TrevorCarpenter.com

My oldest son and I are working on a fun little garage project together.

As you know, I take my daughter out a lot, to shoot photography. We have that to share. My oldest son and I haven’t been doing something like that. So, I decided that we’d undertake a project together. It has been fun.

This project will be a framed chalkboard. My wife has wanted something like this, to hang on the wall.

We took a long piece of red oak and cut it down into four smaller lengths, to eventually become the frame. Next, I got to use my Dremel tool, with a little plunge router attachment, to route down a recessed groove along the back of each oak piece. I then used my chop saw to cut the ends to 45 degree angles.

Once they were ready, I glued and nailed them together, to form the frame. Once the glue was dry, I wiped it down with a nice oil/orange combo.

The chalkboard is made from an extra piece of plywood I had laying around. I had to fill it in with a lot of putty, as plywood isn’t the best for finish work. Since I was eventually going to paint it, I knew that the putty would be fine. The puttying took three applications, interspersed with sanding. This step was perfect for my son to help me. He was able to do some puttying, and I had him do most of the early sanding. I just made him a nice sanding block, by stapling some sanding paper to a small 2×4 block. The final sanding I did with my power sander, and some much finer sandpaper.

This is where the project is now. We painted the first coat of chalkboard paint on the plywood. This afternoon it is drying. This evening, we may be able to paint another coat. My son will do that one. On Saturday, we’ll possibly sand the two coats, and paint another one or two. My goal is to have at least 4 coats of the chalkboard paint, before the final assembly.

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I’m just chillin’, watching Disney’s Enchanted with The Wookiee, and The Padawan keeps jumping up and down on the toy box.

I hollered at him a couple of times, “Stop doing that. It’s loud, and you could hurt your little brother.” You see, The Joker was playing right next to the toy box.

Moments later, I hear nothing but a sucking wind. You know the sound? It’s the sound of a one year old, hurt so much that he can’t cry. He’s trying to suck in enough air, so that he can let out the most horrible cry of his life. Yes, The Padawan had jumped again, and crushed The Joker’s little right hand under the lid of the toy box. I was angry, but I didn’t have the time to punish him. The Joker was in a lot of pain. The lid had come down on his little hand, right where his fingers join his hand. There was a nice dark red line across his knuckles and a purple spot on his ring finger. Poor baby.

As I tried hard to get control of the situation, many things raced through my mind. First, Deanna was off with The Princess in the family car, with the car seats. Ah! There was no way I was going to drive my three boys to the hospital, not in car seats. Luckily, we live 3 blocks from the hospital. I called Deanna as we prepared to leave.

I scooped up the boys and we raced out the door, walking/running to the ER. As we entered the parking lot, the screaming stopped. I looked down and also saw that The Joker was actually grasping his blanket with his injured hand.

I gave him a little assessment, and he did not wince or cry when I touched his injured area. Hmmm. So I called Deanna to see where she was. She was driving into the parking lot. Once she found us, she also checked out his hand, and agreed. The Joker would survive.

We drove home.

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The Queen got one more out of diapers today! He’ll still wear a pull-up at bedtime, but he’s sporting the superhero undies, and there’s no going back.

Just an FYI. If you had kids, you’d celebrate too.

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The Padawan’s 6th birthday was yesterday. He’s obsessed with Indiana Jones right now, so you might notice a theme in his costume choices in my recent photos of him.

Wanting to get out of the house, we took the family to go see the baby seals at the Carpinteria Harbor Seal Preserve. A photo friend, Leigh, had mentioned his own trip to see them last week on the Ventura County Flickr forum. So we took his advice and went for a look of our own. As we were driving up the 101, just out of Ventura, it began to rain. Honestly, I was pretty ticked off, knowing that I may miss a photo opportunity. I was also bummed out for the kids.

We pressed on, however, curious if the rain might break. When we arrived, it was still raining. It wasn’t no Oregon, we-must-stay-inside, kind of rain. It was more Oregon, you-call-that-rain!-that’s-a-clear-day, kind of rain. I was the only one without a jacket, so we went ahead for the walk.

From the parking lot, just off the Bailard exit, we had to walk down the path to the train tracks. Following the trail along the tracks for a few hundred yards, we crossed and approached the bluffs. I must say, be careful at this point! This is clearly a regularly visited location, but not regularly critiqued by the traditionally litigious Californian.

Just a few more steps down the path and there’s even a nice sitting area to view the seals. We saw quite a few, just lazying around, relaxing on the rocks. As we peered over the edge, we began to see the babies. They were closer to the sand than the others, mostly snuggling up to their mothers.

Head over and check out my Photo Set to see them all.

On a side note, I’ve been using the newly announced Apple Aperture 2, trial edition. I’ve used the Adobe Bridge and Photoshop combination for over a year, and I must say that Aperture is next on my list. I love it! Everything is just so much more intuitive. I’m less of a Photoshop artist, but I’m more of a photographer. That’s my goal.

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So, heading into my weekend, this past week, I wanted to head out hiking with the family again. When I was young, I hiked a lot. In my young adult years, I hiked a lot too. Wanting to pass this on to my own kids, I’ve recently decided that we’re going to get out in the real outdoors at least once a month. Plus, hiking is good exercise for this fat guy.

I hit the internets looking for some pointers, cause most of the local good spots are a bit tired.

While drilling down from “ventura county day hikes”, I found a cool park in Simi Valley, CA. It’s called Corriganville Park. What makes it cool is its history. Corriganville Park used to be Corriganville Ranch, which used to be a prime location for Hollywood to head to the hills for some good old fashioned western films. It seems that Ray Corrigan bought the property back in 1937 for $11,354. Corrigan built up the property over the course of years for a variety of films like,

• Colorado Sunset, with Gene Autry
• Down Mexico Way, with Gene Autry
• The Lone Star Vigilantes, with Tex Ritter
• On the Old Spanish Trail, with Roy Rogers,
• Fort Apache, with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Shirley Temple
• and even the television show, Adventures of Rin Tin Tin

There’s quite a bit of history packed into that nice corner of Ventura County. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend you take an afternoon or morning and wander around a little bit. You won’t be sorry.

Dotted around the trails, which run all over the place, you’ll find signs detailing where once stood the structures used for these many films.

Our kids had a great time climbing all over the few pieces left from what was clearly once a great location for filming. Head over and check out my photoset from that day.

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We took the kids to the park yesterday. We had a great time and The Princess rode her bike, (minus the training wheels), for the first successful time. Oh, she’s been without them for quite some time, but this was the first time she really did it.

Deanna chased her around for hours and she was doing great by the time we left.

Click on the photo, or the few below, and wander around at a few of the other photos from that day.

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You know, our local library opened its doors in a brand new facility this past year. Actually I think it opened several months ago. Anyway, we hadn’t taken the opportunity to go check it out and though we should.

Since we homeschool, using the local library really should be an important tool for the kids to learn and understand. Also, it’s only 3 blocks from our house. I know, I know, how easy could it be?

We decided yesterday that we would walk the whole family over there and check it out. So that’s just what we did. It’s safe because we don’t have to walk along any major street or cross any either. We put the Joker in his stroller and the other three walked just fine. Enjoy a few photos from the trip…

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Months ago, my two oldest, The Princess and The Padawan, got themselves a Webkinz stuffed animal. Do you know what that is? Then you don’t have young kids.

Basically this is a hybrid of beanie babies and Facebook, for kids. You get the real toy, then go to the website. Parents may have to help here. Set up an account and enter the code from your toy. Now your kid has a semi-virtual world, where they manage the life of the toy. They name it, build it a room, and feed it. They also get to go around and earn Webkinz money to spend on their animal. They do this by entering contests, playing games, and taking trivia quizzes. OK, now you’ve got the picture. It’s actually pretty cool to watch my two playing, enjoying themselves, and learning a bit about using the computer.

The problem we’re having is that my daughter’s login is screwed up, and nothing, I mean NOTHING we’re doing makes any sense. I’ve been an online adventurer for years. I understand the basic principles of logon and account management. The one thing that the Webkinz team has failed miserably at is that they are unreachable. I dare you to go and find a real email address for me to use, or a telephone number! Even their help/complaint system is a preset list of questions, without providing you with any way to enter your own question. And to top that off, the preset questions each require you to log in to your “home” to go find their answer. WE CAN’T GET HOME, you &#*@&!@!!!!!

So, here I am blogging about it. I know I’m no Scoble, who can get it done with a little bad publicity. But, I thought I’d give it a try.

**************Update**************

Well, just a bit after I blogged my tantrum, and many of you had commented, The Princess’ logon miraculously began to work again. It worked just fine the rest of the day. A unique thing though is that I learned a bit about website customer service. Let me tell you, if a company runs a website, they sure as heck had better make it easy for me (the customer) to get ahold of them. Thanks for all your help and support!

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The Padawan

Here’s my 5 year old, doing what he does best, killing stormtroopers in Lego Star Wars. The lighting is all natural, no modifiers. Basically a large bright window is to his left.

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OK, you’ve read me talking a bunch about Ubuntu, and my desire to get a nice install up and running at home. Some time back, I mentioned that I wanted to build a simple machine, dedicated to serving up my family’s media, printing, and files. Well, the budget always trumps ideas like that. Some day, I’ll get that going again. In the mean time, we had the chance to get a couple of Mac mini’s. Sweet, now the old family computer, the first rev LCD iMac, is going to be dedicated for use as a kid’s computer. Right now they mostly play a few online educational games. As they progress in school, I know they’ll be doing more work with it. So now we don’t have to share. Now, if only Adobe made a Linux(PPC) flash plugin, I’d dump OSX on that machine and run Ubuntu there. I know that it would run faster, but without flash, there’s no way the kids could play those online games. They’re all flash.

So, back to the Mac minis. Mine is an Intel 1.66, duo core, 1gig ram. It’s used for my photo processing, eventually podcasting again, and the random processor heavy app.

The family Mac is the same machine with only 512mg ram. MISTAKE! OSX needs more than that to run smoothly. Since we can’t budget to double the ram right now, I’m considering dumping OSX entirely there and running Ubuntu exclusively. It’s Intel, so no flash issues. I’ve been thinking this through for weeks now, and the only deal breaker has been our massive iTunes Store purchases. There are no tools around for converting, (read, dropping DRM), on the most recent iTunes version. So, I’m left with burning each album to  CD, and reconverting to MP3. I’ll keep a back data-DVD of all the files, and I know I’m loosing some quality, but I really have no choice.

For future music purchases, we now have the DRM-free Wal-Mart online store. And since DRM-free music is catching on, I think that we’ll see more options birthed soon.

So, what do you think?

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I hereby declare that my dishwashing expertise offers me the freedom to wash dishes via my own, proven, methods.

I will not be questioned.

Background…

Sometime in junior high school, our dishwasher broke in my home. It was never really addressed. Then, a long time later, I was informed that it had been fixed. The problem was that I was legally old enough to drink alcoholic beverages by this time.

IT HAD WORKED FOR OVER 10 YEARS!

I am an expert dishwasher. I have a black belt in dishwashing. I can train military dishwashers, I’m that good.

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So, the other day, Deanna has this great idea. “Let’s go for a hike,” she says. Sure, no problem. I’ll take my fatness on a hike. That’s just great.

Well, we did it anyway. And I had a great time, just like everyone else. I couldn’t believe it, The Padawan and The Wookie were pretending to be soldiers, marching strong. The Princess was great. She had an awesome attitude the whole time. And Deanna carried The Baby in a Baby Bjorn. In the words of Posh Beckham, “It was Major!”

So, the photo set is up at Zooomr, here.

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