DIY projects

My cold workshop

My workshop is a cold mess. But, first let me establish that I could hang out all day in the right workshop. I’m a geek for the general manipulation of raw materials into other, presumably more useful, things. I especially like the smells – the tang of cut pine, the sweetness of oak sawdust, even the rich scent of oil and lubricants.

However, my workshop, as for so many other handy folk, is also my garage. In the summer it can be made an inviting space: tools neatly on hooks and in drawers, spare lumber arranged by size on the wall rack above the radial and band saws, benches clear and clean.

Late winter is a different story. The benches are piled with tools that have been taken down for use, but not put back. Why? Because it’s miserable work to slide by a car dripping ice water and road salt.

The garage is cold and dark, even in the light of the six four-foot LEDs. Frosted leaves litter the floor mingled with a dark crust of salt and sand.

Brrr

True fact: Once a month, I sweep the garage, admire the shiny clean floor, and then scrutinize the trees, yard, and driveway. Not a leaf in sight. Next day, and I am not kidding, nature kicks up a wind, borrowing leaves from the neighbors I guess, and there they are, back.

I can, even in the dead of winter, make a very pleasant workplace. Sweep. Ban cars to the driveway. Keep the door closed.  Fire up the kerosene heater. Activate the extra LEDs. Put everything back in its place. Get to work. 

I constructed 18 kitchen cabinet doors over a couple of months a few winters ago. It was nice and warm in that “hah take that winter” feeling you sometimes get hunkered like a turtle in your parka as you walk across a parking lot in subzero wind and snow.

But, since prepping the workspace is so much work, lacking a long-term project that would make all the prep worthwhile, I’m content to avoid the garage and wait for spring.

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Spring’s a comin’

All my life, even as a kid in cloudy northwest Indiana, I have been uplifted by a brightening of daylight starting kind of magically after New Year’s day.

Today, Jan 6, we are only 16 days past the Winter Solstice, and a whopping 74 days from the official first day of spring, March 19 (9:49 a.m. where I live.) Yet, the sun is already rising higher in the sky (about one extra degree above the southern horizon for every four or five days.)

Emily Dickinson commented on this quality of light in “A Light Exists in Spring:” 
“A Light exists in Spring / Not present on the Year / At any other period/ …” 
She was writing about March, but, for me,  this magical light starts now, in January, even if that light falls on thick ice and snow.

And, to top it off, each day in January, the sun sets a minute later than the previous day. (At least at mid latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere.) Sunrises are still dawdling along, stuck at their latest time since Dec. 28.  But the sun will rise one minute earlier this Saturday, Jan. 11.

A good place to check out sunrise sunset times and more tailored for  where you live: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa 

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Technology Anxiety and Future Shock Part 1

In front of me, Lucy, the Golden Retriever, is whirling in circles across the room attempting to get a good chomp on her tail. It dawns on me, tail chasing makes a great metaphor for human chasing of technology.

Alvin Toffler wrote in the Introduction to his book Future Shock, “In 1965, in an article in Horizon, I coined the term “future shock” to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

Future Shock was required reading in many a college course when I was in college. Up until last summer, I would probably have lumped it in with a bunch of other pretentious and overwrought books of the 70s.

However, decades later, leafing through my dust-covered copy, I ended up sitting on the garage floor for an hour reading and saying, “oh wow.” I guess being older and more experienced, I was struck by Toffler’s message that changes in technology and computers were going to drive a whole new level of future shock.

Consider that, prior to 1920, the time elapsed between invention and full implementation for such appliances as vacuum cleaners and electric stoves was about 34 years. By the time Toffler wrote his 1965 article, the invention to full societal acceptance had gone down to eight years for things like television and combination washer/dryers.

By 1971, when Future Shock was published, computers were shrinking from the size of small houses. They were, however, still bulky and operated by mysterious acolytes known as programmers or system analysts.

As I write this in 2019 I’m ignoring my one and quarter inch wide one quarter inch thick wristwatch that is stridently trying to tell me my heart rate, provide me with an incoming text message from my brother 2,000 miles away, show me the weather forecast, oh, and, coincidentally, tell me the time.

These watch functions are great and useful, but my personal future shock is I never seem to have time to master them. Nor do I really have a handle on the tools and apps afforded by my Galaxy S7 phone, my personal Kindle Fire tablet, my work iPad. any one of three laptops, my recently built desktop computer, or even my five year old digital SLR camera, which could probably be taught to communicate with the watch, if I had the time to ponder the connection.

Like Lu, I’m still trying to sink my teeth into that technological tail and stop the spinning. Once upon a time I toyed with the idea that tech would eventually allow me to ride my moving sidewalk up to the house, have technology open the door, greet me with music, adjust the blinds for the optimum sun exposure, feed the dogs, cook up a tasty meal, and shovel it into my mouth.

Some of my above list is already available. All of it could be done. But at what price? The 50s and 60s dream of the future that we would all become great minds mounted on flaccid bodies has proven to be quite wrong. Factoring out certain geniuses like Steven Hawking, research and life experience has shown that our minds work best when our bodies are fit.

Our minds also work best, and I think Hawking was a good example of this, when they are challenged. Letting tech do all the thinking is, in my humble opinion a bad, probably very bad, idea. Using tech to supplement human thinking is good.

How to determine how much to supplement is a challenge we can all take on in our personal and societal use of technology.

Having failed to catch her tail, Lucy has lost interest and fallen asleep.  I, however, could say so much more.  But we future shocked humans seem to want to read only so much.  Succinct writing is not a bad thing, by the way.  It just means I need to break up observations from re-reading Future Shock into more frequent, shorter, pieces.  Stay tuned.