craaaaaaaaane!

I discovered a variety of things when I started machining, that mostly don't apply to woodworking, and one of them is that your tools and your raw materials are incredibly heavy. A 4' x 8' sheet of 3/4" plywood weighs an awkward 60-70 pounds. A steel plate of those dimensions is nearly 1,000 pounds, and you'd use it to bridge a trench in a high-traffic road.

I also learned that everything—except liquids, almost always—is a spring that compresses and expands, and will usually travel far more than the tolerance of even our little hobbyist engine lathes, which can usually hit 0.0005" if they're bolted down. (The lathe can. The machinist...?)

Setting aside all the variables, you're not far off to squint a little and expect that wood will change shape ("move") at least 0.016" (1/64") over the course of a year's humidity changes. A surprising (to me) number of wood joinery techniques are designed allow for this movement, and either hide it, or make it look pretty, but mere mortals won't find 1/64" a useful scale to work in. My skinniest, most fragile pencil, at 3mm, is 0.120". My pulse moves my entire body at least 1/64" with every heartbeat. I can't even make a mark that small.

In this world of "metal is heavy," I'm pushing 50, and in any case, trying to maneuver an unbalanced 100 lbs. lathe in a tiny space prevents me from using safe ergonomics. The tiny space of my cargo trailer also comes with a thin aluminum roof barely above my head, so there's no space for a lifter of any kind. I needed a crane.

So I had a bigger trailer built. I put some flooring down.

Then I built an overhead crane.

,

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.

a poem.

This day in 2012.

Oh, Southern California

Blasted, treeless wasteland

Bleached hair

Fake tans

At least

It's just a visit.

in which musicians look at me funny.

I went to Wintergrass last week, in Bellevue, WA, spitting distance from Seattle. My many, many, many trips to Sea-Tac Airport were mostly for work, with only so much free time and energy for going places. So I’d never been to Bellevue. I spent the whole time in the downtown office-buildings-and-hotels kind of area, so arguably I still haven’t been to Bellevue. I hope there’s more to it than that.

Wintergrass is, surprisingly enough, a (mostly) bluegrass-focused festival, in the winter. The days are full of workshops, and the afternoons and nights are full of concerts. I mostly went because the Internet told me Le Vent du Nord was performing, and also Genticorum. The Quebecois bands don’t come to this coast much—who can blame them?—and at this point I’ve met a couple handfuls of people likely to be there, so it seemed promising.

It was fun! It’s still depressing to be around such high-level groups and have such a hard time joining in, the same as at Fiddle Tunes in 2019; I found a beginners-friendly subgroup, and eventually realized I should have just been with them all week. I have some perception stuff that makes music extra challenging, and one of them is that I don’t have a strong working memory for audio, and I can have a hard time determining figuring out what note someone else is playing. For example, say I’m trying to suss out a tune a group is playing: I’ll have a hard time figuring out the starting note. I do okay after that, but also I can have a hard time hearing which pitch is higher or lower,  and also I have a hard time hearing or singing or playing octaves.

I noticed something as I would talk to people. I have 6 violins (I think), and my two favorites are the "actually quite nice but still made in China for a certain price point," and the "absolutely stunning, much more expensive handmade in the U.S. by a master of the craft," both 5-strings. I bought the Very Nice Violin through a guy in SF who I met at Fiddle Tunes 2019, who introduced me to various folks as "the guy who bought the Very Nice Violin." (I have #4 of that model, and I got to play #5, which seemed about the same, but I’d need them next to each other to know.)

Then I tell people that I brought the Picnic Violin, because the Very Nice Violin hasn’t left the house yet and I would just be anxious traveling with it. I love the Picnic Violin, but it’s a commodity instrument, easily replaced.

And then some people look at me oddly. I think so many of them are professional musicians, they had some difficulty understanding that I would not bring my favorite instrument to this week where I would be learning and sharing music. It’s their companion for expressing themselves. It’s not like mine isn’t, but one of its gifts has been to help me be a better player, so I can get a great sound out of the Picnic Violin, and use it to learn on.

(In the beginner-friendly subgroup, one of the coaches said I was getting a really good bluegrass tone out of it. I started to say "Yeah, I like—" and he said, "No, you’re getting a really good sound." I should probably have that embroidered and hung on the wall.)

It’s nice to be home, though. The Very Nice Violin just has…more, of whatever quality you’d imagine. Responsiveness, volume, depth, anything. It’s just…more.

I’ll leave the house with it someday. But not yet.

I CAN HELP

When I was a kid, and as I grew up, I thought a lot about what I'm really good at, and what I enjoy. As mentioned elsewhere, I've picked up a motley assortment of skills—a few I grew up with, but mostly it's been in my teens and beyond. What do I take to easily? What lights me up and gets me excited? What keeps me interested? How do those change over time?

My hobby, and my gift, is just "learning stuff." Which is weird. More typically, people find things to dig into, and keep digging—often decades, or a lifetime. Whenever I tell someone about machining, they say "What are you going to make?," which is a reasonable question, since most folks will pick up skills for a purpose.

I, on the other hand, get curious about how something is done, acquire a basic competency in it, and at some point I drift away and find something else. It's definitely an ADHD thing, same as how I'm always in the middle of a couple dozen books at a time, where I'll read a few pages before needing to switch books. This is a superpower, especially when combined with my other skills, and winning Brain Yahtzee with the high-intelligence genes that are visited, with the most absurd intensity, on both sides of my family tree.

(There are exceptions. I would be in my third decade of aikido, if my health had let me continue. I'm 7 years into the violin. For whatever it's worth, for those, I did have purposes in mind.)

One source of novelty has been the flow of musical instruments into and out of—mostly in—the household. I don't buy instruments on impulse; I spend a lot of time understanding what sound or experience I'm trying to get, and if I can't do it with the existing zoo of instruments. I do buy them regularly, but each one has had years of thinking and pondering behind it.

I love buying musical instruments so much, I get really excited about helping other people have instruments, whether buying one for them (Honor’s ukulele, my niece’s 7/8-scale violin) or pointing them in the right direction. Around here, my advice for acoustic instruments is "go to Gryphon and tell them what you need," since they’ve added lower price ranges over the past 15 years or so, as carefully-curated imports have gotten better, even as prices have been static-ish. There’s a lot of really amazing work coming out of China, South Korea, and Indonesia: Paul Reed Smith’s budget SE line, for example, started production in South Korea, but now they’re made in Indonesia and the improved quality is remarkable. Outfits like Fiddlershop or Acoustic Electric Strings work closely with the overseas import shops, checking out samples and making sure the output is up to snuff. And it’s humbling to discover that many parts of Asia have been making Western-origin instruments since before any of my late grandparents were born.

I love how accessible and downright good instruments are now. From a colonialism and globalization perspective…maybe not so great. But it enables people to make music, and that’s always worth feeling grateful for.

pfeh.

The job I wanted fell through last week: I assume they have a funding squeeze (real or imagined, probably passed down from the Board). It was a really good fit, too, in terms of shared principles, with lots of room to grow over time. But here we are, and no one will do any hiring until they sober up from New Year’s, so it’s a good time to bang on my various projects. One in particular, building a sort of rolling practice cabinet so I can have multiple violins out of their cases at once, feels ambitious but doable, since I can use the goodies down at the makerspace.

Of course, I was down there yesterday afternoon, failing to make a relatively simple jig to sharpen my chisels and plane irons. I think part of the secret sauce is to just buy actual wood and then build the thing, instead of trying to economize with scrap wood. And

It’s raining again, which is delightful in itself and sorely needed in general, but also we had a lot of epic flooding last year, areas of the city we didn’t know could flood: we were supposed to go to a friend’s house for dinner on New Year’s Eve—only a couple miles away, but as we watched the news and alerts, it became clear that even if we could get there, we wouldn’t be able to get back.

So maybe not all the rain at once.

PROJECTS

One of my pretty durable hobbies—I’m pretty sure I’ll keep doing it as long as my body holds out—is music, for which I have acquired a fine set of instruments and other tools. I have such good taste that the two instruments I’ve sold to my favorite music shop in Berkeley were immediately sold to the same guy—the first one while I was still in the store. Not particularly expensive taste, but very good, and I love buying instruments so much that I get really excited about helping other people buy instruments, because I only buy what I think I’ll play, and I (eventually) get rid of whatever I don’t.

But, with ADHD brain, I often want to use a bunch of instruments in sequence: guitars or mandolins or fiddles or whatever. Occasionally I have non-ADHD desires to hear how something will sound on a different fiddle, but mostly it’s ADHD. Similarly, getting things out of their cases takes up a lot of space and means I don’t play them as much; that, plus the fact they’re pretty, are why we have a house full of display cases. But for sitting down and playing, I want instruments right there, without taking up the square footage needed for all the cases. Just the guitar stand and music stand take up a ton of floor space.

…I can just build something. I’m all certified for the woodshop tools at the local makerspace. I’d used, and often owned, everything except the jointer, planer, and router. It had been a minute since I used a table saw, and they’re more hazardous than I remember—although they have a SawStop, an absolutely incredible safety innovation. Few things focus my attention like sharp objects, and the more dangerous, the greater the focus. They have a simple logic to them that makes for straightforward rules:

• It can’t cut anything it’s not touching.
• Edges can only cut along one axis.
• Blades attached to motors are more dangerous.

So you can roll out corollaries like:

• Keep everything about yourself as far away from the cutting action of the blade as you possibly can.

Anyway. I own a bunch of tools, and have access to a bunch more, and I can probably manage to knock together a stable, rolling furniture…thing. Cubbyholes to safely hold violins. Pegs or a flat drawer for bows. Sheet music storage. Some kind of music stand facility that is not a music stand.

This is a thing that has to be designed, so I went and measured the violins and viola. The 5-string I got over the summer is a beast: the older one is the same length and width (620mm x 220mm), but the height on the newer one is 120mm to the old one’s 90mm. It’s basically a small viola, which is of course why the C string is so delightful. I have a single regular 4-string violin, and it is absolutely adorably tiny by comparison.

I’m also working on a mute for 5-strings, since such a thing doesn’t exist. Not that it can’t be done, it’s just been waiting for someone who both plays 5-strings and also knows how to shape metal. Or me, at any rate. I made a dodgy mute years ago by taking two double-stacks of dime-sized magnets, assembled with gaffer’s tape, one on each side of the bridge, and the mass dampens the bridge vibrations. It’s not great to mess around with your bridge if you don’t have to, though, and it’s just so…inelegant. "Crufty," we would say in software development. Sure, it works, but it’s far from the best idea and not exactly something you want to put your name on.

This is my favorite mass-damper design:

Besides the charming wood camouflage, it’s identical halves, bolted together. There are a few ways to go about fabricating it, but probably roughing it out on the bandsaw is fastest, drill the holes, then cut the fingers with a mill. I have a 4"x4" brick of aluminum that’s just been waiting for a project, and I can prototype in aluminum with my tools at home, even as neglected and unaligned as they are.

Whenever I get motivated to learn 3D modeling, I can share the design out and people can finally make their own…

turns out I love my work.

I’ve been interviewing with a couple companies, which I’ve actually enjoyed! They’ve asked good questions, like "How did you get started in management?", to which the answer is "Let me tell you about college a cappella groups…". This past year has let me make my story coherent enough that I can plausibly talk about my life before Computer Science 101, which itself happened where the Internet was so far along that there were a whole six (6) of we avant-garde who had websites.

I do love working with computers, and I’m an excellent software engineer. I just love working with people more, and I’m better at it. Software development is an utterly human endeavor, and it depends entirely on we squishy, analog humans communicating. We exist as systems on so many levels: cultures, communities, guilds, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, ecosystems, microbiomes, tissue cells. Workplaces, chat rooms, housemates, marriages, friendships, families, minds.

I can see those systems, and I can help people be awesome. And, as a role, being in management makes sense to me, which is not always the case.

I hired an engineer onto a very specifically particular team, but the team and the organization were involved in some slogging work, and they quite rightly brought this up in a 1-1 after a couple months.

"I feel like there are decisions being made where I can’t see them, in meetings I’m not invited to. Am I being paranoid?"

 "No, you are absolutely correct, we have these meetings about The Project, and we can read you into it if you want, but they are meetings which have made both me and Matt visibly angry."

[Matt is justifiably legendary for his patience and kindness, and while I’m no slouch in the patience-and-kindness department, it is known that me getting visibly angry takes a lot.]

"Oh. Shit. Okay. Never mind."

Patrick Rothfuss’s masterwork The Wise Man’s Fear gets its title from a saying in that world:

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."

Managers can be extremely non-creative, partly because they don’t know what else to be, but also because there’s a sad mode of management where the job is being a "bullshit umbrella," protecting teams from the rest of the company. At large companies this is most commonly all you’re allowed to do, unless you also enjoy throwing elbows in institutional—let’s say bureaucratic—politics (which some people do). But it’s so much more fun to treat it like a collaboration with the engineers, because the two jobs are radically different: woe be unto ye whose only way to promote an engineer is to make them a manager.

So, sure, see what I did there? I’m not hiding anything, and I’ll be as transparent as I can, but no one with good sense wants to deal with work which is not their job, which is making multiple gentle men angry.

smaller world than I thought.

I got to hang out a bit with a local fiddler, who’s selling a Very Nice Violin and dropped it at the house for me to try overnight. This kind of loan is common with orchestral strings and bows, often up to a few weeks, because tradition aside, you need to hear the instrument in the places and contexts you would be playing it. Plus, no one wants to (or can) deal with payments and refunds even for $10,000, let alone $100,000 and up. People will take photocopy your driver’s license, and maybe sign a receipt, but overall an honor system that goes bad relatively rarely, all things considered.

This Very Nice Violin was a 2010 and actually just been refitted by an extraordinarily gifted and energetic luthier who manages to be at every folk music-related event in North America, living in San Francisco or Nashville in between. That luthier knows me, so we had that point of connection.

We got to talking about what music I play, so Swedish/Scandi music came up, and I pointed him to Timbre Folk & Baroque as the only place in driving distance to try and buy Scandi instruments. I mentioned this guy down in L.A., who’s a lawyer, but also a pro-quality musician, who’s already been down this kind of Scandi music rabbit hole, and the seller and I took a minute to come up with his name, as the seller said "I should know this, he’s dating my friend L—…".

(I met them both when I was in Bellingham last year, as they turned out to be staying above the cat-free Airbnb I rented to replace the cat-inhabited one. They’re very nice, and fabulous musicians together.)

So then we were talking about the nyckelharpa.

"A friend of mine is moving to Sweden to study it!"

"Amy H—?"

"Yeah!"

I would be stunned if Amy remembered me, because we met at the Fiddle Tunes festival before the pandemic, where she was one of the instructors. The owner of Timbre Folk—who seems to know every professional player of Swedish music that has passed through the Bay Area in the past thirty years—called her "Probably the best nyckelharpa player on this side of the ocean."

(I passed on the Very Nice Violin. Just not the one for me.)

On the one hand, I wish so many people could make a living playing music that it was a crowd of strangers.

On the other hand…this is what community looks like.

that new-violin smell.

Seriously, though, I can still smell the varnish. I think it was finished a week or two before I picked it up.

When learning to ride a motorcycle, one cognitive challenge we have is the genuinely alarming angles we have to tilt over in a curve. It’s freaky, and 100% necessary.

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Motorcycle tires are an amazing technology, and the truth is that on pure dry pavement, and often wet as well, tires will grip really well at extreme angles. That’s why motorcycle tires have a round profile, instead of a car’s square profile.

So we tell each other: go ahead and lean the bike. The tires are better than you are.

This violin is better than me. I learn just by playing it. It has more dynamic range (quiet/loud), more depth of sound, crystal-clear high notes, a much more powerful (i.e. viola-like) C string. I know it makes me a better violinist because when I go back to any of my factory violins, I play them better as well.

It’s just very nice, and I love it.

another addition to the zoo.

Today is the 6-year(!) anniversary of picking up the violin! I thought it was 7, but my teacher points out he forgets, on account of the, uh…I dunno. 30-35 years of making music before that? The trumpet was a loss because I had braces and a developing case of PTSD from school, but I learned to read music, and when I went to boarding school I took guitar lessons and started singing. I still play guitar a lot. I don’t know how much I’ve improved over the years, but it’s my mother instrument. Piano would have ultimately been more useful, though it would have required a special education teacher to help me make sense of piano scores.

(I have trouble distinguishing details in a bunch of identical straight lines, which makes music an adventure, and piano scores just make my brain shut down.)

I’m buying a Nice Violin™: a 5-string by a guy who has mastered his craft and loves experimenting. He’s been collaborating with a fiddler/luthier who knows 5-strings inside and out and has been coaching the maker on what the sound and playability should be. The maker takes that back to his shop and just does his thing to make it sound like that. This is his fourth 5-string, so "#4" for short.

(I visited him over the summer: we thought we’d combine that with visiting Honor’s cousin in the same town. The cousin said "Oh, yeah! He’s a couple doors down, I helped him move his fridge." It cut down some travel time.)

It turns out I saw this one "in the white" in his workshop, unvarnished; he didn’t have it strung up, so I didn’t play it, but I did get to hold it up alongside the Dahlia (the model name for my current violin I’ve played for three years now). I’ll take pictures, but it’s a little silly how different they are.

I’m keeping the Dahlia, because while it’s an uncommonly good factory-built violin from China, if I take it out to a bar or whatever and it goes missing, that will be sad,  but it is replaceable. As is the bow I (will continue to) use, which is carbon fiber. The Dahlia also has a really, really good piezoelectric pickup in it, which is a handy thing to have around. Also I like playing it and it looks cool.

#4 deserves a name, and to tell the truth, the Dahlia might also. We’ll see what #4 tells me, beyond "you have a lot of practicing to do."

surprise!

I got occasional arcane updates about the progress of J’s birth certificate: an email from Juvenile Court saying they sent a form to the state, a letter from the state saying they did their thing and handed it off to the next state, and then finally a letter saying the birth records have been updated! Awesome, that was like 2-3 months, instead of the year the Court told us it would take.

I ordered 3 copies of the new birth certificate, and they’re gorgeous: too: all I had growing up was notarized copies, but no, this is full color, on heavy paper. And they listed me as the father!

In an unexpected twist, the mother was "Not Stated."

The city clerk said, "It was the natural mother blank? Yeah, I think I know what happened. We have this new system for entering adoptions…". She sent replacements, and an envelope to send the bad ones back—practices you want to see in a city clerk—and now it’s all official, with both parents and everything!

So the preparations to send him off to college now also include changing his name, which would be a lot easier if we had gotten him a state ID with his deadname, but it’s his deadname, so we sort of didn’t want to, and also didn’t get around to it. Now we change the Social Security number so it matches the birth certificate, then comes the state ID, and after that pretty much everything is easy.

It’s a nice feeling. All three of us have worked really hard for this. It’s good.

self-revision.

At the end of the day, who we are is a story. We tell it to the world, to tell it how to treat us. (Whether it listens or not.) We tell it to ourselves, to remember who we were yesterday, and who we want to be tomorrow. Our sense of self is a little like cooking: no amount of skill can make up for crappy ingredients. I make a killer salt-crusted roast chicken, but not if the chicken was bought several days past due from Grocery Outlet.

Growing up, I was the nerdy, book-absorbed kid, and Tim and Ben were so profoundly gifted with their bodies, that I always felt like I was also the awkward, uncoordinated one. In the team sports that were prioritized, that was absolutely true. I was, and remain, mostly rubbish at baseball, basketball, and soccer. I’m sure I would have sucked at football. I was dropped into a gymnastics class that was unable to help me. Martial arts were off the table, because that was fighting. (Or something. It’s complicated, and I'm not 100% sure what the problem was. My life would have unfolded differently, for sure.)

It emerged that I was pretty good at tennis. In the violent, traumatic time of 7th and 8th grades, I carved out some space for myself by being good at the ersatz handball played between the two classroom buildings. (We used a racquetball and no gloves, so you needed a baseline pain tolerance.) My boarding school requires you to do some sort of sporty thing every term, so I did tennis, volleyball, softball, soccer, and weights. I was still good at tennis, and I turned out to be quite good at volleyball. (Softball and soccer were still a bit of a waste, but with nobody pretending the game is anything more than a curriculum requirement, who cares?)

For some reason, I joined the swim team as a diver. I wish I remembered why. It was appalling. Incredibly anxiety-provoking. When you dive, failure is painful. I was bad at it. Senior year, a kid broke his ankle, and I was on the varsity team. I did really poorly. I hit my head on the board at an away meet. Clearly I was gawky and uncoordinated.

Except...I'm not, actually. Even before aikido got me inhabiting my body properly, I was naturally good at a whole bunch of stuff:

• tennis
• racquetball
• handball
• volleyball
• sharp objects
• hitting people with sticks
• climbing
• not falling down cliffs

Ben and I used to have these crappy dart launchers, the kind of rubber suction-cup darts that often don't quite fit and are never really straight, and even if they were, they have the aerodynamics of a handful of wet sand. I was pretty consistently able to hit the outside of Ben's ear, from 15 feet away. I knew how the launcher worked, I knew how the shape of the dart affected its flight. Straightforward enough, but my therapist assures me it's atypical, as is being able to grab an insect out of the air. (Even if all I can do is crush it. Not flies, but mosquitos, gnats, and moths.)

Remember that time I made friends by flawlessly throwing a hatchet? I had literally never thrown a hatchet before.

(It's vastly easier and safer than throwing knives, which is why people have been opening axe-throwing franchises for parties, not knife-throwing. I think the difference is in how closely a hatchet's mass is concentrated around its axis of rotation, meaning the blade is not going as fast as a knife blade does. The mass's inertia keeps it in alignment in flight. And, finally, the blade is heavier and has a lot more energy behind it, which knives don't, which is why just getting knives to stick in a target—never mind hitting what you were aiming at—is an achievement.)

So it's not that I didn't get my share of the sporty genes, as though to compensate for getting more than my share of the bookish genes; it's just that, as happens, my growth was asymmetrical, and it took a long time to find the body stuff I'm good at. Oddly, this excludes dancing, which is so hard for me it's not fun at all. Same with video games.

And now I can read and play viola music, leaving me no wiggle room to doubt that I am, inter alia, a viola player. One of the violin challenges is knowing—feeling—where the notes are on the fingerboard.

One of the viola challenges is that the notes are in a different place from the violin.

Guess who doesn’t have a ton of trouble playing in tune on a viola.

maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…