Schedule for Week Ending 12/31

Monday - HOLIDAY (8 hours)
Tuesday - 10:00 to 18:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 07:30 to 16:00 (24.5 hours)
Thursday - 07:30 to 16:00 (33 hours)
Friday - 10:00 to 17:00 (40 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 12/18

Monday - 12:00 to 18:00 (6 hours)
Tuesday - 13:00 to 24:00 (17 hours)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 18:00 (23 hours)
Thursday - 13:00 to 24:00 (34 hours)
Friday - 14:00 to 20:00 (40 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 11/18

Monday - 08:00 to 16:00 (8 hours)
Tuesday - 16:00 to 24:00 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 14:00 to 18:00 (24 hours)
Thursday - 14:00 to 24:00 (34 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 04:00 (38 hours)

I can't be arsed to figure out where the other two hours are coming from so let's just say V for two hours. :|

Nerdiest Thing I've Ever Done

So with Halloween having passed, for some reason I'm still getting my arts and crafts on. Approximately one week ago, I fell in love with the idea of making my very own Portal gun. There are plenty of guides on the internet, some of which I've paid attention to in bits and pieces to customize the way I'm crafting the thing. This post is to document the progress and describe exactly what I did, step-by-step.
The things I've purchased so far include:

MATERIALS

• 4" inner diameter PVC pipe, three feet
• 3" inner diameter PVC pipe, three feet
• 4" PVC coupling (x2)
• 3" PVC coupling (x2)
• 3M all purpose filling putty
• Half-inch hex bolt, one inch length (x3)
• 3' fluorescent bulb protector
• Plunger with acrylic handle
• Four-pack of exercise foam mats
• Rustoleum spraypaint primer (white)
• Epoxy
• Rustoleum spraypaint glossy white
• Rustoleum spraypaint glossy black
• Rustoleum spraypaint clear top coat
• Popsicle sticks
• Dixie cups
• PC power cable
• Duct tape
• Scotch tape
• Paper (for patterns)
  

TOOLS

• Dremel tool
• Saw
• Metal ruler
• Exacto knife
• Sandpaper (course, medium, fine, ultra fine)
• Soldering iron and "helping hands"
• Printer
  

ELECTRONICS

• 1x 1.5W KingBright LED
• 3x red LEDs
  
• 2x 10 ohm resistor
• 2x 100 ohm resistor
• 1x 18 ohm resistor
• 1x 5 ohm resistor
• 3x 3 ohm resistor
• 4x 0.7V drop diode
• Radioshack project board
• Solder
• Wire
  

Wednesday, October 26
After the first (of many) stops at the hardware store, I undertook the first steps of the project. The first thing I did was sand two edges of the 4" couplings with medium paper to promote proper adhesion with epoxy. I glued the two together to create one double-length pipe, then set that aside to dry overnight. Next, I used my saw and cut down the 3" PVC pipe to about 15". It was a bit longer than necessary, mostly to facilitate sanding and a little insurance in case I made mistakes. By design, the length of the 4" and 3" pipes doesn't matter so much as some other pieces. Since I had yet to buy the Dremel tool at this point, I left everything until the next day.

Thursday, October 27
Woo, new Dremel tool obtained! It's hard to believe that I managed to go several years without one of these babies - they're so useful for pretty much anything you need to do, hardware-wise, especially when I have no garage to store a belt sander or circular saw. Anyway, taking the epoxied-together 4" couplings, I eyeballed a few of the designs on the web and cut a hole. After sanding down the edges a bit, I had the below:

From left to right, 4" couplings, 4" PVC (uncut), 3" PVC (cut)

Cut 3" PVC inside the glued-together couplings

Next, I cut down the 4" PVC to about 11.5" with my handsaw, again to leave a bit of room for sanding and budgeting for mistakes. After sanding the edges down to be reasonably straight, I marked up the remaining length for the cuts I planned on making. As you can see in the picture below, I left some straight, diagonal edges to later be sanded down to a curve. I also sanded the inside of the 3" coupling to ensure that the 3" PVC pipe could be threaded all the way through.

Cut 4" PVC without sanding. The 3" PVC is threaded through the 3" coupling in the front

Everything fit together pretty well at this point. I got out the Dremel sander and sanded the 45" cut to a smooth curve, as in the image below.

Sanded down to create the curve on the inside of the barrel

Friday, October 28

The next step was to cut down the 3" PVC in a similar fashion. The 3", as can be seen above, had to be a fair bit longer than the 4", since it has to extend further forward to form the ultimate barrel of the gun. I used the 4" to trace onto the 3" PVC in order to guide my cut, which ended up looking like the below.

U-shaped cuts done in the 3" and 4" PVC pipes

As can be seen in the above picture, the next step was to cut one of the 3" couplings in half and sand down the insides to allow them to slip comfortably over the 3" PVC pipe. The halves can be seen above on the left side of the picture, one underneath the 4" PVC rim to allow the two PVC pipes to fit together comfortably. You may notice also that I trimmed down the rim at the front of the 4" PVC pipe to ensure it looked more like the reference pictures. Finally, as can be seen to the left of the barrel, I cut the fluorescent bulb protector tube to a more manageable size, about 10".

Saturday, October 29
Most of the cutting was done, so I finished up a little more sanding and began the process of putting on the filler putty. I used several batches to bond together the 4" and 3" PVC pipes. They had a bit of a gap between them, as was expected, so I filled that in with the filler putty. It took quite a few batches, but eventually it was all nicely filled in. After letting it dry, I sanded it more or less flat, nice and contoured.


As you can see in the above picture, I cut out the little holes from the putty when it was partially dry with an Exacto knife. The whole process was pretty laborious, and I broke the knife's tip in the process, but it came out looking pretty much like the "real" thing. I also bonded the 3" coupling to the barrel on the forward end of the gun and tapered it. It's finally starting to look like what it's supposed to be! Additionally, I filled in some of the space between the 4" coupling and the larger PVC pipe and sanded that as well as I could.

Next, I placed the second piece of cut 3" coupling over the end of the barrel and puttied that into place, and properly sanded it. In order to create the illuminated rod in the center of the gun, I took a cheap plunger and cut the handle to the proper length. Then, I sanded the result down to reflect internal light a bit better. Below shows it mounted inside the barrel with an LED flashlight providing the illumination. I plan on wiring up a circuit featuring one or two RGB LEDs to produce any color in the rainbow.

After sanding, testing the mounting of the "glowing" rod

Sunday, October 30, 2011
Today was an experimental one. When we got back from New York City, I managed to pick up a four-pack of the exercise mats that I'd been eyeing. With them, I cut out a few circles to mount the plunger handle inside of the gun, and attempted to cut out one of the shells. It was a bit too small, but it worked in that it was a proof of concept for the final shell.

Additionally, I cut out a small piece of foam and glued it onto the 4" rim. I then covered this with the putty and sanded it, before drilling a couple holes in this little nub. I screwed a bolt into the gun as shown below, which would be painted black with the rest of the barrel.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011
I began the final step before priming for paint on the barrel of the Portal gun - building up the end of the barrel to approximate what it looks like in game. At the moment of writing this, I'm partway through the sanding and articulation of this portion of the barrel. Hopefully I can finish it up this evening and then prime for painting tomorrow.


Thursday, November 3, 2011

Wednesday didn't give me much time (or inclination) to work on anything but continuing the sanding of the barrel tip. I patched it up a few times and got it into a pretty nice shape. I have to keep telling myself that it'll never be perfect and get on with it already! Today, however, I picked up my electronics parts from FedEx before work. After heading home, I went back out to the Radio Shack to pick up some wire and some flux, a must for good soldering.

First, I tested the LED with a fairly simple circuit to get a feel for the operation of the LED and the brightness. Needless to say, it was blindingly bright - whenever it would blink on it'd leave spots in my vision for quite awhile. Anyway, after testing, I breadboarded a circuit that would be similar to the one inside the gun. This would also allow me to tweak resistor values to get the best mix of color for each of the gun settings: an orange and a cyan, roughly matching the colors from the game.

Simple breadboarded circuit

The hardest part of the entire wiring process was getting wire leads on the surface-mount LED. It took a few tries, but I managed to get it soldered in a reasonable fashion and taped together so the wires wouldn't shift and short one another. The only thing I'm worried about is overheating, so at some point I'm going to need to install some kind of heat sink, considering that in the "cyan" mode, the LED is buzzing with a little over a watt of power, creating a lot of excess heat.

Anyway, after I tweaked the current going through the different colors depending on the setting, I was ready to wire everything up on a project board. I had one laying around that was a bit small, but large enough to accommodate the simple circuit. It ended up being pretty packed in, as seen below.

Nest of wires

Once I got all the various wires (two for the battery pack, three for the three-way rocker switch, and four for the LED leads), diodes, and resistors soldered into place, I flicked the switch and tested it out. I duct taped the LED to the end of the central "rod" that will be the centerpiece of the portal gun once it's finished. Tape will probably be what I use in the final piece, since it won't be visible inside the barrel's body. Anyway, here's what it looks like on each of the "settings":

Orange

Blue

The one snag here is heat dissipation. With one watt of sustained power pumping through the LED on the cyan setting, it's heating up to unacceptable levels. Tonight I ordered a heat sink and some thermal paste so I can mount the LED on the sink and hopefully keep the LED underneath the 85*C max operating temperature. According to the data sheet, it's probably heating up rather quickly to around 275*C, which probably isn't great for the lifetime of the poor little LED.

Additionally, I cut out a piece of foam that would become the back shell. The hardest part is going to be shaping it into the "dome" shape of the real gun, but I'm sure I'll figure out a way.

Friday, November 4

Today was paint day! After getting off work, I put down a piece of cardboard and covered the barrel with spray paint primer. After waiting an hour, I turned it about 120 degrees and did it again, then repeated one more time. It seems like the majority of the barrel now has a nice, white coat. I plan on sanding it in the morning once the primer is dry, then laying down another coat. That should hopefully be enough!

Coat #1

Anyway, I also had an unshaped bit of foam that would become the back shell. In order to force it into the correct shape, I made a "spine" from another foam cutout of the profile view of the shell, then made a couple "ribs" to give the shell its proper shape. I duct taped everything together, and now it's prepared to lay down a coat of the Bondo. This will force the foam to keep its current shape once it hardens. More tomorrow!

Saturday, November 5

A lot of progress today! First, I took the shaped back shell foam and began covering it with the putty. After allowing it to dry for a bit, I sanded it down nicely. Unfortunately, I'm just about out of the hardening agent for the putty, so I may need to pick up a bit more to finish the project. Below is the before and after the first coat of the putty.

Additionally, I started laying the first black coat on the barrel after sanding down the second coat of primer. I'm going to let it dry for about twelve hours before laying on the second coat, but it's already looking pretty great!

Sunday, November 6 - Thursday, November 17

Through the majority of this week, I was down in Dahlgren, Virginia for work, so working on my portal gun ceased for a bit. I have picked up, however, and am hoping to make some progress this weekend!

Anyway, this week has been a bit hectic with odd hours at work and a big injection of Minecraft. I managed to layer on a few coats of primer on the fairly smooth back shell. There are a couple of cracks in the facade I have to take care of before layering on more coats. Additionally, I've got to make the little "nubs" where the black cables originate from.

Speaking of said black cables, I cut lengths of cable from a computer AC cable that I didn't need anymore. I stripped them down enough to isolate the cable underneath in order to wire it properly into the red LEDs I intend to mount on the front. I cut out the front shell and shaped it in a similar fashion to the back shell, using a spine and a pair of ribs and taping everything together with duct tape. As of right now, I've spread a couple layers of putty over the front shell. Since it's a good deal smaller than the back shell, I plan on putting even more putty on it to keep it a bit more rigid.

Although it needs more work and some coats of paint, here's an image of the back shell laying in the proper position on the barrel:


Friday, November 18

Today I layered on a bit more putty for the front shell and made a few spines to go inside to allow for the connection of the shell to the barrel. These, additionally, were covered in putty and sanded down to allow for a good connection between the two pieces. I also took the opportunity to place the electronic guts inside the gun. After a couple scratches to the paint on the inside of the barrel (ouch!), I was able to mount everything fairly well inside. I capped it off in the back with the piece of foam that holds the switch for the gun color. It worked quite well!

Barrel plus shells, together at last

Saturday, November 19

Today I continued work on the shells. I opted to begin attaching the "nubs" to the shells that will allow for the mounting of the cables that attach between the back and front of the gun. In order to do so, I cut out the shapes from the foam and attached them to the gun with the bondo putty. After covering them with bondo and finalizing the shapes, I sanded them down properly and ensuring each was nice and solid. After allowing the bondo to dry and sanding it, it was time to paint the shells again with spraypaint primer. Once it dries, I'll sand again and repeat the process until I've got a pair of shiny, smooth shells!

Shell with mostly finished "nub"

The three nubs on the back shell in differing stages

Portal hat on Dana!

Wednesday, December 8

So, I've gotten into the swing of things once again with the Portal gun! I dropped by the grocery store and got a piece of tupperware that I felt would work well for the "claws" on the front of the gun. After a bit of work with the Dremel and a pair of scissors, I managed to get a general shape for the plastic pieces of the claws. Each claw is made up of three pieces of plastic and a bit of foam at the end. Below are the pieces and the rough assembly:

Very annoying to cut out!

Everything fitted together on a spare piece of foam

Additionally, I layered on a couple more layers of primer on both shells and sanded them down. I figured I've gotten about as far as I'm going to get on the back shell, so I put on the first layer of white. I plan on coating it a few more times and then topping it with a nice clear coat, and then I'll be done with it!

Sunday, December 11

I've finalized the back shell, hooray! Today I also spray-painted the lengths of wire, continued work on the front shell, and cut out the remainder of the claws for the front. I soldered the red LEDs to their respective cables and spray-painted all the nuts and bolts for a nice black appearance.

Additionally, I drilled a hole in the back shell to mount and glue in a screw which holds the assembly in place without needing glue. Eventually it'll be glued in with the final product, but for now it makes more sense to have it still be removable.

The front shell is looking pretty good. I've tried a lot to smooth it out more, though I think I'm going to call it good. I sprayed on two layers of white - after some sanding work and a couple more layers, I'll top coat it, and hopefully it'll look just as good as the back one, if not better.

Bottom claws look a bit long

Monday, December 12

Almost finished! Today I did a bit more work on the front shell by adding a couple more coats of white paint. It's got some imperfections, just as the back shell does, but I think it'll look just fine in the finished product.

I took all the electronics guts out of the gun barrel and rearranged everything a little to make it a bit more compact. Unfortunately, there were a couple loose connections, which I mostly fixed with a little application of solder. The cyan looks great, though the orange looks a bit red still. Oh well.

I made sure the red LEDs worked when wired in before screwing in a dolly in the back of the gun that would serve as a back handle. After that, I threaded the cables through the holes in the back shell and duct taped the shell onto the barrel. Eventually I think I'll end up coming up with a better way to mount it, but for now the tape should do, since it's not visible from the outside.

Finally, I mounted the middle red LED on the cable to the front of the barrel and painted it with nail polish to make sure that the black color is uniform. Once I'm done with the front shell, all that's left is to glue it on, glue the LEDs into the base of the claws, and then voila, portal gun! It's been a long and arduous road, but I'm so close!

Tuesday, December 13 - Friday, December 16

In order to keep the back shell on without having to glue it down, I drilled another hole in the back of the barrel to accommodate a screw. I glued a screw into the back shell, which will thread through the barrel and be secured with a nut. That way, I can re-open the gun for battery replacement and possible future upgrades.

I cut the two bottom claws a bit shorter (trimmed maybe 3/4" off of them) so they didn't look so long in comparison with the one on top. Then, I glued the front shell onto the barrel with high strength epoxy, letting it dry overnight. After that, I attached the two remaining claws to the front shell. Only a couple steps left!

Schedule for Week Ending 11/4

Monday - 12:00 to 24:00 (12 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 20:00 (20 hours)
Wednesday - 11:00 to 20:00 (29 hours)
Thursday - 12:00 to 19:00 (36 hours)
Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (40 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 10/30

Monday - 12:00 to 19:00 (7 hours)

Tuesday - 13:00 to 19:00 (13 hours)

Wednesday - 11:00 to 24:00 (26 hours)

Thursday - 12:00 to 19:00 (33 hours)

Friday - 7:30 to 14:30 (40 hours)

867-5-9-9-9

So, with the race for the Republican Presidential Candidacy race off to a running start, Herman Cain has been the flavor of the month. At the forefront of his debate rhetoric has been his 9-9-9 plan - named for its nine (point one) percent tax levied across the board: 9.1% on personal income, 9.1% on corporate income, and introducing a 9.1% national sales tax. This sounds particularly simple, and that's one of the reasons why Cain has been surging in the polls. "THE DARN TAX CODE IS TOO COMPLEX!" yell a lot of Tea Party followers; they cite it as one of the reasons government it out of control, because no one person can really understand and know the entirety of the US Tax Code.

But I wondered. How would it change things? What kind of tax burden would this result in? How would it affect the revenue of the government? So, woo, another nice statistical diversion! Note that all data for this analysis comes from the 2010 US Census data, unless otherwise noted.

Anyway, the census looks at about 118,683,000 households. Within those households, I divided them into quadrants:

Lower quadrant makes underneath $29,670.75 gross income per year. Second quadrant is between this and $59,341.50. The third goes up to $89,012.25, and of course the top quadrant is unbounded at the top. These equate quite neatly to $30,000, $60,000, and $90,000, so for the sake of easier math, I'll round up in each case. Here are the various take-home amounts for someone making federal minimum wage along with all the other borders currently. Also included are a couple, much higher, incomes. To note, I am using the Single filer for a "worst case" (highest taxation) scenario.

$15,080 -> $13,243
$30,000 -> $25,925
$60,000 -> $48,875
$90,000 -> $71,183
$250,000 -> $182,603
$1,000,000 -> $672,686

Now, this is just the income tax, of course. Additionally, social security taxes and Medicare taxes are also levied. Social Security is taken at a rate of 4.2% up to $106,800 and Medicare at 1.45% of all wages. Presumably, Mr. Cain wishes to roll all these up, along with deductions, into the 9-9-9 plan. In order to deal with this, I have to use the average deductions for each income level along with the Medicare and Medicaid numbers. This is where it gets even more complicated, and so I have to break it out into "individual stories".

Our minimum-wage earner is paid $15,080 in gross income. Let's assume she's a single mother of one, and manages to deduct a fair amount of her income due to medical and taxation deductions, but makes no charitable contributions and does not save because she has to spend the majority of her income. After the 4.2% and 1.45% for OASDI and Medicare respectively, that comes to about $14,237. Assuming deductions of about $8,000 for medical and taxation (the average for $15k-$30k is about $10,000), her taxable income is about $6,237, which is taxed at 10%, about $624. Finally, since she has a child, she receives $3,050 in earned income credit. Thus, her final take home pay is about $16,663.

Whew, that was complicated! Anyway, without factoring in state income tax, our hypothetical person ends up with a little over 110% of her gross income in take-home pay, mostly thanks to her kid. Under Cain's plan, the same person would be taxed at 9.1% for income and another 9.1% on everything she purchases. Assuming she's reasonably thrifty (as anyone at this income level would need to be), she is likely to spend her income mostly on food and shelter. The latter would be untaxed, and would likely take 25-40% of her income. Assume 10% of it is spent on used items such as appliances or furniture. Thus, her final take-home pay less any taxation due to the sales tax, is about $13,146. So she's about 20% worse off in this system.

Next, I'd like to talk about our $60,000 earner. Let's assume he's unmarried as well, with no children. After OASDI and Medicare are taken out, it leaves about $56,646. Assume Mr. Sixty has a 401(k) and a few investments, spends relatively little on medical care, and earns a fair bit of interest on bank accounts, making his deductions total about $22,000 - again, fairly average for his bracket according to the IRS. That leaves a taxable income of about $34,600. The effective tax rate on this income is 13.8%, leaving a take-home income of $51,825.

Under the 9-9-9 plan, 9.1% is skimmed off the top, leaving $54,540. The average single filer making $60,000 is reasonably well off, so let's assume he spends 25% of his income on rent or mortgage payments, saves 20%, and spends the rest on food and entertainment. This results in a take-home income minus federal sales tax of $51,810. So he's about as well off as he was before under this plan.

Finally, for now at least, is the $250,000 earner. Let's say this is a married couple making this amount jointly, and filing jointly. After SS and Medicare, that leaves $241,889. Both have 401(k)s, several investments, and they have a single child. Their deductions total about $65,000, which is again, fairly average for their income level. This leaves about $177,000 as taxable; after federal income tax at a rate of 21.26%, they take home $204,369. They earn nothing from their child or children, as they earn too much to qualify for the Earned Income Credit.

Under the 9-9-9 plan, 9.1% is skimmed from the top of their income, leaving them with $227,250 in take-home pay. Assume they have a nice home and spend about 20% of their income on the mortgage and manage to save about 40% of their income per year, leaving them with $90,900 to pay for everything else. This is taxed at a 9.1% consumption tax rate, leaving $218,978 in total income. So they're about 7.1% better off.

So we can see that this system is inherently a bit more regressive than the one we have now. Now, on the flip side, I'll take a look at revenue differences in the two systems.

In the United States Budget for Fiscal Year 2009, the IRS counts government receipts via taxes at $2.7 trillion. An estimated $340 billion comes from corporate taxes, which we'll deal with later. It hasn't been stated whether excise and customs taxes will be removed for the 9-9-9 plan, so we'll remove that $100 billion to add back in later, assuming they will be kept. That leaves about $2.26 trillion that comes out of personal income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate taxes.

Going back to our data from before, there are about 118 million households in the country. This totals an average of about $19,152 per household. Mean income was about $60,500 in 2004 - following inflation, this would be about $71,000 today. Thus, the average effective rate on all households is 27% when factoring in all federal taxation.

Given that information, the average household under the 9-9-9 plan would be paying $6,461 in federal income tax, generating $762 billion in revenue. For the national sales tax, we need to take a look at consumer spending in the United States. The Gallup organization has it broken down nicely for us, and below are spending numbers on an annual basis:

$6.42 trillion on home improvement, furniture, etc., excluding rent/mortgage

$6.62 trillion on food and drink

$2.75 trillion on travel and leisure

$5.56 trillion on car repairs and gas

$8.83 trillion on generic shopping

$8.16 trillion on health and wellness

The only category that would possibly not be eligible for the 9-9-9 plan's national sales tax is "health and wellness", since it includes taxes on insurance plans. The total of the other categories is $30.18 trillion, taxed at 9.1%, generating $2.74 trillion in revenue. Finally, we add in the corporate tax rate. Currently, the rate is capped at 35%. Obviously, corporations find ways around this - there's no real reason to believe more corporations will pay their mandated amount. Let's assume that 33% more corporations will be willing to part with their money due to this, generating about $120 billion in revenue.

So, what do we end up with? Well, a 34% increase of revenue to about $3.6 trillion, the majority coming from the national sales tax. So what are the problems with this? I'll have to continue this post once again!

Schedule for Week Ending 10/10

Hey, I haven't done this in awhile.

Monday - sick day (8 hours)

Tuesday - 12:00 to 24:00 (20 hours)

Wednesday - 13:00 to 17:00 (24 hours)

Thursday - 12:00 to 24:00 (36 hours)

Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (40 hours)

The Travel Bug

I've been bit, I think, and it's not going away any time soon.

After having a long conversation about potential places to visit in Europe last night and poking around on Atlas Obscura, I feel restless. Just as I had been feeling like the "weird"-flavored places were starting to dry up in the area, I have a whole new database to poke through.

Anyway, since I'm reading about interesting places and sights anyway, I figured I'd compile a little list with descriptions, for my own reference and for (hopefully) the benefit of my reader. Readers? No, probably the former!

• Northlandz - a collection of model trains that is apparently second-to-none. It features thousands of train cars being carted around by engines, over eight miles of model track, a forty-foot bridge and a thirty-foot-tall model mountain. Last I checked it costs $13.75 per adult to get in, but from the sound of things it's well worth it. Open until 5:30pm on Saturday and Sunday. Located in North Jersey. Driving distance from home: 74 minutes.
• Monument to the War of the Worlds - in 1938, a broadcast of the War of the Worlds by Orson Welles on CBS radio sparked controversy and set a few people into a panic, thinking the Martian invasion to be real. The first landing of the alien crafted was reported that night was in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. Erected at this supposed landing spot is a monument to remember the occasion, a rock slab featuring one of the tripod landing craft. Located in North/Central Jersey. Driving distance from home: 50 minutes.
• Fonthill Museum - a castle constructed at the turn of the century for the collections of Henry Mercer. It's filled with artifacts from the everyday lives of those living in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. Costs $9 per student to get in, and it's open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Located in Northeast Pennsylvania near Doylestown. Driving distance from home: 56 minutes.
• The Land of the Lost - a bunch of dinosaurs built out of car parts created by Jim Gary, who died in 2006. He is the only person to have a solo exhibition displayed in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The dinosaurs are located scattered around a yard in Central Jersey near Asbury Park. Free. Driving distance from home: 71 minutes.
• The Holmdel Horn Antenna - a twenty-foot aluminum antenna that was first used in the 1950s and 1960s to discover the origins of the universe itself: the Big Bang. The antenna is retired and is now mounted in the middle of a field and is open to the public. Driving distance from home: 86 minutes.
• Popcorn Park Zoo - a home for rescued animals in the New Jersey pinelands. Apparently it's fairly unusual and has a lot of exotic animals you wouldn't think to find here. It costs $5 and is very near the town of Double Trouble, New Jersey. It's open until 5pm every day. Driving distance from home: 80 minutes.

If we hit all of them, it'd take about six hours and a little under $40 admission. Sounds like a fun Saturday to me!

An Historic Meal

I really just named that post that because I wanted to write "An Historic." Though this is pretty historic, nonetheless.

After realizing that sorbet was out of reach last night, I went out today and acquired a few new food processors - a blender and an ice cream maker. Yes, I'm really getting fancy now, it seems. I prepared a couple things pretty much simultaneously:

Strawberry Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

Two bananas

Ten strawberries

3/4 cup of milk

3 Tablespoons of sugar

6 ice cubes

Wash and rinse the strawberries and cut their stems off. Toss everything into a blender and use the ice crush setting until the ice disintegrates a bit, then blend it all together nice and smooth. Easy, quick, and tasty!

Raspberry Sorbet

Ingredients:

Three cups raspberries

One cup sugar

Half cup water

One Tablespoon lemon juice

Put the water and sugar into a sauce pan and put it on a low simmer until the sugar melts. Stir it to allow the sugar to melt and dissolve into the water, and remove from heat to allow it to cool.

Throw the raspberries into the blender and puree them until they're reasonably smooth. Pour the result into a mesh strainer and crush the contents through the strainer into a bowl - a potato masher is probably best, but a measuring cup did in a pinch for me. Juice a single lemon for the juice and combine it with the raspberry juice, stirring it up a bit.

Get as much juice out of the raspberries as you can!

Combine the water and raspberry/lemon mixture and put it into the fridge to cool off. After it was reasonably cold, pour it into the ice cream maker and let it mix it up a little, and put the results into the freezer until it's nice and firm.

Finally, was dinner! We decided to make US Senate Bean Soup, famous for the fact that's it's been on the US Senate cafeteria menu for over a century. Unfortunately, apparently all the groceries in south Jersey seemed to be out of ham hocks, so we had to improvise.

US Senate Bean Soup

Ingredients:

Half a bag of navy beans

A dinner ham

Half a tablespoon of black pepper

A tablespoon of salt

Three stalks of celery

One small onion

One medium-sized potato

7 cups water

Two chopped cloves of garlic

A pinch of parsley

First of all, combine the Navy Beans with the water in a large pot. Heat it to boiling and then remove from heat. Leave the beans for an hour to let them soak.

While waiting for the beans to soak, chop up the celery, onion, potato, and garlic. Combine them all in a bowl with pepper and salt. When the beans have soaked enough, place the ham into the pot and put it over a simmering heat.

Hot Ham Water

Dana dicin' up the ham

Let this cook for about an hour and fifteen minutes, then remove the ham and dice it into small chunks. Put the diced ham into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mix them nicely before dumping them all into the pot with the beans and water. Continue to simmer the mixture for another half hour, or until the potatoes are nice and soft.

After the soup is done cooking, put in a pinch of parsley and a little more salt to taste. Ladle it out and enjoy! It was a lot better than even we expected. I got to eat the same soup the likes of JFK, Barack Obama, and Bob Dole ate! And Mitch McConnell... and John McCain... hmm.

Looks tasty

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend it!

New Culinary Direction

So over the last two weeks, Dana and I have set out to cook more than we have. Well, by that I mean cook at all. A couple of my friends suggested that we blog about what we're making. We've started with some really simple recipes, but hopefully we'll branch out soon enough.

Tonight we gathered some ingredients for raspberry sorbet, but then soon realized our biggest obstacle: I don't have a blender or an ice cream maker. So, we ended up with raspberries, sugar, and three pounds of lemons. So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to make some raspberry lemonade!

Needs:

Some large bowls

Citrus juicer

Mesh strainer

Pitcher

3-4 medium-sized lemons

One cup sugar

A dozen raspberries

A medium sized (8-10 cup) saucepan

First, put about six cups of water into the saucepan and mix in the cup of sugar. Heat until it boils for about two minutes, then remove from heat to let it cool. After it's reasonably close to room temperature, pour the sugar-water into a large bowl and put it into the fridge to cool it further.

While you're waiting for the water to cool off, cut 3-4 lemons in half and squeeze the juice out of them with your juicer. Place the mesh strainer inside a bowl and pour the pulp-and-seed-filled lemon juice into the strainer to separate out the juice. Place your dozen or so raspberries in another bowl and mash them up - I used a spreader, but a spoon would probably do in a pinch.

Once the water is nice and cool, pour it into the pitcher and combine it with the lemon juice and raspberries pulp. Stir it up nicely and repeat the process you did with the lemon juice - pour it through the strainer into another bowl. Return the newly seedless mixture back into the pitcher. Add about half a dozen ice cubes and return it to the fridge to cool off.

To serve, we poured about two and a half cups of the stuff into each of two mason jars. We added a couple more ice cubes to each mason jar and a splash of vodka in each just to make things interesting. Anyway, it turned out a nice, pretty pink color:

Voila! It could have used a little more lemon juice (it had a much stronger raspberry flavor than lemon), but it was pretty great. Tomorrow, we're aiming to make some US Senate Bean Soup. Wish us luck!

Delilah

Tonight I found out that an old friend, Delilah Wooldridge, passed away on Monday night. She and I were pretty close back in high school - in fact, she was probably the closest thing I had to a "girlfriend" up to that point. I never met her in person, but we dated for about three years via myriads of IMs, e-mails, phone calls, and snail mail. As with anything, those three years had their ups and downs, and eventually she broke it off to pursue something else. It was pretty soon after that I let it go and forgave her, mainly because I understood that an exclusive relationship with someone long distance was something that was difficult to maintain.

Either way, we reconnected late in 2008 when I got a message from her on Facebook out of the blue. She told me she regretted the way we lost contact, but she would like to reconnect, so we did. We talked a bit about life and kept up with each other loosely, through a once-every-couple-weeks text conversation. She liked to send me pictures of her ferrets, and for awhile there I got one every day, which I liked a lot.

Delilah had changed in the four years we didn't speak, but she still seemed, at her core, the girl that I met back in the year 2001. When we spoke, whether on the phone or online, you really could get a feel for how witty she could be and how much she had genuine affection for me. Life was difficult for her now, I could surmise that much - she had a job that she didn't particularly like and made lots of plans for moving to places that weren't Oklahoma that really never came to fruition. But she trotted along, still hoping, still making those plans.

A couple anecdotes about the Delilah I knew. When we first met, we did so in a chatroom, so we were basically just anonymous strangers. After a couple weeks of talking to her regularly, we steadily revealed more and more about who we were. One day she consoled me when we had to put our cat George to sleep. George was sixteen years old (nearly a year older than me, if I remember correctly) and had been suffering from cancer for an extended period before we took him to be euthanized. Delilah said not to worry, that she'd do her best to make me feel better, and that she could be my new cat. Hence, her nickname, Kitty, since she always hated her name. That's what I called her until we lost contact in 2004.

I remember the loneliness Delilah seemed to have when her family moved to Oklahoma from Oregon. I had never moved, much less to a different state, at this point in my life, so it was hard for me to empathize, but I did my best to try and make her feel better. I distinctly remember the times she would be sitting at school, waiting to be picked up by her parents, when she would call me and we'd talk for awhile. If I helped her even a little bit to grow accustomed to her new surroundings, I'm glad.

Delilah took her own life on Monday, September 12. She was twenty-four and six days old - her last birthday was September 6. I found out tonight when I was listening to music at work and stumbled across an Everclear song. Everclear was the only band she liked when I knew her previously - her musical tastes had expanded since, of course, but I will always associate her with that band. I listened to the song and brought up her profile to post it there for her, and on her wall were the messages that alerted me to her passing.

It's difficult to think very rationally about the situation in the haze of confusion that I feel right now. I wish I could have done something or said something that would have compelled her to get help, but the truth was that I never would have guessed she was depressed or would be likely to take her own life. That seems to be the trope, though, about people who commit suicide - nobody could have known, nobody would have guessed. And the other universal truth? It can never be undone.

I miss you, Delilah. I wish I could have met you before you died. I saw a side of you that was tremendously sweet and beautiful, and I hope that you are at peace.

No Wawas in Mahwah

So what could Dana and I possibly do for a follow up to the gigantic road trip we got home from barely a week and a half ago. Well, for awhile, I've been wanting to go up to New York City to check out the new World Trade Center building. Currently, the building stands at over seventy stories tall, with thirty or so to go before they open. Considering the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is this weekend, what better time to go up?

Anyway, that was the plan, so I decided to use the last of my Hawaii Hilton points to book a hotel up in Mahwah. On the way up, we had a few stops planned, most of which were straight out of Weird NJ - our favorite! We ate a little breakfast and managed to get on the road before four o'clock to head up north.

Our first stop was Belle Mountain, an abandoned ski hill site. We walked up what was once the ski hill, but the trail was now overgrown. To be honest, it didn't seem very steep, either, the trail only being about a quarter of a mile long, if that. It was a nice little hike to head up the hill and back down, and on the way back down we saw the ruins of the ski lift. The hill was last skied in the late nineties, a victim of the mild winters of that time period and a general lack of interest.

Just down the road was the fabled Lambertville High School. Dana had read about it many times in the pages of Weird NJ, and it looked like a tempting place to go visit. However, the school is now privately owned and the owner doesn't hesitate to bring lawsuits against people who trespass. Additionally, there is absolutely no parking along the single-lane road leading past the school, and I feared for a moment that my car was wrecked after slipping into the sinkhole in one of the roads. So, we took a look at the school on the hill and moved on.

Next up was the Paulinskill Viaduct, a railroad bridge over the Paulins Kill river in North Jersey. For five years after it was completed in the 1910s, the viaduct was the largest concrete structure in the world. Although there are access doors that allow people inside the titanic structure, Dana and I decided to move on since the bugs were starting to get a bit thick. It was an amazing sight, either way!

It was pretty impressive. I couldn't help but notice how high every single river we drove by had crested, considering the rain that had been falling in the area lately, including two massive tropical storm remnants. There were a lot of bridges out and parts of roads washed away thanks to the high crests of the area rivers. In point of fact, this made it difficult to visit our next stop. We budged past a few "RESIDENTIAL TRAFFIC ONLY" road blocks, but ran into a terribly flooded stretch of road that forced us to skip Walpack Center, or so we thought.

Walpack was a town in the Delaware River watershed, its origins dating back to the early 18th century. The town was first mentioned in historical literature in about 1731, long before the creation of the United States of America. The area the town lay in became known as the Delaware Water Gap. In the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers obtained the land through eminent domain for the building of a dam. The dam would create an artificial lake that would flood much of the region for hydroelectric power generation. Thus, the federal government kicked everyone out of their homes in the area (save a few stragglers), but ultimately the dam project was never executed. The land was later donated to the National Park Service, with several towns surviving with extremely low populations. Walpack is one of those, with around 16 remaining residents as of the 2010 census.

A pretty interesting story, to be certain. It was about an hour or so to get to the restaurant from here, so we got back on the road. Dinner tonight was at an Afghani restaurant, which strangely enough served some American fare as well. I got a pair of kebabs and some buffalo wings, which oddly enough went very well together. It was a great meal to end a really fun day.

Our final stop was the hotel, another Hampton Inn, a brand which had become very familiar with us. Tomorrow we'll head into the city to scope out some sights, eat some cupcakes, and pay some respect to those who died ten years ago. A good weekend already!