Our 5 year-old needed a nightstand, but the ones in the local ads were too big or too expensive or just wouldn’t work well, so I did a quick project this week. It’s pretty basic, but the pocket hole jig definitely came in handy for hiding screws inside. It’s only about 18 inches tall since it’s sitting next to a kid-sized bed.

This was a disappointing read about our handling of oil and gas wells in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, which is the most productive oil field in the United States. There are a lot of wells in some of these areas - around one well for every two people in Pecos County, TX. The problem is that many of these wells are abandoned when oil prices fluctuate, or when they are bought and sold in groups and are no longer used.

I built a couple of fairly simple garden boxes with my wife for the back yard. It’s all just redwood 2x4s and corrugated roofing panels. It ended up being easiest to do pocket hole joints for the framing of each ‘wall’, and the rest of the wood is butt jointed together from there. The metal panels are attached to the insides of each wall separately.

Our oldest child just had a birthday, and one of the things we did to celebrate was to visit Wings Over the Rockies Air & Space Museum in Denver. She had a lot of fun at the Museum of Flight in Seattle in 2019, so this was sort of a followup to that. I’m no expert in aviation and don’t have any extraordinary interest in aircraft, but I find it interesting enough to stay entertained at these museums.

I just finished building a basic plant stand last night. This is the first time I’ve used a router on any woodworking, and it seemed much easier to cut the slots out that way than to do it with a jigsaw. With that said, I should probably make it clear that a) I’m not particularly good at using a jigsaw and b) I’m no superstar with a router either. One major issue I ran into was not being able to properly clamp enough parts when I glued it together.

I’ve been playing around with Voltage Modular from Cherry Audio over the last few days, and it’s dangerously fun. I barely know what I’m doing yet, but I can tell there’s a bottomless pit of fun sounds that can be built with this thing. I discovered it after coming across another synth made by the same company a couple weeks ago and loving the 80’s sounds it makes - DCO-106.