adventures of a canoelover

at the Madison airport on my way to SLC. There is really bad Muzak. Here is a partial listing. Prepare the air sickness bag.

· Ballad of John and Yoko. No, really.
· More. Sometimes more is less.
· Two Ships That Pass in the Night. As if Barry Manilow weren’t painful enough.
· Smile (Though Your Heart is Breaking) – ugh
· Three Coins in a Fountain – double ugh.
· Every Breath You Take – melody on the soprano saxophone, bridge on strings. Some musicians should be banned from the planet.
· Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. They swing it a little. Like a dead cat.
· On the Street Where You Live. No comment needed.
· Imagine. Imagine John Lennon spinning in his grave.
· Longer. Imagine Dan Fogelberg spinning in his grave as well.

I had to stop counting, I could feel a stroke coming on.

Last September Stephanie and I went to Seattle (actually Leavenworth on the east side of the Cascades) to a wedding for Kelly and Mark. They asked me (before hearing me, natch) to play my octave mando in their wedding. It didn’t suck, and at least one person asked if they could buy a CD if I had one released. I told them to get our their cell phone and I would record their ring-tone.

Anyway, the photographer took this and Kelly sent us this picture framed for Christmas. It’s one of my favorites — hot wife, gorgeous weather, and a nice root beer (locally bottled, of course). Loads of fun.

So I tried to get on the Horny Toad site (to be honest, I wanted to pro-deal a shirt), and our anti-porn service said that the site was potentially pornographic. I can only assume it is because of the name of the site.

Yeah, right…”Horny Toads Want to Jump Your Bones.” Sigh…

It is finished…the first of four frames. It was an experiment, and I think it succeeded fabulously. Now to trim, melt knots, and varnish…but first I have three other shoes to make.

Fans of “The Office,” both American and British versions, will recognize the ol’ stapler in the jelly prank that Tim/Jim play on Garreth/Dwight. The SITJ prank was replicated, because Ian wanted to do it, and Jeff was a good victim.

We did not, of course, take Jeff’s beloved Swingline 777 in maroon, as that would have been wanton destruction of company property. So we took his second-tier stapler and suspended it in a jelly. It was fun, and trickier than you might think, requiring several pours to achieve the proper suspension effect.

Jeff is plotting his revenge. Ian better watch his back.

We went skiing and it was cool. Because we didn’t have the tripod we couldn’t take a picture of us together, so we settled for the next best thing. Although you can’t tell from the picture, we were smiling.

It was a lovely ski. Warm (25), sunny, and clear, which after the miasma of fog we suffered through was a real treat.

I get this way every so often. I get going on a new project and I become single-minded in its completion.

I love building snowshoes, but this is a new thing — building with no pattern, just the basics ingrained in me after building a bunch of them over the years. It’s really relaxing, just sitting and working with my fingers, and the good news is that on the other side of the activity you get something useful and beautiful.

The toe section went fine, as did the heel section. The center section is where it gets sorta scary. There’s a point where you sorta have to wing it and hope for the best as far as the pattern goes. I’m sure there’s an algorithm to determine the critical point for starting the center weave, but I’ve never figured it out. So I trust intuition and start lacing.

So far, they’re beautiful. I have another set of frames so I’ll be experimenting with those as well, we’ll see what happens.

All in all, a great activity for a Sunday afternoon.

…that if your bicycle frame breaks, it can cause you to lose control? Yessir, Cannondale is recalling 150 mountain bike frames. According to their statement, the frame “can break while in use, causing the rider to lose control and suffer injuries from a fall or collision.”

I dunno, I guess the last time my bicycle frame broke, I just kept on riding for a while until I found a convenient location to go ass-over-teakettle.

I’ve been addicted to making snowshoes since 1987, when Stephanie and I first built snowshoes while she was pregnant with Whitney. It’s relaxing, and when you’re done you have a cool piece of art that actually has a function.

My friend Greg at Country Ways sent me a couple of prototype frames and some of the 1/4″ lacing, not the standard 3/8″ and 1/2″ lacing because I wanted to try a little tighter pattern. It’s unknown territory, so you have to kinda mess around with the lacing patterns until it works.

This pattern worked the first time because halfway through I listened to a little voice in my head that said “no, not that way.” So there ya go. I guess after lacing a few dozen pair and teaching it to a few dozen other students, it’s almost part of my finger/brain connection.

Next — a toe section.

Chances are when you get your eggs from the supermarket, they’re not:

• Brown shelled
• Laid by contented chickens who have names like Kaitlyn
• Have a date they were laid written on them in pencil

My eggs are wonderful. We get them from Larry and Karen. Larry was/is my blacksmithing mentor, and now he and his wife have taken to chickens like a chicken takes to a handful of grasshoppers. Thirty laying hens, and they all have names, and Larry can pick them out in the coop. They all look the same to me, but not to Larry.

We get a couple of dozen every few weeks, and they cost about three times as much as eggs from the store, but the yokes are orange, the whites thick and cohesive, and the shells are substantial and solid. In short, worth every cent.