Category: General

Solomon may have been correct in saying, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. But there are indeed so many new things to learn and try each day! A few of my new ones…

In my head I hear Satchmo singing, “just don’t get around [to blogging] much anymore”.

Better late than never I guess! Special family party in November for my Moms 80th birthday.

This picture captures a few of our homeschooling values fairly well. Alice already knows more about excellent homemaking & housewifery than most girls twice her age.

I forget what this tower of ingredients turned into, but she’s made so many delicious things lately that I lose track!

At the dump today Jill found me a grindstone just sitting neglected in the dumpster. Now it has a new home. I paired it with a small piece of rubber and a drill bit:

Then I attached it to my drill and went to town on some hard-to-sharpen blades, like my two machetes and Jill’s whittling knife.

They’re not quite “easily cut through paper” sharp but they’re plenty sharp for what I need them for 🙂

I was poking through my audio plugins and discovered that somehow I had installed Cardinal Synth. It’s a “free and open-source virtual modular synthesizer plugin”. It acts like a virtual synth rack and has hundreds of built-in modules to arrange however you want. In this one plugin there’s a whole world to explore!

So I started exploring. I know only the basics of building synths but was able to come up with this:

It looks complex but that’s the magic of it, you build one thing at a time and just patch ins and outs. Before long you have created a monster. This whole thing uses about 5% of my processor. I ran it all night just for fun, no memory leaks or performance hiccups.

What does it do, you might ask? It’s an ambient music and ocean sound generator. Here’s some sample audio of what it does forever:

Not perfect, but for a first effort I’m proud of it. I’ve learned a bit about VCOs, VCAs, and oscillators – far more than I would have if I had to buy all this stuff! The only thing that isn’t actually generated is the seagulls (you did hear the seagulls, right?).

I know a ton of you were asking about how my archery practice was going. And by “a ton” I mean “not one”. But still, I’ve made a short video of my progress. I keep tweaking my technique slightly with new information, and each change requires practice. I noticed that in the video I’m looking at every single arrow, and I’ve stopped doing this to rely less on sight and more on the feel of the nocks.

I’ll be working more on it this winter. I practice indoors at close range with cardboard boxes. This does nothing for accuracy or power, but is conducive to speed practice!

For the last two years or so I tried to get modern and use a camera from a smart phone. I thought its portable nature would allow me to bring it more frequently and capture more photos. However, it seemed to be the opposite. Plus, it smoothed out everyone’s faces and imperfections and that feature could not be turned off. Now, I am reunited with my point and shoot, my beloved find from the dump, and it feels good to take pictures again with a camera of weight and substance! Feels good to capture some nice pics again. 🙂

We’ve also been getting back into the woods for walks and exploring. A curious sight is all the GREEN leaves that have fallen. Have the trees just given up? They have fallen without turning color, pretty unusual.