Rants :: Palsgraf.com :: Blather, sheer blather.

Monday, January 12, 2009 - 01:36 PM

To the chagrin, I believe, of my wonderful spouse, I fixed the orange chair upstairs. It is possibly the most-hideous chair I have ever seen, and I think she had hopes that its formerly imminent physical failure would provide cause to remove it from the house. She did not, however, count on my (1) reluctance to throw out something that could still be salvaged or (2) my resourcefulness.

The chair was saved with a combination of the power drill, some old twinish rope, and an old roped bed pattern from the first Foxfire book. Something like the pattern I used is here, although I went through the top, not through the sides.

I drilled holes from top to bottom through the seat of the chair (the "frame") and tied a knot in the rope. I strung it through the first hole from the bottom, and tied a knot in the tailing end to keep all of it from coming though the hole.

I pulled the rope across the chair and went through the top of the hole across from the first, pushing the rope downwards. Staying on the same side but going over a hole to the left, I came out the top and went straight across to the hole next to the one I started with. When I finished step 1, I had straight rope lines going across the chair, front to back. I tied off the rope with another knot after finishing.

I started on the "side" of the chair next, going across to the other side, working the same way as before, only weaving the rope through the existing work done in step one. This created a woven rope seat for the chair, with squares about 3 inches to a side. I put the cushion on top, et voila! The chair is sound and firm again. It will survive to annoy Mac for at least another 30 years. It is also quite comfortable now.

I was about to add something and promptly forgot...

Saturday, November 08, 2008 - 01:24 AM

Age has surely caught up with me.

Ah...I've got it back. I just brought home an older computer from work. It has been wirelessed and attached to our home lan. All sorts of work-related, but unnecessary to home stuff has been removed. It runs like new again. Woohoo!

In any case, I'm adding bookmarks. One of which is a certain relative's blog. Not knowing the URL, I search for "[handle] martian [xxxx] poison." Bingo. First result. That's just money.

Rocks

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 - 11:39 PM

I remember finding an arrowhead at the valley when I was a kid. The road had just been gone over by the road grader and I just found it. I recall it being made from shale, which I thought was odd then (and now) as this struck me as a really stupid rock to make an arrowhead from. I spent the better part of the evening looking for pictures of a similar one on Google, to no avail. I've lost the thing somewhere and the memory is faint at this point. In any case, I then spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what tribe was responsible for the arrowhead before giving up and concluding that it could have been thousands of years old, possibly.

This fiddling around then made me dig into the rocks at the valley (figuratively) since I have been curious about the possibility of finding fossils in them and whether I could therefore look for same with the kids at some point. No dice, apparently. The ground is pretty much made of the Mauch Chunk formation (the red shale) and the Pocono Sandstone formations, neither of which are known for having fossils. Such fossils as may exist can include plants, fish things and occasional amphibians, such as the tetrapod discovered in plain view in the Reading library (I think). I'm too lazy to include the link now, but it was just last fall (2007).

The nifty rocks that look like lumps of various cobbles held together with mortar are "conglomerate" and are often found with these two formations. The age of them is approximately 100 million years prior to the dinosaurs. The Mauch Chunk formation is often found below the coal beds in northeastern PA and therefore predates it, and the Carboniferous period, placing it in the Upper Devonian some 380 million years ago. As we all well know, 380 million years is enough time to leach out pretty much all the nutrients. That's a joke, people. Check the centerfold here.

I may spend some time looking for some native american relics at the state museum and possibly locally to see if I can find something similar to learn a bit about what I found. Learning about the rocks was also sort of interesting. Wikipedia has a nice map of the US for the Carboniferous period, showing the area as, essentially, a swamp. Things change, things stay the same, I guess.

The short version of this is (1) no fossils at the big house, (2) the soil sucks, and (3) it used to be a swamp (and the parts that you don't need to be a goat to climb still are). Who knew?

Topic: Rants