Year: 2017

Bedrock Gardens

A few weekends ago Lori, the kids and I met my sister and her kids at Bedrock Gardens, in Nottingham, NH. This place was really cool - I wish I had taken more pictures. It's basically a 20-acre garden in the middle of the woods, with all kinds of sculptures everywhere you look. They're only open two weekends a month - we'll have to get back there sometime and take more photos.


Voice-Controlled Mood Lamp

This little project uses a Raspberry Pi and an 8x8 Neopixel grid from Adafruit. I've got some scripts running on it that let me control it via the Amazon Echo. We can say things like "switch the mood lamp to green", for example It's working, but I still need to come up with a way to keep the port served up permanently - right now I would need to log into it and restart the server any time we lose the power.

Walnut Frame for Painting

We've got a friend who paints, and she gave us this painting recently. I made the frame for it out of a piece of walnut that hand a big knot in it, that I haven't been able to figure out what to do with. It worked perfectly for this project. This is now hanging in our bedroom.

Bluetooth Speaker

After shopping for a bluetooth speaker lately and being somewhat shocked with the prices of anything better than a toy, I decided to try building my own. This one is made of oak and mahogany, and has a 4 inch full-range driver. I found an off-the-shelf little board (for around $20 or so) that handles all of the bluetooth details. It sounds great. The range is a little low, but that may have to do with having to receive through 3/4 of a inch of red oak. I can probably only get around 10 feet away and still have it work - but I can live with that. We put it on this shelf in our living room. It really looks pretty nice over there.

Geometric Shelf

I built this shelf a few weeks ago, based on one I saw online while surfing for inspiration. I love how this design provides lots of little nooks and crannies, with varying elevations for displaying things. We've been slowly acquiring things to put on it as we come across them - we've still got room for more, but we're in no rush. All of the joints are reinforced with biscuits - which a couple of the joints really hard to get together. I actually broke one joint while trying to assemble it, but I was able to repair it and if you didn't know where to look for it you'd probably never see it.

CRT2017 – Kansas City Zoo

On the last full day of the trip, we went to the Kansas City Zoo in Kansas City, Missouri. Their polar bears had just had twin cubs, and we they also had a wonderful new penguin exhibit. We also got to ride in a ski-lift style sky ride over the zebras, giraffes, ostriches, and springboks. By this point in the trip we were burning out a bit on taking pictures, so the only photo I have is of this penguin. All of the other penguins were swimming around and socializing, but this little guy was hanging out directly under the shoot of the ice machine - the newly made ice kept bouncing off his head, but he seemed to like it just fine.

CRT2017 – City Museum

Day five took us to St. Louis, Missouri - and the City Museum of St. Louis. The City Museum is really hard to explain if you haven't seen it yourself. It's a like a combination of a playground, sculpture, and junkyard all rolled up into one. They essentially took a ten-story building downtown, and told a bunch of artists to go crazy in there. The whole place is riddled with tunnels, slides, secret passages, and other sorts of craziness. They recommend kneepads and flashlights. Just a few highlights include a ten-story spiral slide made out of industrial laundry chutes, a three-story staircase made to look like a brontosaurus, and a cave system full of dragons, balconies, and fountains. It's a strange and wonderful place. Everyone should see it sometime in the lifetime.



CRT2017 – Illinois Drive

As part of our day four travels, we spent about 10 miles on a gravel road in southern Illinois - we were about as far from the 'main drag' as you could get. It was a really scenic, pleasant drive. I was pretty worried about all the gravel I could hear pinging off of the car though - but luckily, the paint was fine once I checked it out later that day.

CRT2017 – Boo Rochman Memorial Park

Before finishing up day four, we stopped at Boo Rochman memorial park in Carbondale, Illinois. It's a cool playground with a Dungeons and Dragons theme. It was built by a local family after there son (who was a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan) passed away. There was an enormous concrete dragon structure for kids to climb on, lots of sculptures or wizards and fairies all over the park, and a huge wooden structure built to look like a castle. It was full of rooms and winding passages - Carter and I even found a secret door that led to a hidden section of the castle.


CRT2017 – Garden of the Gods

On day four we drove through the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. I'd love to get back there someday for a more extended visit. While at the trailhead for this hike, we ended up talking to one of the groundskeepers for quite a while about all of the other things to do in the National Forest. I still have the map he annotated for us. He even pointed out some cool local restaurants we should check out. The hike was pretty amazing. Pictures don't really do it justice. It's a set of rock formations and cliffs that are made of sandstone. The signs said that they are about 320 million years old. Back then, the area was covered by a giant inland sea and rivers deposited sand and mud there. When an eventual uplift occurred, it fractured the bedrock exposing it to weathering and erosion.