Coulda, Shoulda, Wooda

This last week and a half has been interesting. For one thing, Joe and I have taken our woodworking business out of super slow-mo and into just regular ol' slow-mo.

We've worked, like... four times in the past two weeks, instead of just once!

Teef Brushums

Ah, but first I have to bring you up to speed on everything else—starting with the night of 12^th, when our neighbor "Teef" apparently tried to steal his own car.

We've talked a few times about our newest neighbors "The Jamaicans": They're the ones who bottlenecked the entire parking lot when they left their 50-foot long U-Haul truck parked here for an eternity and a half when they moved in a few months back; and they've since resorted to parking three cars here even though parking is limited and the lease specifies a maximum of two cars per apartment.

But anyway, I've nicknamed the one Jamaican "Teef" for the simple fact that he still has two or three of 'em in his "moufh."

He's also got this gold BMW—which never moves, and instead sits parked indefinitely in one of the prime spaces right outside his door (and close enough to ours to rob us of a potential space as well).

Every now and then—usually at a completely inappropriate hour to be making excessive noise—he manages to set off his own alarm, which is precisely what happened on the night of the 12^th...

I know a picture's worth a thousand words; and so, I really just need to get a video of this clown in the sunlight one of these days. But, if you remember Horace and Jasper from 101 Dalmations...

...just picture a 60-something black version of the tall, lanky one.

I swear, this dude has a full-time job of sitting around at home all day and coming outside every 22 minutes to smoke a cigarette before walking a lap around his precious BMW as though he's casing it like Nicolas Cage preparing to steal the Shelby Mustang in Gone in 60 Seconds.

But anyway, there's something about the way the guy moves that just always makes him look like an absolute shadeball—almost like an eight-year-old who just pocketed a roll of Bubble Tape in the checkout line at the grocery store, and then trying to play it so cool that all the other people in line who watched him do it might start questioning their own reality and wondering whether they truly saw what they know they saw.

I've come to wonder if this guy's cursed to walk the earth forever, looking guilty A.F. until the end of time. Like, instead of the mark of Cain, maybe he has the mark of Cain't: No matter how desperately he wants so desperately to be normal, he can't and he ain't.

It seems like, for whatever reason, God was so ticked off with him that he just said,

Joint Effort

On Tuesday the 13^th, I went to Joe's to get some work done.

Back in the first week of the month, we'd broken out the jointer for the first time and cleaned up the edges of all the pallet wood we planed last month...

Jointing was a breeze, and I'm super happy with the quality of the entry-level Wen model I ultimately decided to purchase. It's very efficient and way quieter than the planer :)

Later that afternoon, Joe and I decided to embark on a shopping trip in search of another work table, since having only one just wasn't cutting it. But, after doing some online research to compare product offerings at Home Depot and Wal-Mart, we learned that table manufacturers must all be conspiring with each other to cut corners and jack up prices.

Nobody wants to sell a table rated for more than 200 pounds anymore; and even tables flimsier than that are priced comparably to what a table with a 400-pound rating would have gone for just a few years ago.

No, thanks.

We decided to wait until we can snag something solid but cheap on Craigslist or Marketplace, and Joe said he could repurpose some smaller tables around the house for our use until then.

On a brighter note, we finally unboxed the remainder of my tools—which had just been sitting in his sunroom for weeks at that point—and we came up with a relatively easy-to-access storage system for the four big guys...

But, again, this is all stuff we did back on 06 January.

On the 13^th, we decided to try our hand at turning the wood from our "nicest-looking" pallet into a coffee table.

So, with the planks jointed—and planed not to a perfectly uniform depth, but all within 1/16^th of an inch or so to each other)—we glued 'em all up and clamped them together to turn them into a panel...

For best results, we'd have to let that dry overnight; so then we broke out the table saw so we could cut some table legs.

We were both nervous about the table saw...

The planer is damn near impossible to injure yourself with. (Well, not impossible... but you'd really have to try.)

The jointer has a slightly lower barrier to entry, as far as the potential for injury; but even still, it's a pretty common-sense tool, and you'd more or less have to go out of your way to do something dumb where your hands could end up contacting the blades.

But, the table saw? I don't know, man. I've watched enough videos to know that there are about a hundred different ways your table saw might try to kill you; and I wasn't sure I was ready for that kind of pressure.

Shit or Get Off the... Table?

You have to face your fears eventually though. So, we did.

And, remember that armoire-entertainment-center-console-thingy that Joe and I disassembled in his shed back in September?

But, we still had all that scrap wood sitting out in the shed. And some of those scraps were like six-foot-long hardwood 2x2s that just needed a really thin layer of veneer shaved off of them.

So, I armed myself with a couple of push-sticks, fired up the table saw, and gave one of those bad boys The Closest Shave Ever^TM.

The cut was super-smooth—especially for just the 40-tooth stock blade that came with the saw. I felt confident the entire time, and... yeah, I'm like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone after he's conquered his fear of the furnace in the basement.

Totally comfortable using a table saw now :)

Obviously, given that this was our first time using the saw at all, we haven't gotten around to building a cross-cut sled for it yet... which meant we had to lug out the miter saw to cut our smooth new 2x2 into four actual table legs of a uniform length.

That was no problem at all—although we were both taken aback by how much torque the miter saw has when you engage it. You'd better be ready for that kick when you squeeze the trigger!

Tech Support

When I got back to the apartment later, I saw that the laser engraver I'd ordered on Christmas Eve day had finally been delivered (after Creality had swiped my $700 immediately, despite the product being out of stock for three weeks).

Then later that evening, I helped Riley install Minecraft on her laptop so she could start playing :)

The following evening, Riley said that Taaro was trying to get her to download some additional piece of software so that they could play Minecraft online together.

You don't need anything extra: You just need to host a server or connect to somebody else's.

Luckily, whatever he was trying to get her to install was only for Windows machines and Macs; so Linux wasn't even having any of it ;)

The whole thing gave me some mild PTSD from four years ago when I repurposed some old computers for the girls, and then-19-year-old know-nothing Ahlina took it upon herself to make Riley's "run faster" by deleting the entire f*cking desktop environment!

But Taaro eventually managed either to figure out port-forwarding on Nina's home network and host his own server (unlikely), or to find a free server elsewhere online where he and Riley can play together (more likely).

Riley said they were working on building a house together. Hopefully in addition to dealing with creepers, zombies, and skeletons, they will not also have to fend off overzealous code enforcers trying to forbid them from using extension cords and power strips :)

Glue-Ups and Glue-Downs

Thursday the 15^th, I worked with Joe again.

Our panel had glued up super nicely!

The camera angles in the pics of our glue-up two days earlier make it look like we glued everything into one giant piece; but, can you imagine if we had actually done that?!

That would've made it too wide to run through the planer!

Then we would've had to lug out the table saw and rip the damn thing down the middle, just so we could run each half through the planer to save ourselves literal hours of manually bringing everything to a common depth with a pair of orbital sanders.

In all seriousness though, if not for the nail holes, would you believe that this was originally pallet wood?

After we got the clamps situated, Paula treated us to lunch at Metro Diner, and then Joe and I took the time to register all the tools in case we ever need to make use of the warranties.

Building Tables, Buying Tables

Joe and I worked again on Friday the 16^th.

I treated to a quick lunch at Chick-fil-A; then we went back to his place to sand down our re-glued tabletop, and I cut some scrap wood to use as undergirding—and also some thin-cut wood strips I can paint to look like steel banding to cover all those nail holes ;)

Later that afternoon when we got sick of standing out in the cold, Joe and I scoured the internet for some used tables and found two beefy-looking boys listed for $20 each.

We met a young guy named Tristan at his storage unit in North Wales to pick up the tables; and it turns out that he does junk removal for a living... so, he had some 2x4s and 2x8s in his truck that he threw in for free as well!

Here's a picture of the haul—and of the miter saw, because it just looks badass!

I treated Joe and Paula to dinner at Gianni's that evening and then headed home to spend some time with my Kitten before she nodded off to sleep :)

Nixty Sixties

But, when I arrived home, I received the wonderful news that Kitten was going to be taking Riley into the bowels of North Philly to drop her off at Nina's and hang out with Taaro for the day—which meant that last month's little heart-to-heart in which we had sat Riley down and explained that Nina and Kenny are a couple of nutsack-chucklefucks and she probably wouldn't be seeing Taaro in person for the foreseeable future actually translated to "for about three weeks."

And so, on Saturday the 17^th, Kitten drove the Molerat down to Nina's on her own... in the snow... and happened upon the aftermath of an accident that shut down three entire lanes of Roosevelt Blvd...

As it got closer to dinner time, Kitten suggested that the two of us go on a date to Nifty Fiftys together.

Unbeknownst to me, she had just discovered the "new" location that opened up by us back in the spring. But all I could think was,

Kitten relented and we went to Julio's instead, and then—since snow forecasts are always about 15% of what was promised, and we have four-wheel drive now anyway—we shot over to my parents to surprise them and visit for a bit...

Nina and Taaro dropped Riley off at home around 9:30 that evening... and, of course, she came bounding up the stairs with a box of leftovers under her arm.

You'll never guess where they had eaten...

Then, as Nina and Taaro got back in their car, I saw Taaro get into the back seat.

Good God.

Cut the cord, Mom. He's ready.

Unreal.

Neighborly Sorts

Here's a quick clip of Teef casing his BMW again...

And another one of some guy I don't even recognize: Maybe Hoodrat has a boyfriend now?

At any rate, we got about 3.5 inches of snow Saturday night into Sunday; and we had seen Rob and Nicole's little boys outside building a snowman Sunday afternoon...

But then some gang of turds (who don't even live in our complex) had to roll through and stomp it into oblivion.

One of the little pukes also touched Kitten's car—so we stood in the window ready to set off the alarm and scare the piss out of them if they did it again...

...But, they came, and they pillaged, and then they were on their merry way to go terrorize another building's parking lot...

Coulda, Shoulda, Wooda

Fast-forward to yesterday (the 21^st), and Joe and I continued working on our coffee table.

Bear in mind, this is primarily a practice piece to familiarize ourselves with our tools—and, if we do decide it's good enough to try selling, we'll be pushing the "reclaimed wood" angle as a feature rather than a bug.

That being said, we're both happy and disappointed with how things have turned out so far...

The table looks really cool—and even better in person—but the L-brackets we used to attach the legs to the table's underside (in lieu of learning actual joinery just yet) left quite a bit to be desired.

It was immediately apparent to us that we'll need to shore things up somehow and come up with a way to keep everything square and ensure the four legs remain parallel to each other despite the brackets' complete inability to achieve this.

If anything, we may scrap everything but the tabletop and try something else entirely, like perhaps adding a bottom shelf (which would solve the whole keeping-the-legs-straight problem).

Who knows?

It's been down in the teens outside, and they say we're about to get dumped on with as much as 18 inches of snow in a few days; so, we might not even work again until after our birthdays!