Westacular

Saucy indeed.

My good friend Dawnelle works with Marination Mobile, a fantastic “food truck” in  the Seattle-area that was featured on November 21st’s Good Morning America Weekend.  GMAW is hosting a contest called the Best Food Cart Challenge and Marination Mobile was one of the four finalists chosen from around the US.

In anticipation of the TV crew’s visit to Ballard to try out Marination Mobile’s cuisine, Dawnelle asked me if my new screen printing hobby/business would make her a shirt that said “Saucy”, just in case a shot of her made it into the piece.  And Woot!  You can see Dawnelle in the segment, apparently performing crowd control, wearing her custom Saucy shirt for all America to see.

UPDATE:  Marination Mobile won Good Morning America Weekend’s Best Food Cart Challenge!  http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=9147915 Congratulations!

When I stopped drinking in 2008 it was suggested that I would end up with some time on my hands so I should take up a hobby. I had been interested in screen printing for a while, and my friend Robin had said it was easy, so armed with her encouragement and the need to keep my mind clear I started learning about screen printing and started buying equipment and supplies.

My daughter Sarah Michael was interested in doing this new hobby with me, and we talked about designs we could make together.

But I didn’t end up with that much free time needing to be filled, I seemed to be pretty busy. We also had a nightmare home remodel that started in the winter of 2008 and so it took a while for the t-shirt shop idea to actually become a reality.

Finally this summer I started to put the T-shirt shop together and make sure we had all the stuff we needed. But what I really needed was something to motivate me to actually produce a design and make a shirt, and that something was a trip to San Francisco for a three-day outdoor music festival called Outside Lands. I thought it would be fun to screen print my own Outside Lands shirt design to wear to the shows, and it ended up being quite fun indeed!

I stayed up very late a few of nights before I left for my trip watching DVDs on the shirt-making process, then printing my design, exposing and washing out the the screen then finally printing onto some shirts.  There was a lot to learn and do, but it was a lot of fun.

And I even had people comment to me on my shirts!  Two different people came up to me and said “I didn’t see that shirt at the merchandise table.”  I felt proud!  I told them I designed and printed the shirt myself, but I didn’t bore them with the long drawn-out history.

Now I just need to keep making shirts, and start charging money for them too, cause if I don’t these Outside Lands shirts will be the most expensive pieces of clothing I have ever worn.

I have seen several times over the years online posts about how to make a DIY camera dolly that uses PVC pipe as track. It came up that I could use a camera dolly recently so I put one together and it is great!

There are many many tutorials, guides and videos online explaining how to create one of these, I took inspiration from these…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcMPhuhqVO4
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-build-your-own-ten-foot-long-camera-dolly-track-175170/

I used some thick plywood as the platform, then mounted inline skate wheels to aluminum angles, then attached those assemblies to the bottom of the platform. To take the thing to the next level I affixed some indoor/outdoor carpeting to it. The entire project was pretty easy and the results are fantastic.

Here is the finished edit of the video I did for PacWest, there are a few dolly shots in there: http://www.vimeo.com/6299207

I recently came across a Lifehacker post about a DYI project to make Sun Jars and was inspired to try it myself. It is easy to do– in fact my method was even easier than Lifehacker’s– and the results are spectacular.
For this project you need a jar, a solar LED garden light, frosted glass paint and epoxy.

First, a few words about the materials used.

I found these excellent Westinghouse solar garden lights in the Home and Garden section of our local Fred Meyer. The label on the underside of the box calls them “WH Gladiator 1PC Pewter”, the packaging also calls them “Item #474005-41″ from International Development Corp. and Westinghouse. I’ve searched Google for all of these keywords and can’t find these lights anywhere, so I just bought a bunch from Fred Meyer. These lights are perfect because they fit perfectly into the lid of the jar so you don’t need to dismantle the light like the Lifehacker post instructs.

Commenters on the Lifehacker page reported problems finding jars for this project. I found quite a few at local stores (Fred Meyer and McDaniel’s Do it Center), and McDaniel’s happily ordered me more when I exhausted their stock. Amazon lists them as in stock, so they’re out there.

[UPDATE] it rained recently and we were dismayed to find that the Fred Meyer jars actually filled with water! The “Fido” jars I got from McDaniel’s, however, did not have this problem. So I definitely recommend getting “ermetic” jars.

Let’s go!

• 

  First, dismantle your jar, removing the lid and the wire latch. Keep the pieces, especially the small wire loop that keeps it all together.

• 

  Paint the outside of the jar with your Frosted Glass paint. You don’t need lots of coats, just one will probably do just fine. You do want even coverage, however, so spray lightly and don’t get too close to avoid pooling the paint on the surface.

• 

  While the paint dries let’s work on the lid.

  Remove the light from the stick/reflector part, just rotate it and it will come apart. Discard the stick/reflector part unless you can find another use for it as an olympic torch or magic wand or something. Mix your epoxy and apply it to the top of the light assembly as shown in the picture. You should first place your light into the lid of the jar to a) make sure it fits and b) get a sense of what surfaces of the light come into contact with the glass lid. To me it felt like the contact was around the ring of the light, not just the top face, so I applied my epoxy to the edge as well as the top.

  After the epoxy is on the light, set it into the lid and allow the two to bond.

• 

  When your paint is dry and epoxy completely set you’re ready to reassemble the jar.

• 
  If you haven’t already done so, pull the plastic tab from the light assembly, this engages the rechargable battery.
• 
  That’s it! You’re done.
  Put in the sun to charge and when it gets dark enjoy your new Sun Jar.

This morning I woke up at around 3:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to go ahead and start driving toward home.

The night’s sleep in the Walmart parking lot was uneventful, though Jessie said she heard a horn honk shortly before we left.  Maybe the horn contributed to my waking, probably more I was just excited to get home.

The sun rose as we were in eastern Washington, west of Spokane.  The Palouse is so beautiful, especially when bathed in the light of dawn.

But later we drove through an area where a massive wildfire that has been burning for the last few days.  A thousand fire fighters are fighting the blaze that has so far consumed more than 19,000 acres.  The smell of smoke still hangs in the air and it looks like another planet, so desolate is the landscape.

At Coulee City Jessie got behind the wheel and I slept until Leavenworth.  Then we gassed up for the final push over Stevens Pass and home.

So here we are, home a day earlier than planned, but glad to be back to our familiar surroundings.  The trip was wonderful and we certainly have many great memories.

I’ve been playfully threatening Jessie that we were going to stay in WalMart parking lots during the trip and she has not very playfully said “No Way!”

Well, here we are on what may be our final night in the RV, Jessie is a asleep and I’m driving, and I see a Walmart beside the freeway.  Oh, we gotta do it!

Expect a report from Jessie in the morning.

We are 33 miles from the Montana-Idaho border and we are getting anxious to get home.

We stopped in Bozeman for lunch, we just can’t wait until Butte, and lucky for us Google and John’s web site say there is a John’s here.

But there is no longer a John’s here. If you look closely at the pic you may be able to make out the outline of the old sign.

The dude behind the counter of the new restaurant recognized my Rothbury shirt, though, he was there too! That’s cool.

While fueling up the RV in Billings this morning I saw this ad placed above the pump that caught my attention.  The ad is from ZeeCreative a company that offers web design, hosting and other consulting services.

Are there a lot of folks in Billings, MT who are filling up their tanks and thinking, “Who can help me sort out an SSL certificate for my web site?”

Just struck me as funny.

Here is a closeup of the ad.

Our plan was to spend the night in Billings, Montana and on the way there we stopped at the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

On this hill Custer and his men fought against the indians but lost and were killed.  There is no way to know how authentic the placements are, but one thing that is neat about the monument is they have gravestones placed where Cavalry soldiers fell.  This gives the place more emotion.  I was expecting to find just a hill, and a hill indistiguishable from nearby hills would have had much less impact.