Cable cars and Christmas lights.
West Coast Wolf
After work we had a team event where we went to Urban Putt, an indor miniature golf course with a vaguely San Francisco Steampunk theme. (To be honest, I had more fun watching the set pieces than actually playing the golf, at which I was pretty terrible.) It was great fun, and a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend the evening with coworkers.
Today I served as an SF poll worker for the gubernatorial recall election. After a mad scramble to get everything ready for the polls to open at 7 AM, I spent most of the day welcoming people and telling them that the voting booths were upstairs. (It was pretty quiet, since the state sent out vote-by-mail ballots to all registered voters again this time.) Once the polls closed at 8 PM it was another mad scramble to get everything packed away again and prepare the ballots for counting, but I left at the end with the satisfaction of a job well done.
I spent most of last Saturday afternoon at Noisebridge helping someone build a frame to hold a box fan in a window to improve ventilation. Neither of us quite knew what we were doing but we managed to get it put together in the end.
My bedframe has a large gap under the headboard, so my pillow keeps falling off the end of the bed. I decided to fix this by making a board to go in the empty space.
Step 1: Obtain a quarter-sheet of ¼" hardboard from Discount Builders Supply, a local store down the street from me.
Step 2: Take board on the bus to Noisebridge to use their shop.
Step 3: Cut board to size on the table saw. (All photos involving power tools were staged while the tool was turned off, for safety.)
At this point I hit a snag—one edge of the board needed to be cut at a sharp angle in order to fit my bedframe, but the table saw could only cut up to 45°. After puttering around with some ideas for making a jig or trying to do the cut on a bandsaw, I decided to consult my dad, who knows quite a lot about this sort of thing. He offered some advice on how a production shop would design a jig, but suggested that for my purposes it was probably easier to just sand the edge at an angle.
I bought some sandpaper and headed back to Noisebridge, but when I got there someone pointed out that they have a belt sander, which made quick work of the project once I tracked down where the sanding supplies had ended up during the move.
Finally I drilled some countersink holes for the screws to go into when I attached it to the bedframe. (I’m not sure if this was actually necessary but I figured it couldn’t hurt.)
Then I took it home, attached it with some wood screws...
...et voilà! My pillow is no longer in peril of plummeting.
In lieu of fireworks, I went with some friends to Emporium SF, an arcade with a lot of old videogames and the like. An unusual choice for a 4th of July celebration, perhaps, but I consider it just a different kind of light show.
