July 7th, 2006
been busy…
Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated. To recap, here’s the events as of late:
Home Roasting
I recently discovered the joys of roasting your own coffee. I use a hot air popcorn popper and in five mintues I’ve got the best cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted – except for the time I under-roasted. Yuck! I’m just waiting on getting some more green beans so I can roast again. Fortunately, the Roasterie in KC has a bunch at a good price.
Vacation and Fireworks
I finally took some vacation in preparation for my fourth of July extravaganza. It was mostly fun. I spent way too much time building racks for my mortars. However, this is time I won’t have to spend next year because they’re good for years to come. All in all I made 4 15 shot angled racks. I’ll have some photos on flickr soon. I also shored up the deck that was about to fall off the side of our place. It was pretty scary. I don’t know who designed it, but they didn’t do a good job. I just wish I had the bucks to re-do it. Eventually I’ll do a large screened in poorch. Maybe in ten years.
The rest of my vacation was spent waiting on parts to arrive from Futurlec. Apparently one item was on back order and no one decided to e-mail me about the delay, so I got parts on July 3. There wasn’t enough time to spend on my firing system so I’ll have to complete it this summer. Yes I was bummed, but overall the hand fired show was awesome. All the neighbors seemed to really enjoy it. I’d like to think I established some sort of reputation around the area ;)
I did make a sketchy stickymatch machine but I already want to re-do it. It’s too messy and requires a little more work to get it to work, but at least I was able to stickymatch my fireworks. One nice thing about stickymatch is when you sandwhich 2 sets of 10′ long firework strings together and they both go off at once it makes one hell of a rush. I’m only sad I don’t have a video decoder card to upload it.
I learned my friend Don who was scheduled to shoot the Independence, KS fireworks show was in an accident. I don’t know what happended but news crews are reporting $11,000 of fireworks gone up in smoke as a result. One of the 4″ shells apparently went off unexpectidly. Fortunately, no one was hurt, so I look forward to getting together in November.
Company
Katie came down (or up rather) from Dodge City, where it must smell like cows all the time according to her. It was nice having someone around for Laura to hang out with becuase I was rather kept up with all the stuff I wanted to do for the big day.
In Conclusion
Overall, it’s been a nice month since I’ve last updated the site. I’m done with school for the summer so I look forward to slowly spending some time on the website. We’ll see.
July 16th, 2006
Sarah Says :
Fireworks show was WAY more that awesome! It really was great!