Walls

So after planning and buying materials, I cleaned out the corner so we could start putting the walls up.

I didn't really plan that part too well, though, as there wasn't a lot of room left to swing a hammer. We had to get creative at times, lifting the walls up to pound nails in at an angle.

The back wall was in place and the front wall was coming together.

When the front wall went up I realized we were going to have more problems later with Grimlock, my vintage 1979 PDP-11/44 mini-computer, right in front of the door. I hate moving that thing around. It weighs a ton.

Planning

The first step in building my new lab was modeling how I was going to arrange my Ikea shelving to provide a decent working space while maximizing storage areas.

I got the idea to build this model from my Dad who used to make these really cool paper models of houses he was building. Once he built a cardboard house for this Wile E. Coyote figure I had which I thought was totally awesome. That inspired me to make many cardboard spaceships as I was growing up. Some of them got pretty elaborate, with lasers made from battery powered light bulbs, missile tubes that shot small card-stock paper airplanes using elastic bands, computers with paper slides to change the display, and other more-or-less functional parts.

I was hoping this might inspire more creativity in Donnie, but it also gave me the opportunity to show him some math, including the Pythagorean Theorem, squares and roots, and working with scales (the model was scaled to match his Nick Bluetooth figure).

Building a Computer Lab / Evil Lair

Donnie Darko wanted his own bedroom, mostly to have a place to keep his own stuff. So I was evicted from my nice upstairs office. There was one corner of the basement where I'd been storing my computer equipment, and I decided it was time to turn it into a proper lab.

My main workstation would stay in a corner of the den upstairs so I could still pretend to be a part of the family.

Geocaching at McKinnons Flats

It's a beautiful, warm day to be geocaching at McKinnons Flats, a Watchable Wildlife site on the Bow River, southeast of Calgary.

The only wildlife we saw was Calvin, though.

(original posts)