The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Who’d’a thunk it?
Thirteen months ago, that round table had self-enclosed:
We don’t have a good picture of the square table, but it had that same crater open to the central hole.
Other pictures show the topmost 14+ inches from that storm consisted of lovely, fluffy snow that cleared well, although I’d have settled for a bit less.
It’s winter in the Northeast US. Snow happens on a regular basis. I enjoy the shapes, not the shoveling…
They only come out at night:
Two raccoons took turns at the feeder, but I only caught one in the act:
Apparently they enter torpor, rather than hibernate, which means they’re getting hungry right about now.
Taken through two panes of 1955 glass with the Sony DSC-H5, using an LED flashlight for focus assist. Both culprits oozed off the far end of the patio when I opened the door…
A few more weekly snowstorms refreshed the patio tables mounds:
The spire under the square table nearly reached the cross brace:
That spire comes from snow falling straight down through the table, with a bit collecting on the struts:
Holding the camera over the table shows a thin glass rim around the edge of the hole:
I wouldn’t believe it, either, if I hadn’t seen it!
OK, I’m a sucker for sunlit solid water:
They’re hanging from the gutters over the patio. The house has six-foot soffits back there and nearly three feet elsewhere, plus the roofers installed rubber sheets along the walls, so we’re not worried about leaks…
Two snowstorms in a week converted our patio tables into gentle sculptures.
If you could flip the round table upside down, the mound might match the snow shadow underneath:
Snow falling through the 2 inch hole in the middle of the square table produces a large cone below:
Leaving a much larger caldera in the top:
Yes, I’m easily amused…
So I pulled my trusty Kindle Fire out of my pocket, only to find slugs racing across the edge:
Turns out those are leaves of the Sedum Morganianum, a.k.a. Lamb’s Tail, plant next to the window behind my desk:
I’d been leaning in there past the plant stand to swap cables for the new portrait monitor, brushed against the plant, and knocked some leaves into my pocket. The bare sections on the right side are entirely my fault, although not entirely during this incident; the leaves seem perfectly willing to fall off during a harsh glance.
You can find more than you probably want to know about the care & feeding of Sedum Morganianum, some of which suggests that those tendrils have reached pretty nearly their maximum length. If past experience is any guide, the heavy glazed ceramic pot will eventually overbalance and auto-trim the stems to a length suitable for replanting in a new & intact pot.
My biz records from 1985 emerged from hiding on their way to the recycling bin:
Yup, you read it right:
A few years after that, I gingerly plugged a $750 80387 math coprocessor into an 80386 system that we depreciated forever.
Another page of that report says I dropped nearly $3500 on various chunks of software.
The times, they definitely have changed. Nowadays, I buy throwaway off-lease Dell boxes costing less than that 10 MB hard drive and use Free Software for essentially everything I do.
I wish I still had that HP plotter, though…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 