Soup kitchen troubles

Gah! I just read an article from today's Providence Journal (here) that says the soup kitchen where I volunteer in Pawtucket will be closing. It turns out two woman in the neighborhood complained that they were harassed by men who appeared to have come from the soup kitchen so the city's zoning board denied issuing a new permit to allow the kitchen's continued operation.

Sheesh! Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath-water. First of all, the women weren't even sure the men had come from the soup kitchen, yet this one complaint was enough for the zoning board to deny the permit. Secondly, even if the men had come from the soup kitchen, it seems like a very strange policy to punish all the people being serviced by the kitchen because a couple of the patrons have behavior problems. I guess people want to help the homeless and poor in theory, but they just don't want to have to actually see them in their neighborhood. Yes, some of the people being helped are going to have behavioral problems and/or hygiene problems, but they still need our help. What people have to realize is helping the severely disadvantage in a city is not pretty work, but it's important work. All people deserve help - even ones you might not like.

What I find really odd is the soup kitchen is located downtown in a somewhat industrial neighboorhood, yet people still complained. Of all the possible locations, I would think this location would be the least intrusive. What do people want? A special walled community for the poor and homeless? Then we wouldn't have to see them and we could just live our happy lives not having to confront some of the ugly realities of life. We wouldn't even have to remember the homeless exist.

Where've I been?

A month has gone by since my last post. A few people have asked what's up. I've not had much free time in front of a computer lately, hence the lack of writing here. I've spent most of this month helping a friend renovate a condo she just bought. The place needed a bit of work, so she pretty much gutted it down to the sheetrock walls. Working along with a couple other friends, I've helped replace lights, ceiling fans, electrical outlets, wiring, a sliding glass door, installed new hardwood floors in three rooms, new plumbing, kitchen cabinets, a dishwasher, garbage disposal, etc.

It's been a lot of fun. The construction work is very satisfying when you see the finished product. Plus, I had always wanted to learn how to solder copper pipes and I finally got a chance to do that. Now I know just about all I need to build a house from scratch. The only thing I haven't been able to help with is installing the ceramic tile. I've never done that before. I suppose if I ever do build a house from scratch, I'll have to avoid putting in tile.

The only downside to all this is it can be very tiring, so between this construction work, my day job, and karate at night, I've been feeling pretty worn out. I think missing meals hasn't helped either. I tend to get distracted when working on a project and sometimes won't remember to eat. The construction work is winding down, so I'll probably resume posting a bit more frequently here - and I'll hopefully be eating a bit more regularly.

Hitchhiker

I got in my car this morning and noticed there was some sort of bug on the inside of the windshield. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it was a baby praying mantis and it was eating a fly!



While I thought it was kind of cool that I had a praying mantis living in my car, I was initially wondering how the heck it got inside my car. Then I remembered I had been mowing a lawn a day earlier and the lawn mower was still in my car. (It's one of those spinning blade push-powered mowers that don't use any fuel other than human enegy, so there's no awful gas fumes.) Best I can figure, the praying mantis must have hitched a ride in the grass clippings that were stuck to the mower.

I was ok with the praying mantis hanging out in my car, up until I was on the highway and noticed the praying mantis started jumping around on the dashboard. I then realized it could move pretty fast when it wanted. Not that I was afraid of the thing - it's only about 1.5 cm in size and I could crush it like... well.. a bug. But crushing it was actually my main concern - I didn't want to lose track of where it was an accidentally squash it.

Fortunately, for my 1/2 hour drive in to work it kept to the dashboard area of my car. When I finally stopped the car at work and opened the door to get out, the praying mantis decided to hop out too - right into the door jam area patiently waiting to be squashed when I closed the door. So, I then had to find a piece of paper to shepherd the thing fully out of the car. I finally got it to climb on the paper and I dropped it off on some shrubs nearby. Hopefully it likes its new home.

Here's a picture to give you a sense of how small the thing was - note the car air vent on the right hand side of the picture.

Settling

No, the title doesn't refer to lowering one's standards - it refers to me finally settling in at my new condo. I still have a lot of unpacking and painting to do, but the bulk of the work is done.

When I first moved in but hadn't yet moved all my stuff from my old condo, I made the mistake of forgetting to bring my silverware. I had brought food, but had nothing to eat it with. Fortunately, there's a Stop & Shop just minutes down the street so I was able to pick up some needed utensils. I didn't want to buy a box of disposable plastic eating utensils (that would be wasteful!) so instead I found what I needed in the baby aisle:



Yes, they're tiny reusable little plastic forks and spoons. I figured they'll also be useful for hiking since they're so small. The only drawback of them is the spoons are so small I would only get a tiny amount of milk in the spoon when eating breakfast cereal. But it was definitely better than nothing and I wasn't about to drive 40 miles to my old condo late at night just to get some spoons and forks.

Here are a few pictures of the condo before I started painting - all the walls were initially white. Keep in mind the ceilings are about 15 feet high, although a lot of the pictures don't show it.

This is the kitchen.



This is the dining and living area (most of the dining area is out of view to the left of the pillar).



This is the entrance to the dojo room:



And this is the room that will be my dojo. The bed is no longer in this room - pretend it's not there.



In case your imagination isn't so good, here's another view with the bed gone.



This is the master bathroom. I get one sink for each hand! I find I tend to use the sink on the right most of the time.



Here are a few pictures of what the place now looks like painted.







And this last picture is not a picture I took, but is something I found on my camera. Apparantly while I was out there was some sort of Star Wars person sneaking around among the boxes in my condo and someone mysteriously caught a snapshot of him/her/it using my camera. Weird....

The great Internet time sink

Sometimes I think I'd be better off without Internet access. I figured I'd pop online for a minute to check my bank account to see if a check cleared. I have my web browser configured to give me a quick summary of news headlines as the default, so as soon as I opened up the laptop, I noticed some distracting headline in the news. A few minutes later (after reading the news article of interest) I'm staring at my computer trying to remember why I turned it on. I know there was a reason, but I can't remember it any more. Oh yes - my bank account. So I check my bank account and then remember one of my nieces had recently sent me an email with her blog address so I figured I'd read it to see what she's been up to. Well, it turns out her blog is on MySpace and is flagged as private, so if I want to read it I have to subscribe. So, I create a MySpace account (yes, I really didn't already have one) and spend ten minutes waiting for the confirmation email so I can use the account. Then I remember my nephew who is in the Army and is serving in Iraq right now also has a MySpace account. So I track him down and read his current take on life (not too cheerful) and discover through his list of friends that a whole bunch of my relatives also have MySpace accounts with tons of family photos and comments. It's like this whole other secret society I didn't even know about - I feel totally out of the loop. And I really get a chuckle out of viewing my MySpace profile when it currently says "You have 0 friends." Thanks for the words of encouragement MySpace!

So, the point of this ramble is my quick "pop online for a minute to check my bank account" turned into a two hour excursion.

Yeah, I know. I've got a monkey mind. I'm working on it... But it wasn't a total waste of time. I did learn a bit about my extended family.

Busy painting

Yes, I'm still alive. Sorry for the lack of content (for those of you who check in occasionally looking for something new). I'm all moved in to my new condo and the old place is officially sold and gone. I've now been spending just about all of my free time painting at my new place and at a friend's soon to be purchased condo. I've been painting so much now that when I go to sleep I dream about painting. And they're not even interesting painting dreams - just totally mundane dreams about painting a wall.

I'll try to put up some pictures of my new place soon.

Update from Iraq

I just received word that my nephew was involved in yet another road-side bomb incident in Iraq this past week. Fortunately he is ok. Unfortunately, a friend of his - Jerome Potter - was killed. You can read about the soldier here.

It seems every day I hear news about soldiers being killed in Iraq. The news is so frequent it's possible to let it just blend in with the expected normal day-to-day news chatter, failing to keep in perspective that each and every one of these losses of life represents a heart-breaking ripple for the families and friends of the departed.

Hopefully this war will end soon.

Poor planning

While packing up some boxes this morning, I glanced out the front window and saw this:


A swan has built a nest right outside my living room window! There are even a couple eggs already in the nest. It's a bit poor planning on the swans part. I know I'm moving away and all and they're eager to take advantage of the vacant space, but the spot they picked it a poor location. At high tide the whole area ends up underwater! I would have thought the swan would know that. I don't think the eggs are tolerant of the cold water, but I suppose the swans have more experience at this stuff than I. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Here's another view of the area (from my upstairs bedroom window). It's looking straight down on the area. The whole grass area usually ends up underwater at high tide - and it's a near full moon today, which means an even higher tide than normal. In this picture, the nest is on the left edge.

Moving

Tomorrow (Friday) at noon I have the closing on my new condo. I've been going a bit crazy the past few weeks trying to get things squared away, hence the lack of any new items here. The date seemed to come up fast, yet I didn't have the final confirmation on everything until a few days ago, so I was hesitant about doing too many things until I knew everything was a definite go. Now this week I had to schedule switching over the utilities and moving my Internet service. Because I had to wait so long before scheduling things, it looks like I'll be without Internet access at home for a few weeks. Apparantly no one else in the building has ever had DSL service before, so it'll take a while to get it set up. The current schedule from the local telephone company says it will be activated on May 17th.

Don't expect to see much new material here for a couple weeks.

Tying up loose ends

A couple years ago I started a project to convert an old arcade machine into a multi-arcade machine running MAME. Plenty of people have done this; there is even a book written about it. However, I wanted to try to take a unique approach to the project. Rather than try to duplicate the look of an arcade machine from the 1980's, I thought of trying to make something that might be what an arcade machine would look like were it built back in the age of steam powered machines of the 1880s. So, I bought a used arcade cabinet, gutted it, put a 27" TV inside along with a PC, built a custom control panel, and then covered the whole exterior with copper sheeting and brass screws.

The only problem was I never quite finished it. As I came to learn, cutting copper sheet metal, bending it into the proper shapes and drilling holes in it for the brass screws is a very time consuming process. So, while the project was about 90% complete, there were some tricky pieces of trim that I had just run out of motivation to work on - up until today. I figured I should finish off this project and today was a good day to do it. There are torrential rains, high winds, and it is just plain nasty outside. What better day to stay indoors and bend and cut pieces of metal?

So, after a few hours of work, I am happy to say the machine is now complete. Here are some pictures from this last phase of the project.

I used a cardboard template first as a proof of concept to make sure the folding of the metal was going to work properly.



The following are the tools I used. This first picture is of a simple tool for flattening and bending metal.



A dead-blow plastic hammer (filled with lead pellets) - useful for bending metal.



Metal snips - for cutting the copper sheeting.



An improvised vise (made of C-clamps, an L shaped strip of aluminum, and a pine board) for bending long lengths of copper.



Here you can see a piece of copper sheet bent into a C shape.



This is a close-up of one of the more tricky cuts and bends - it was an odd angled junction - kinda looks like a butterfly when flattened out. I like how it finally looks with the screws.



This is a simple strip of copper used to cover the seam where two larger sheets of copper met. The brass screws were meant to give it a rivet-look.



The next three pictures show the control panel. Ideally, I'd like to replace the colored buttons with black ones. The colored ones don't really fit the old steam-age theme. Originally, I wanted to use metal buttons - I even bought some metal drawer knobs to test out, but it didn't work out very well. The arcade buttons get really hammered on when people are playing games, so I felt it was best to stick with real arcade buttons designed to take the abuse.





The control panel has controls for four players and also includes a track ball, spinner, and flight-stick for mimicking various specialized arcade games' controls (such as those used in Discs of Tron).



In the upper left of this picture, it is just barely visible that there trim is missing on an edge. The two pictures that follow show the process of adding the trim.



First, the copper strip is bend into a C-shape and fitted in place. Then, I use a metal scorer for scratching a mark so I know where to cut the proper angle and made the bend.



This shows the piece now cut and bent into the proper shape and screwed in place with brass screws. Note how shiney and new the piece of trim is compared to the rest of the copper. This is because over two years have passed since I last worked on this project. Any copper that I handled previously has tarnished due the moisture from my hands reacting with the copper.



These last two pictures show the completed machine.