Tiny Shop almost done!!

Like most of us, I've never built a living or working space from the bottom up, but 6-7 months later (in line with the estimate), Tiny Shop is nearing delivery! All the decisions have been a pain. Do I have them paint it? Is that a good price? I'm certainly not going to paint it. Turns out all I want to do is insulation and flooring.

Figuring out the physical thing, a tiny house on a hefty trailer, highlights how absurd Micro Shop is. The built-in full-length workbench—taking up 40% of the interior width, and a permanent installation—might be made workable if the space had any height, which it doesn't. Not only can I not turn around without knocking stuff onto the floor, but I have instruments and machine tools and measuring stuff, and I can't go up on the storage, because the roof is right there, a few inches above my head.

Countless problems solved by an open space of 8 feet instead of 3 feet.

I also happened across a local liquidation auction that had a bigger lathe. It's more important that I upgrade the mill first, so I was going to do that, but then this is the lathe I would eventually want to upgrade to anyway, but at a 25-40% discount, with all the trimmings. It comes on its own stand, and also in the auction were a couple of heavy rolling workbenches, which is also great because I've had no clear sense of what exactly I would put any of my tools on.

So I've been learning a lot about flooring, even though I can't (if I understand right) make many choices until I know the height from the subfloor to the sill. And for 104 square feet, everything I'd choose is more or less the same price. (I don't want a floor harder than the tools and workpieces I'm guaranteed to be dropping, so the Tuscan marble will have to wait for another project.)

I'd been trying to avoid it, but I have to buy a shop crane—a small hydraulic thing on wheels, usually used for pulling engines and such. I'd hoped my overhead X-Y crane would make it unnecessary, but I actually have a ton of stuff to move around that is too awkward and heavy to be lifting much. This became a serious problem because I have a storage unit to hold the new lathe and tables, and I'm actually going to stick Micro Shop in it, and there's going to be a lot of moving heavy things.

Such a long project. Imagine, being able to do projects inside!

at least the kid's okay.

Amidst everything else, the Increasingly Mislabeled Boy (he's been bigger than me for several years now) is flourishing. He had some understandable difficulty focusing on his Government class: he's interested in law school, but there are obvious questions about how relevant the rule of law will be in a decade.

We get to witness him through the eyes of the program staff, who have loved him since Day 1, because he's a deeply caring and wonderful person, and he's also hilarious. His comic timing, when he was...maybe 7 or 8?

One evening the three of us were in a car waiting for some friends, and we started a poorly-defined game that involved throwing a purple Nerf ball at each other.

J starts saying "Quack" over and over, waiting for the audience (us) to notice.

"What are you doing?"

With as much glee as I've ever seen on a child: "Oh, I'm just ducking!".

He is probably the world's foremost expert on an emerging genre known as Bad Fan-Fiction. This is fanfic written in some form of terrible prose, as the name suggests, but with multiple layers of parody and social commentary woven throughout. Among other patterns, it expands the Unreliable Narrator to include the Unreliable Author, who might be throwing their beliefs on the page, or mock said beliefs by pretending to believe them. There are many, many master's theses to be had down this road: it's marinated in and encompasses every meta-referential fourth-wall break in Western literature. Dante's Virgil is an unabashed author insert. Don Quixote moves through a merciless dual reality, his mind having been destroyed by too much chivalric literature. Miguel de Unamuno's Niebla, Pirandello's Six Characters In Search of an Author, Waiting For Godot, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Being There, Forrest Gump, The Truman Show, on and on and on.

His infectious enthusiasm for this thing, which nobody's ever heard of, is absolutely off the charts.

He had a stereotypically somber German anesthesiologist for his tonsillectomy—somber and focused is a great feature in an anesthesiologist—who we met while he was mostly already asleep. We did our waiting thing, and when they wheeled him in, she had this wondering grin on her face, and said "He was telling me about this 'bad fanfiction'...?". 

We're at that stage where the grown kid spends most of the year away from home, and we get minimal visibility into his interactions and relationships. We still can't get over the fact that he was "chatting" with college fair people.

Or any people.

Ever.

I want to see it so bad.

well, this is...horrible.

I started the process of getting us a residence visa in Europe, just so there's one other country we can go call home if we need to. Now is the time to do it, before the rise of fascism and the escalating refugee crises have countries locking their immigration down.

Are we going to permanently relocate to Europe? Hopefully not, but it's not been a great decade for hope. Obviously, we'd far rather go to Canada, but Canada (understandably) makes it a much, much bigger commitment and risk. J feels the need to have an exit strategy, but has no context or experience to understand what it really means to live abroad, especially if you're crossing an ocean to a place that doesn't speak English.

Despite seeing the need, I've held off doing this, irrationally hoping events would save me all the paperwork and expense and logistical nightmares. The impartial analysis part of my brain just keeps saying "told you so."

I've never really been tempted to renounce U.S. citizenship: it's a dramatic step with a lot of knock-on effects, and I'm neither wealthy nor mercenary enough to do it for tax reasons, and then just fuck off to my 5-bedroom pied-à-terre in Zurich. We've been having a very privileged life in an even more privileged country, and life is difficult enough without voluntarily making it that much harder out of some blend of principle and spite. We live more or less sustainably in a place with nice people, and good food, and world-class medical care a few miles away. Our water situation is just waiting to snap back into our face, but the most we can really do about it is to move to a state with a proper rain cycle.

But if the U.S. unambiguously voted for a fascist who is not only deporting permanent residents—better to say "permanent" at this point—to a slave gulag in another country, and is deporting citizens born here...what's the point of citizenship that doesn't offer the most basic protection of "you are allowed to live here"?

(I'm glossing over the full panoply of evil shit going on. It's so, so, so much worse than it looks.)

 So, I dunno. It's Plan B. We don't want to leave and start over. But it's not looking great.

*twitch*

I've been feeling a lot of overwhelm and anxiety, which are at once entirely reasonable responses to the past two months, and also thoroughly unhelpful, but mindfulness and meditation only get you so far. We all have our limits. I've been watching too much TV, and playing my music, and working on the design of the new shop, which I have christened "Tiny Shop," retroactively naming the current one "Micro Shop."

I'm not really good with houses—Honor is our "can-do" repair person, energy permitting—partly because I'm not very good at it, and practice doesn't seem to help much. Much like my difficulties in distinguishing plants, or remembering math proofs, it's just a thin area in the wide tapestry of my aptitudes. With Tiny Shop, so far I'm not feeling anxious, partly because there are a billion scarier things to be anxious about, but also there's nothing hidden, no crevices for rats to be or tools to get lost. There's nothing fancy or aesthetic: as much as possible, I want it to be like the under-supervised fire-hazard barn theater we had in high school. Exposed wood everywhere, and none of it precious. Need to hang a thing? Drill a hole? Connect a whatever? Have at it. All you need is a dream and a drill.

One of the worst things about Micro Shop has been the difficulty of moving things around. I have small machine tools, but they still weigh about 150 lbs, and the processes of getting them aligned and mounted—technically the mill isn't and won't be "mounted," it's just been unnecessary—have involved doing things like jamming a hand into the very small clearance under the 90 lbs motor-end of the lathe, and lifting it by curling my fingers. It doesn't have safe prying possibilities. I have wanted a crane the entire time I have had Micro Shop, and because the roof is only 33" above the (built-in, unchangeable bench), I'm not sure what would work, if anything: things like pulleys and material slack take up precious vertical space. That's just for lifting; to actually move horizontally is a bunch more gear and vertical space.

My dream, my rules. I get a crane. Turns out, for home-workshop loads you can buy some basic hardware and make an overhead X-Y crane that will cover almost the entire space. I have 13 feet of vertical space to work with. Being as all the cheap parts are from China, I've been balancing the desire to get them while they're still cheap, against the fact that it all takes up storage space I don't have.

Man. Picking windows. How many? Where do they go? I'm glad it's not getting plumbing and other stuff you need in a living space.

I am very excited. What a magnificent distraction from...all of this other stuff.

it's been a minute.

Does anyone read this? I haven't checked. Apparently I haven't written here since July? I've been trying to write in areas I can share more widely with strangers: I have a hundred different ideas for a work blog, that I've been accumulating all this time.

It's been an eventful year. I traveled so, so much. I thought it had been 5 trips, but then I counted and it was 7:

1. Washington for Wintergrass in February.
2. Oregon in June, to get J moved out of his dorm room.
3. Washington again, in July, for Fiddle Tunes.
4. Oregon in September, to get J moved in.
5. Minnesota, to see Mom & Dad & Ben.
6. Oregon in November, to visit J.
7. Minnesota in November, since Dad died.

Getting J moved out and in was pretty chill: he's quite capable, and just needed someone to drive a car who had also ever packed a dorm room in and out. We would do some work and hang out a bit, maybe have burgers, then call it a day and return to our respective introvert-caves.

We get regular reports from his program staff, and of course he's charming everyone, because he's quite charming. Recently they said he was at the community college and "chatted with some student guides," which is mind-blowing because we have never seen nor heard of him doing anything you could call "chatting."

We miss having him around, but we also know how important it is to experience who you are when away from your parents. We're many things as parents—safety, support, crutch, irritation, inconvenience—but as he slides into adulthood, we're a sort of noise that's hard to filter out. We don't say things like "we're not going to be around forever, you have to learn to fend for yourself," which is not a stellar concept to parent with, but for a dozen reasons is especially problematic with neurodiverse kids.

(We're legendary among the staff for being low-maintenance: we showed up for the interview using the same language, and having the same stuffed animals, as the program does. We don't freak out—which is a gift to our financial advisor, as well—and we raised J with a constant interest in his own voice and experience of the world. The program devotes a lot of energy to teaching parents about their kid's needs and struggles that they're not quite tuned into. With us, we swap parenting tips.)

I've been increasingly annoyed with my workshop, which is a 6' x12' enclosed cargo trailer that the previous owner tricked out for taking to racetrack days as a vendor. It's got a 24" bench running all on one side, incredibly well-built. But it's also unchangeable, and leaves me no more than 3' of space to turn around. In practice, I'm constantly losing stuff, and knocking things off hooks and piles every time I turn around. It's also got no ventilation, and climate control is a problem, certainly because it's often unpleasant to work in, but also if the temperature isn't controlled to be high enough to absorb the moisture in the air, the water will condense onto the vast number of ferrous surfaces out there, and create "flash rust," which isn't always harmful if you catch it, but it is always irritating.

I started enumerating things I wanted to do with the shop, like insulate it somehow, and get some kind of HVAC going, and maybe a port so the vacuum cleaner can stay outside, on and on, and suddenly I realized that what I actually want is a building. From our previous Planning Department adventures, we know we can't have a building, but: they make buildings on wheels now: tiny homes!

As much as there are many many (many) ordinances for structures on foundations, there are almost none for things on wheels or otherwise not permanently fixed to the ground, as long as they're 120 ft² or less. Thus my cargo trailer (72 ft²), Honor's studio retreat (about the same), or our shed (120ft² and sitting on the new concrete pad where the Terrible Garage was) are all exempt, as will be my new shop (119 ft² externally).

I'm very excited, and I'll have to show why in a later post. Unfortunately, I realized that because it's a building...it's going to take forever. Le sigh.

Fiddle Tunes

I finally went back to the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes! I went way back in 2019, and then didn’t, obviously. This time I rented a car and drove myself, which guaranteed that I had a ride—a problem I had last time—but I didn’t properly account for traffic. Much like the Bay Area, a trip I’d counted 2.5 hours for wound up more like 4.5. Unlike the Bay Area, I really love the landscape.

Not that the Pacific Northwest is monolithic, even if you stay west of the Cascades and the moisture it traps there. Port Townsend lies in the Olympic Rain Shadow, a term surely coined by real estate agents, but despite that, actually true.

When I worked for Chef, I had a lot of trips to Seattle, and over the years I’ve heard two kinds of Seattle residents (past, present, or future):

1. "It is so gray and rainy, it drives me nuts, especially the long winter nights."
2. "The weather here is actually fine, but don’t tell anyone, because then they’ll move here."

I’ve been to Seattle at all times of year, essentially randomly scattered through the seasons, and I gotta say, it does indeed seem fine. It rains sometimes. It’s overcast sometimes. It’s sunny sometimes. It’s hot sometimes. And the coffee is truly outstanding.

Playing the violin is a very emotionally fraught thing for me, and my brain has not yet found a way to learn tunes and still remember them the next day. I think next year’s solution is to bring a guitar, an instrument I’ve played for 30 years, and if I’m not amazing at it, I also know I can sit in a group and I don’t have to think about where B-minor is.

(Yes, I have a travel guitar in mind, which I do not yet own. This is me we’re talking about: I love shopping for instruments so much, I love helping other people shop for instruments. Once I think "guitar that’s pleasant to play, takes up little space, and likely to survive being checked baggage," there’s only one answer.)

I made it be more of a vacation: I had a really nice Airbnb to hang out in, and I got to see Rachel and Darren for the first time since 2019. I slept a lot. I made a friend or two. It was a good week, just…weird, because things are weird. The world is weird. This was a sort of normal thing to do. Which was weird.

Fort Worden is an incredible place to be; I feel like if I lived in town I would be spending a certain amount of time there. It’s one of three Army bases built to protect the opening to Puget Sound, but then we and our enemies all invented military aircraft, and suddenly the fort’s intended function was irrelevant. Eventually it was shuttered and then taken up as an arts center.

And, hey, if you’ve got a spare hangar for observation balloons, you can turn it into a concert hall, and have the giant doors open one side of the stage to the outside.

And, finally, the tides are like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I have never even heard of that sort of mini-tide. It’s weird.

I will enjoy visiting again.

making stuff.

I have just about the tiniest milling machine you can find that will (if you ask nicely) cut the more tractable varieties of steel (slowly). It’s not my first choice, but it was definitely the only one that would fit on my bench: from the benchtop to the roof is 33", and almost all bench-top mills are 36"-39". I do see a more powerful one that claims to be 29", but I haven’t yet exhausted this one, and now I also have access to the grown-up machine tools at the makerspace. I have quite a lot of tooling for it, but a lot of it will transfer to a next mill. And the tooling for the next mill will be much more common.

The next mill is not really on the horizon, budget-wise, but how much do I want to sink into this micro-mill that is discontinued? How can I make it usable for me and my brain, in the most economical way?

Machining is fascinating in its unending yak shaving, constantly executing projects for the machines themselves, which compete with actually making something you wanted to make. After many iterations and failures, I finally made a coupler so I can power the mill head up and down, instead of using the handwheel located behind the machine, which means it’s slightly above my head, and reaching a couple feet over the counter. I’m glad it’s done, because I’ve been avoiding using the thing, not wanting a workout cranking the head just to change tools.

Occasionally I remember that this may have started out with a desire to make some finished products! A mute for 5-string violins, for example. And…probably other stuff. I have a list someplace.

One quirk of working with metal is that you also end up woodworking, because we don’t usually want all-metal handles or storage or whatever. So I’ve been making a couple very large wooden drawers to get the shop the sort of tiny-home organization it needs. I’ve never built any kind of box before, but I designed something that’s definitely Good Enough™. I discovered giant drawers aren’t actually the right solution, but I already cut the parts for the second one, and I’m already annoyed at how much time it’s taking, so for the moment I have giant drawers. Which is fine. I put things in them and *poof* they don’t get brass chips on them. (Brass is easy to work, but makes tiny chips that fly some distance if not controlled.)

I do like learning things.