that old USB DVD drive I have sitting in my desk drawer for just such occasions. OK, I’m good to go! Movie playing, stream to AppleTV. Grey box. WTF? The movie is playing, I’m hearing video, but the DVD player window is only showing a big grey box where the movie should be.

Quick google search…

Yep. Apple does not allow its DVD player app to stream to AppleTVs. WTF Apple.

What does…google search…VLC. Ah hah! Download VLC, easy to install, get it running. Playing, streaming to AppleTV. Ta-da! Whew.

30 seconds later…

WTF?!?! The movie just froze on the TV. Still playing on the computer, but froze on the TV. Now, the computer is locking up. Hmmm, now the movie stopped playing on the computer and AirPlay is no longer an option available on my menu bar. sigh. I give up.

I get the whole anti-piracy stance that Apple takes. I’m against copying, I don’t steal content just because I want something and it’s not conveniently available to me. But what is the point of all the above? I’m not trying to steal anything, I just want to watch a DVD I purchased. I ought to be able to view it on whatever device I want without Apple or the DVD publishers deciding that certain screens are forbidden to me. Furthermore, who is this stopping? Grandmas? Anyone sufficiently technologically capable can work around all these stupid precautions. The only people these roadblocks actually stop are people who would never be interested in pirating the videos in the first place.

I guess instead of watching Star Wars tonight, I’ll rip the DVD to my computer with Handbrake and watch it that way.

JIm

You may recall, when we last left off I was about to embark on making the nibbing strake.

To refresh your memory, take a look at the picture below:

You see how in the bottom left corner the planks no longer run smoothly into the waterway, but instead are notched in. That notching is called nibbing, and the plank into which the deck planks are notched is called the nibbing strake. Why is this done? Well, on a real boat, as the angle between the deck planks and the waterway becomes more acute, the deck planks would be coming to sharper and sharper points. Attaching and sealing such narrow strips of wood would have been too much trouble on a real boat, hence they just cut them off square and notched them into the nibbing strake. So, to maintain realism, I am supposed to notch them in the same way.

I was a bit stumped at first. I didn’t quite know how to measure and cut them to size so that they would look good. Well, Google to the rescue! I was able to find a site that described the process well enough for me to copy it. That’s what I’ll describe here.

Step one is to lay out the next plank over the top of the nibbing strake and mark where it should end. Cut it off there.

Then, lay the plank back down and mark where it just begins to overlap the nibbing strake.

Now, on my boat, I wanted the end of each plank to be one-half the width of a full-sized plank, so I marked the mid-point of the plank and then cut the plank on a straight line from where it overlaps the nibbing strake to the end. (After I completed all this, I found another post that suggested making a jig you could lay the plank in that would cut them all to the same width. Darn! Should have found that one earlier!)

Next, lay the newly cut deck plank back over the nibbing strake and mark where it overlaps.

Now, carefully cut the nibbing strake along that line. I was so nervous doing this the first few times. I did not want to mess this up because then I’d really want to rip it out and start all over again. You should then have a nice notch where the plank will fit perfectly!

Here you can see I’ve gotten a couple planks done on both sides of the boat. Looking pretty good if you ask me!

Making more progress. As you can see, I didn’t do such a good job on a couple of them and the gaps between the planks and the nibbing strake are a bit wide. Hopefully a little wood filler will take care of that.

Finally, the fore deck is complete!

Notice how the last two planks are just little wedges. Those were kind of a pain to put in place properly. They took a bit of cutting and sanding to make sure they fit right and could be glued in place. Overall I really like how it turned out.

Sanding and staining come next. Stay tuned!

JIm

Now it’s time to move on to planking the deck! I’ve decided to start with the fore deck (the front half of the boat).

Unlike the outer hull, when planking the deck, you work from the inside out.

Here I’ve laid the first two deck planks right down the middle over the center keel of the boat frame. Luckily(?) the width of the two deck planks together equal the thickness of the boat framing so that made it easy to lay two deck planks side by side and make sure they line up exactly over the center of the hull.

From there the process was pretty easy. Just keep cutting and laying on some planks.

What is that big “X” in the middle of the deck you say? Well, there are going to be two masts on this boat: a fore mast and a main mast. The masts must go through the deck and fit into slots in the hull frame.

Above is a picture of the slot where the main mast will fit. The big “X” on the deck marks where the slot for the fore mast is below deck.

So when I’m all done with planking the deck, I’ll have to drill a hole in the deck right at the “X” for the mast to fit. Hopefully I’ll get it right!

Back to planking, first I lay out a new plank next to the existing planks and mark where it overlaps the waterway.

Then cut on the marks and make sure it fits.

Like before, I then color one edge of the plank with a pencil. Recall, this is the way I’m simulating the caulking that would normally go between the deck planks. When I’m done planking, sanding and varnishing the lines will show up and look like caulk.

Then a little Elmer’s glue along the other edge and fit the plank in place.

A drop or two of super glue on the bulkheads to hold it in place. I’m trying real hard not to get any on the deck itself. The super glue ends up discoloring the wood and hardens it some too. Later when I sand, it won’t necessarily sand smoothly. I’ve not always been successful in avoiding that. You can see a bit of it in the picture.

Keep working outward.

Here’s a close up of the plans I’m following. Each sheet is about 2 x 3 feet and is drawn actual-sized. Notice the weird double-width plank on the plans marked “7” in the picture. Those are there because there is going to be a big winch mounted on the fore deck and this double-width plank is where the winch legs will be mounted.

Well, I’ve got those in place.

That’s it for today. The decking is going much quicker than the hull planking. The next step is the nibbing strake! If you look up above a little bit at the picture of the plans, you’ll see after that double width plank there is another plank along the waterway that is notched out to accommodate the deck planks. This is called the nibbing strake and will be the topic of my next post!

Stay tuned!

JIm

Just a minor update here. I’ve been working steadily on the boat actually, but there just isn’t too much to show you.

After completing all the trenailing I had to sand the hull all smooth.

After some sanding, I then took some wood filler and filled in all the cracks. I wasn’t looking to create a perfectly smooth hull with the filler because then that would just end up hiding all the trenails and other work I did. And it wouldn’t look like a wooden boat, it would look like fiberglass.

Finally I ended up with this.

Then cam time to prime.

First, I wanted to mask off the deck. That part is going to be varnished to keep the natural wood look.

Then, several coats of white primer with sanding and cleaning in between and it is all ready for its real paint job.

That will come in a bit once I am done planking the deck, re-adding the bulkhead stanchions and then finishing the planking above the waist.

Next time, planking the fore deck, stay tuned…

JIm

As promised, here is a little tale of how I made all the little sticks I needed for the trenailing featured in the last post.

After some research, I learned that the best way to do this is by using a draw plate and bamboo skewers. For those who don’t know, a draw plate is typically used to create wire. You stick a piece of wire into a hole slightly smaller than the wire currently is and pull it through. This will stretch it out and make it narrower. Repeat this process until you have a wire the diameter you want. This same process can apply to whittling bamboo skewers down to a needed size.

So I did. Start with a bamboo skewer and split it into several smaller skewers.

And now onto the draw plate.

I actually started with a different draw plate that wasn’t too well made. The holes in it weren’t very consistent and it didn’t work too well. So, I bought the one pictured above. Great draw plate. The numbers you see are thousandth’s of an inch.

Since we aren’t stretching wire but instead shaving bamboo, you use the draw plate “backwards”; by putting it through the back end.

When it sticks out the other side, I grab it with a pair of pliers and pull.

This generates lots of little wood shavings.

Basically repeat the process moving from one hole down to the next one. Sometimes it would take several pulls through to get it fully narrowed down before I could move to the next one. Since the drill bit I was using was .028″; I kept this up until I got down to the 26 hole.

Here is a shot of about what it looks like in a few stages.

I actually completed all the trenailing and have been working on filling, sanding and smoothing the hull. It looks good. I’ll post about that next.

JIm