A Percussionist's Notebook

 I just realized that this sounds like a 'James Bond' type spy thriller. Actually it involves my attempts to produce a non-reflective finish for so many of my aluminum projects. Powder coating and anodizing are the typical processes to produce this finish but they are expensive or require car battery chargers and caustic chemicals for the DIYers.  I've tried a flat black paint using etching preps etc. but they all resulted in the paint chipping off quickly when tossed around and hitting other things in an accessory case. Since I use a 2 part epoxy to connect the parts of the Nickster together with perfect results, I thought about using this as a bass coat for the paint (see my Nickster Commemorative post). This result had promise but the finish became glossy even though I used the matte black paint in the mixture.  I came up with this idea from an accident. After the epoxy/paint mixture experiment I left some of the mixture out and some of the paint had dripped on the mixtu

 AND YET ANOTHER REASON TO HATE MOWING THE GRASS!!!   After mowing this last time, I kept smelling pine. There is a pine tree close to where I keep the lawn mower and occasionally I brush up against it and get sap on my hands or shoes but not this time.  No, this time that pine tree had a more sinister plan. It dropped a glob of the stuff on the back of my head (one of the few places that I have what's left of my hair). I only found it about 5 hours after it happened, so I Googled how to get rid of it. Olive oil, a hot wash cloth with olive oil wrapped on my head for 10 minutes did it. I'm now free of pine sap but smell like a tossed salad. Not only does the sap smell but it's sticky. I hate sticky (even more than mowing). I wore a beard for 40+ years and didn't eat pancakes the entire time because I didn't want the syrup sticking on my beard.  OK, so no more sticky pine smell and as for the salad? My Grandmother, Grandfather, Mother, Aunts, Uncles and cousins would

As in 'Little Miss....' Our kitchen window is a great place to grow cactus. One in particular was from a trip to south eastern Colorado in 1974. We also put in herbs, orchids, and other things in there which creates a hot bed of little flying things.    About 2 months ago we started to notice that we had fewer and fewer of those flying things. But we did see some little dots on the shelf at the bottom of the window. That's when we noticed Muffet in the upper left hand corner of the window. Muffet is a cobweb spider (I looked it up on Google), one of the most common house spiders in the US. Normally Patti does not tolerate spiders in the house but we began to think there may be a correlation between Muffet's appearance and the lack of flying things. Sure enough, I watched her crawling towards a small dot stuck in her web. After about 5 minutes of dining she dropped the bug on the shelf, exactly where we find them.  This symbiotic relationship has given me a lot of entert

 I timed myself mowing the lawn this morning. I hate mowing the lawn! Even though this sub-23 minutes is considerably shorter than mowing the family lawn when I was a boy. Our yard back then was larger, the front and back was equal to about 3 football fields and took about 24 hours to finish (there might be a slight exaggeration  here). It rains a lot in Pennsylvania which normally means we had to mow very often. It doesn't rain very much in Colorado and 'green' grass is not native to the area. Buffalo grass and yucca yes but not that stuff that makes it look like a New England countryside. Also, there are only 1 or 2 roads to get anywhere in Colorado unlike PA where they invented the "toll road" and multiple main, secondary and tertiary roads. When our uncles, aunts and cousins would come visiting the conversation always started with " What route did you take to get here?" That led to a half hour discussion about any and all variations of routes. After