On Friday, the work in the garage was doing maintenance for my pencil empire,
as well as further refining the systems for running that empire.
First, I started on making a new box to start store the overflow of
full-length pencils I am able to collect at school. Now that I have started
looking more systematically, I just find it amazing how many basically new
pencils I find, and I seem to be able to collect them, whether in the
hallways or the recess areas, every day. The cup of the long-defunct
Houston Oilers just can't store all of them any more.
I have learned how to efficiently make boxes out of cardboard of essentially
arbitrary size. Each time I need a new sized box, I make a template that
is a small cross to cover the 5 sides I want to enclose. I then make small
cardboard L brackets to strengthen the sides. I have found that
I checked in on the gift I gave of stubs of pencil glued into thick dowel.
It turned out that those pencil have been getting good use. . . so good
that several were worn down, with a few of the stubs some how out of the
hole drilled for them. Those were actually the easier ones for me to work
on, as I had other stubs ready and it was a simple matter of glue,
placement tight in to get some "squeeze out" and then clean up.
As I (wrote before), there is an optimal size of pencil I want for my shop.
It is shorter than the full sized ones, but large enough to fit in my hand.
I figured it time to organize the process, so I started work on another
holder for pencils for the shop, one that would lay the pencils flat and
stack them. For this I am mixing materials, which cardboard at the bottom
and the sides made of strips made out particle board which I had tried to
stack up to form the sides of a different project. It had to be glued up
in steps, so the with the first bit clamped up, I was done for the night.
On Saturday, my wife and I went out to a place that would let us stay and
work after we ate. I didn't particularly feel like working on my book
project, but that is precisely why I needed to make myself do some on it.
I have found, and I'm sure many others feel the same way, that the more
times I don't start on a step that offers *some* resistance, the
resistance grows stronger and stronger.
So I am doing steps, words are being written. I'm taking pressure off
myself, shooing off commitments to deliver any of it on specific date. And
the hardest person to avoid committing to is myself.
I am almost perversely see how little I can do while still feeling like I've
added to the project. But I have the self-knowledge to say this is
probably the best way to get myself to pick back up the project soon.
I remember musing that I would do my writing on the Mac provided by work,
since it did have a bash terminal and everything, but in the end I am
choosing to do the writing here on my newly converted Linux box. Partly it
is wanted to play with my new toy, but I would like to flatter myself with
thinking it is more about ease of getting the text onto the eventual home
at the super-dimensional fortress nested in directories for gopher.
But again, no promises as to when the pages will be ready. It is all about
the process for now.
===
I love to hear from people. My email is the handle minus "net" (so, a work by
Voltaire that starts with "c"), at sdf.org.
While we're adding boiler plate: this work is hereby in the public domain. Do
what you want with it.