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Gettin' Round

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      simple humor

      December 28th, 2006 by mike d. in Quickthoughts, Humor

      A penalty shot.

      A penalty shot.

      Authored by: mike d.

      Cooking and climbing

      December 28th, 2006 by mike d. in climbing

      currently eating: ham

      Even after a huge feast of pulled pork earlier this week, I decided to make a ham last night. It came out great! 10 pounds of delicious delicious ham.

      Now we have all sorts of leftover ham. And I’m excited to say that I’ll finally be able to dive into my new Asian cookbook. Tonight I’m going to pick up a few scallions from the food store on the way home from work and then I’m going to make some fried rice. It looks simple enough: egg, diced ham, brown rice, peanut oil, etc.

      If I can remember, I’ll snap a few photos and post about it tomorrow.

      In other news, this past Tuesday I hit up the climbing gym with Irene, Pete, and Jesse. While there I tried a frighteningly difficult climb that is rumored to be somewhere in the high 5.12 low 5.13 area. There’s one move near the top that requires a powerful left hand bump from one sloper to another. I tried the move about half a dozen times unsuccessfully.

      This morning, two days after those 6 attempts, my left arm still feels destroyed.

      Authored by: mike d.

      Carving a Climbing Santa

      December 28th, 2006 by mike d. in Features

      Rock Climbing Santa!

      Each Christmas I try to carve my mother a little Santa out of wood. I’ve been doing this for the last 4 or 5 years and have made a bunch of different Santas…. everything from a Banjo playing Santa to a Santa painting a candy cane. This year, I decided to make a Rock Climbing Santa climbing a chimney. I took pictures to document the process.

      The process starts with a block of wood. After I sketched the basic top, front, and side views onto the block I used a band saw at work to cut the basic shape.
      Block o wood

      Once that was done I brought the wood home and used my dremel to carve out the basic shape. I used a coarse bit to remove most of the excess wood and then a sharp end mill type bit to clean up.

      Unfortunately my pictures of the carving process itself came out pretty poor. This one shows the later stage after I had separated the arms and cut between the Santa and the chimney but before the details of the harness and face were added.
      Carve

      Once the carving was complete, I sanded down the figure with a sanding bit and a few strips of sand paper. Then I applied one coat of white paint to the whole piece.
      Whitecoat

      After that dried, I painted the brick with a dark red paint. I kept my brush very loose to keep the red out of the carved area that defined the individual bricks. This gave the brick a really rough look.
      Brick

      Finally I painted Santa himself. He got a bright red coat with ivory white details.
      Finished!

      He also got a festive green harness.
      yay!

      The only real problem was that Santa’s left foot is magically passing into the chimney. We can either pretend that:
      1) there are some missing brick’s where Santa’s left foot is.
      2) Santa is magic
      3) Mike D miscalculated the size of Santa’s left foot.

      Either way, I consider this Santa a success.

      ta-da!

      Authored by: mike d.
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