I’ve now had a full season with my mega-sized rain barrel. It’s great. Here’s how it works and what I learned along the way.
The “barrel”: I also have a proper 55 gallon barrel collecting rain from my garage, but the barrel that’s the focus of this post isn’t actually a barrel – it’s a caged IBC tote (“Intermediate bulk container“) that holds a whopping 1,040 liters of rainwater!
Status: full.
I bought it from a local government unit, the Washtenaw County Conservation District (store link). It didn’t fit in my minivan so I carried it home on my cargo bike – that’s a whole ‘nother story that I wrote up as The biggest thing I’ll ever tote on a bike.
I won’t lie, these IBC totes sure are ugly! And mine is visible from the street. Here’s how it looked at first:
I had planned to build a wood screen in front of it and paint a mural or something, but it was simpler to buy online a black cover that zips right on. Also, apparently these totes will grow algae inside if you don’t cover them or paint them black to block out the sunlight, so this was a 2-for-1 solution.
“Do you have any questions?” the surgeon asked. After a year of learning all I could about kidney donation, I did not. Following a quick debate over who would shave my abdomen – the surgical team, eager to start, waved off a nurse – it was finally happening.
On October 30th my left kidney was removed via laparoscopic surgery, flown to California, and transplanted into a complete stranger. This kicked off a chain of paired transplants: in exchange for that person receiving my kidney, their loved one put their spare kidney up for grabs to another stranger with a loved one willing to donate, and so on. Last I heard, seven transplant surgeries were scheduled as a part of my chain.
Those recipients will live longer lives. And richer ones: free from dialysis, they can play, work, and travel. This came at little cost to me. I spent a night in the hospital followed by several weeks of recovery at home, mostly spent reading and taking walks. During the screening process, a surgeon categorized me as a “chronic do-gooder” type – guilty as charged – and as such I will confidently say there is no better deal out there when it comes to doing good.
Here are my collected notes from throughout the process. Along the way, I read, listened, and watched much of what’s out there about non-directed (aka “anonymous,” “altruistic,” or “good Samaritan”) kidney donation and have woven in a reading list of sorts. Those writings were above all what convinced me to donate.
This year both of my weathered passenger seat cushions split open (Yuba has entirely changed the seat cushions they sell since I bought mine, and I hear the new ones are more durable). So I undertook my first foray into upholstery, refashioning my old and busted Soft Spots into one double-length cushion, a couch of sorts.
My coworking friends at Workantile have many interesting skills. One of them is a hobbyist upholsterer! With her tools and know-how it only took an hour or two, using materials we already had lying around.
First I measured and cut a piece of plywood to cover the full tail of the bike. It turned out that the foam from the old seats was still in good shape, so we reused it. We stuffed some foam scraps between the two old blocks of foam:
All the foam, resting on the plywood basePacked tight and held in place by special spray adhesive
My brother recently suggested I could upgrade my hat game. He was right: the crusty, adjustable-strap White Sox hat I’d worn for years was due for replacement. I liked the fit and look of the New Era 59Fifty wool ballcap he lent me. But I didn’t care to advertise for a team (a.k.a. company) I don’t care about, nor did I wish to invite small talk about sports.
My mission: replace the logo on an official New Era baseball cap with one of my own design. It was a fun mixed-media project, part art, part craft, and part hack.
I ordered a gently-used cap from eBay. If you don’t care about team logo, the choices are vast! I purchased a 1990s vintage black hat with a black Yankees logo for $13.
The original hat, ready for surgery
First I removed the existing logo. I used a seam ripper to slice threads and pliers to yank on loose ones. When removing logos from other garments, I rip stitches from the back, but that wasn’t possible here due to the white backing liner on the inside.
Going…
This part was slow going. All of the yanking with my dominant hand bent the cap slightly. I probably should have done more slicing and snipping and less brute force with the pliers.
Going… (this was messy)
The result wasn’t perfect. A few threads from the logo remained and I pulled out a little material from the hat itself. But it sufficed once I covered it up. I wonder if contrast would have helped. Would a white logo on black hat work better (because the white logo stitches would be easier to selectively remove) or worse (anything left over would stick out)?
Gone! The outline visible here can’t be seen under the new logo.
Next I made the new logo, using the community laser cutter at All Hands Active. I downloaded the Extinction Symbol and loaded it into Lightburn, which auto-traced the outlines. I was ready for the laser.
I cut the logo out of corrugated plastic sheeting, often called Coroplast. Most plastic is unsafe to cut on a CO2 laser, but Coroplast is okay. In Ann Arbor, unscrupulous companies print advertisements on this plastic and illegally place them in the public right-of-way near highway off-ramps and busy intersections.
I considered 3D-printing the symbol. That way I could have controlled its depth – the Coroplast stock is a tiny bit thicker than a New Era-style logo – and added touches like tiny holes through which to sew the logo to the hat. But that would have taken a while to design and print. And I liked the spirit of reusing roadside litter.
The laser burned nearly through and I finished it with an X-ACTO knife.
After the laser cutterTrimmed with the knife
Next, I wrapped the logo. I used a small bundle of embroidery floss, I believe a 8.7 yard bundle of 6-stranded DMC 25. That was exactly enough for this project.
Wrapping underway, trying to keep the knots on the back
A crafty friend at Workantile suggested I wrap the logo before attaching it to the hat. Brilliant!
Mostly wrappedFully wrapped and ready to mount
I got it almost entirely wrapped, then tacked it onto the hat in a few places with the same thread. Finally, I completed a few tricky wrapping stitches that were easier once the logo was anchored to the hat.
The wrapping is imperfect and in one spot I pulled too hard and compressed the plastic. But from across the room it passes for a commercially-made hat!
The finished product
I’m pleased with how it turned out. I have a comfortable, well-made hat and instead of promoting a sports franchise, I’m starting conversations about living during the Sixth Mass Extinction. Seeing the logo reminds me to think timefully.
If I hack another hat, I’ll consider 3D-printing the symbol to try to precisely match the depth of the hat’s original logo. And I’d start with a hat that isn’t black-on-black so the New Era logo on the side pops: I enjoy the tension and confusion that comes from this being a mass-produced object with a hand-made logo.
Tl;dr – check out gath.io for making chill, inclusive, not-creepy event pages. Unlike Evite, It won’t track you or serve you Bitcoin ads.
It amazes me how a free, open-source program can outperform its proprietary, commercialized equivalents. An obvious one is R, the statistical programming language. It blows away competitors like SPSS. R is a huge project, but some great open-source projects can surpass commercial competition while remaining a single person’s side project.
It touches my heart that people build great things together, transparently, and then make them freely available. I’ve long meant to write posts where I shout out a free, open-source software (FOSS) that has improved my life materially or spiritually. I was finally spurred to write when I got an Evite yesterday, for a 7-year-old’s birthday party. I opened the link on my phone and saw:
barf
Evite has always had annoying ads and links, but this took it to the next level. I buy as little as possible from Amazon. Amazon’s bad enough. But Bitcoin?? It’s a Ponzi scheme that lures in unsuspecting saps (see the Citations Needed episode on manipulative Bitcoin/crypto/NFT advertising) and sows remarkable environmental destruction. Happy birthday, kid, here’s 0.0005 Bitcoin. Good luck spending it. (Web3 Is Going Great has you covered for crypto realism and schadenfreude).
These ads put me over the edge, but I’ve disliked Evite for years. In particular, it’s creepy that the organizer can track who has opened and viewed the invite.
And then there’s Facebook events. Because I’m not on Facebook, I sometimes forget how many events are organized there. Until someone sends me one I want to attend and I’m unable to view the info or RSVP. Argh!
Why must we engage with platforms that track us, shove ads in our faces, and sell our data in order to organize a dang birthday party or seed-swap?? Well, someone else felt the same way and did something about it. Enter: gathio!
This is a love letter to Ann Arbor’s scrappy little downtown makerspace, All Hands Active. In particular, their weekly Repairsday event, which takes place on Thursdays from 6-8pm. And it’s a vignette of how they helped revive a lovely old keyboard/synthesizer.
All Hands Active is a nonprofit. Their mission is educational. I’d argue it’s political, too, though not in the common sense of the word as it relates to electoral politics or parties. Rather, there’s an ethos that you should be free to modify and repair things, that people should help and teach each other, that consumer culture and its quickly-obsolescent, disposable goods are bad, and that knowledge should be free. (Some of that might be me projecting).
So, Repairsday. Any human can bring in an object they’d like to repair. Volunteer AHA members are on hand to help. That can look like advice, diagnosis, or attempting to fix the item together. Sometimes an item can’t be fixed, but that’s okay too. You learn from taking it apart, and for me, knowing that a thing was unfixable – in my case, a toaster that only heated one of its two slots – put me at ease with discarding it.
Last week, AHA Repairsday helped me fix a classic keyboard, rescuing a valuable object from the landfill and giving it a second life.
Years ago, someone accused me of being a hipster. I told them, I don’t even really care about music, so how could I be a hipster? They replied, that’s the most hipster answer!
Could it be the same for skateboarding, where my natural lack of style is in fact its own style? Hi, I’m Sam, and I’m a sk8r dad.
Dadness already had been stoked to a near-inferno by the widespread re-adoption of loose-fit, faded denim jeans, sometimes with a sensible cuff-roll well suited to low-impact cycling or safely depressing the pedals of a used minivan.
Ouch! I certainly wear loose-fit faded jeans to cycle and drive a minivan. One quibble: I’d argue that rolling up your pant cuffs is trying too hard. It’s more dad style to have a chain guard and/or just get grease on your pants. But yeah, this has my number.
Well, if “dad tricks” is a style, I am its paragon. I appreciate the effort by these skaters to do dad tricks, but they’re too young, too talented, too far removed to know real dad skating. Here’s my insider take on being a sk8r dad.
Contributing to Workantile, the co-working community I’m a part of
It turned out nicely. Here’s a writeup and some photos.
The rack
It started when I was biking home with groceries from Meijer and encountered a big pile of buckthorn by the side of the road, culled from Greenview Nature Area and awaiting pickup for composting. The biggest trunk was a decent sized log. The bike was already heavily laden but fortunately, a log is a different shape than grocery bags so I found a spot for it:
This was surprisingly easy to haul
For a while I’d been interested in woodworking with found wood, especially buckthorn. I take pleasure in removing it and would enjoy that even more if I could turn it into things. I asked my friend and de facto woodworking coach Chris how I should go about processing logs. Buy a bandsaw? Build one of those circular-saw-converted-to-chainsaw DIY mills I saw on YouTube? Both seemed excessive.
I’d liked the idea of making a wallet out of a empty bag of potato chips, but didn’t know how to use a sewing machine. I finally bought one off of Craigslist this winter and am figuring it out. A sewing machine unlocks some projects I’d long been curious about – this is one of them.
I followed the steps from this Instructables guide and it turned out pretty well! I would make this project again. It felt like it dragged on, my 10 year-old helper and I took our time, but if doing this again I could move much faster and complete it in an hour or two. I wonder what the durability of the wallet will be. I plan to use it, so will find out.
It’s fun to think about what part of the design you want on the outside
I recently broke a pair of toaster tongs I’d been given. They looked very much like this set ($10):
Image belongs to the Vermont Country Store
Complete with the laser-etched phrase and magnet to grip a metal surface. Made from a single piece of wood, with thin tongs, one of the tongs eventually snapped. I generally stick to rough, practical carpentry, but saw these plans from Rockler for DIY kitchen tongs that made this finish carpentry project seem within my reach. And it was! Now I’ll have more confidence tackling polished projects going forward.
