Ruminations:
Are you Nostalgic? What are the histories in your life that are past present and growing as time carries on?
As Melissa and I nest at the Norman House. This house is now, in my mind, the ending place, the last home. I never want to move again.
We have made many homes along the way, and the memories of good things that have happened at those places I wish to memorialize and compound into some feature of our new house – essentially, combining all the homes into a SuperHome™.
The Japanese Garden that the Arboretum garden is based on, an emperor’s I believe, first introduced me to this principle. According to the historian at the Arboretum Garden, part of a garden’s purpose is to preserve history and place – mainly this achieved by miniaturization of geological features or buildings from home towns or past times. For instance, a rocky jetty that the emperor’s mother would walk out to routinely was miniaturized in his garden – when she passed he could still connect to her through suggestion of place.
In my home now there are many artifacts from my childhood home, my first places I lived in Seattle, etc. these items make the space feel extremely familiar, comfortable. Also the emotions of all those times are very close at hand. These items have limited sentimental value in creating new memories however.
Old house with blooming plum
Conversely, some of the projects I am taking on are exploring the stories from past homes and are attempting to create a dynamic thing that will hopefully bear fruit for future nostalgia. Literally, I am planting a fruit tree from the seed of a tree from our last home. The tree there had been around for at least 40 years I imagine. It provided fruit for some of the most tasty jam. The variety is a wild variety that was very important to large mammal and American Indian diets. Apparently, it is not really planted on purpose much at this point. The plum tree, it kind of is a symbol of all the pleasures that were had at that house. Interest in gardening and livestock and being thankful for nature’s gifts really came together there. So I’ll plant this tree at our new house in memory of those past pleasures and as a toast to future pleasures. 10 years from now, I’ll get fruit. The patience required for seeing how the story continues is also attractive.
That first plum harvest
Are there things that you see as long arc stories in your life? What are they? How would you represent some things that you are nostalgic about in a physically dynamic growing thing?
Projects and Planning:
At work I am managing a fairly large engineering project, doing actual engineering work, fabrication, as well as directing up to 4 people with tasks on how to make the final product come together. It takes a lot of knowledge of the folks I am working with to gage how much can be done in a given day and what is the minimum amount of help I need to lend in order for those folks to succeed.
Another key point is to gage, how on a given day, actual productivity on a given task pans out or accounting for an unknown unknown that pops up and sucks up a ton of time – Fridays are always buffer days and have nothing scheduled to them until Friday. This has a tendency to make the team feel really ahead of schedule if they get everything done by the buffer day – we get to creep into next week’s stuff and get ahead. While arbitrary and totally meaningless really it is effective and improves morale.
My personal todo list is split into tasks I think I can accomplish in a given day. Checking in with the TODO list throughout my day and moving things to subsequent days can help me come to terms with the amount that is done at the end of a given day. This also helps one prioritize what things are left and what can be kicked down the road. Also understanding that it is good to never accomplish some items on the todo list since the reason for doing them may go away.
I think the part of to do lists that are garbage generally is that they are mentally and physically static. We say this is everything we need to do, no priority given really, just how many boxes can be checked and how many we can get done in a weekend. We may end up looking at everything that is left and saying wow so much didn’t get done. We didn’t scope our weekend or leave any buffer.
Here is a look at how i planned this weekend
Green arrows show how things moved as I checked in throughout the day. By 3pm i had moved everything green from saturday to sunday and by noon on sunday i had moved sunday stuff to monday. But also Sunday and Monday were left pretty open for buffers and could absorb the Saturday tasks that were too ambitious.
Below is just my scratchpad for next steps in my project plans that I populate up to my schedule.importantly those things are not scheduled into my to do list. There is no need to feel burdened by them until they are planned.
Looking at the weekend I accomplished everything I needed to do and feel like I scoped it pretty well. Also importantly I scheduled relaxation time. Is this similar to what you do? How does your system work and not work for you? Is this insane?
She sells SheSheds by the Seashore:
Building a Meli garden shed with my stash of free wood – let me brag with a photo:
TBD until i get home – imagine your jealousy
All Free!!! Collected over a 4 month period.
For the shed I based it off this plan from ana white: but then made mods to fit the materials i had on hand. Here is my cad model of just the frame (i used Solidworks): for ref this took about 2 hours of planning to reach this point. I will be replicating the shiplap cedar look that she did.
I even got the mower in there from Grabcad.com to check the size was okay. This project will cost about $100 when I get all the materials for the frame. From here I can bust out build plans and have a friend come help make this fairly quickly.
The power of CAD is through relational modelling. For instance, I started with the frame of the back wall (shown below). This wall sets the width and height of the entire model. If I change that dimension, the floor, roof, and front doors are all dependent on that dimension and scale accordingly. This makes it super easy to iterate to nice dimensions or to fit existing material.
Nice
One change of a dimension
