UptownMaker

A friend of mine recently posted to Twitter a picture of an object that his 19-month-old identified as "K". That got me to thinking- clearly, she knows what a "K" is, but it doesn't exist in the "privileged class" of objects that we arbitrarily refer to as "letters". Hence, she was able to spot a "K" someplace an adult would never even look for one. At her age, she still sees nouns everywhere she looks. That doorstop LOOKS like a "K" so she identified it as such. As adults, we live in a world of verbs. We look at that object and see a doorstop- which is to say, we see what it DOES rather than what it IS . There's an important distinction there, for makers and artists especially. We tend to be so wrapped up in the verb form of the world that we forget the noun. My personal experience with this has also been that even when I succeed in considering an alternative solution to a problem, I STILL verb-ify my solution,...

Two-fer today, to make up for yesterday. I wish I could get it together and post daily. The first is a simple Jacob's ladder. I've always wanted one of these and it's an affront to my tinkering nature that more than 10 years after I started into electronics, I still haven't made one up. The second is a raised garden bed for my vegetable garden. We'll be moving next week (eep!) and I have no interest in tilling up a large patch of yard in a rental property, and I'll need to buy some kind of soil to make it support plants anyway (there's little chance of success in the area I'll be living in without doing so, due to the advanced age of the neighborhood), so I'm thinking I'll build beds on legs, about two feet high and four feet by eight feet. I figure that'll make it easy to work them, and you should be able to reach the middle pretty easily. Good drainage, etc. My company has a demo dumpster FULL of old shipping crates made of 1/2" p...