On Sharpening Tools

August 8, 2017

...g holes in my education. I won’t bore you with an account of my philosophy self study but I would like to share what I learned about sharpening this past weekend. While one can pick up a lot about philosophy from reading books, sharpening is a skill best learned hands-on. For this reason I’m not going to give detailed sharpening instructions in this post but I will note the basic principles. It’s simple: you move from course abrasives to finer one...

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Misadventures in Laser Cutting

Mr. Homegrown

August 5, 2019

Design

7 Comments

...an initial enthusiasm followed closely by alternating periods of triumph, self doubt and pain. Hopefully you learn from your mistakes while acknowledging that you’ll never un-see the flaws nobody else will ever notice. My latest episode of DIY mountain climbing involved a laser cutter. When I found out that the LA Central Library had a laser cutter that you can use for free I jumped on the opportunity. As an experiment I thought I’d try making a...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

Mr. Homegrown

July 10, 2017

Gardening

3 Comments

...n as if it were nothing at all. In tilling the soil many a child “found himself.” In one school there was an Italian boy who just naturally could not help fighting. Though punished, he had a fight almost daily. All of a sudden he got interested in the work in agriculture and asked for a garden of his own. All the good land having been apportioned he was given part of a dump heap in a mean corner of a vacant lot just being put under cultivation. Af...

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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

Mrs. Homegrown

February 26, 2016

Domesticus, Tidying up

2 Comments

...lding techniques. These things made the book worthwhile for me. The book itself is interesting as an object. It’s smallish, and pretty. Inside, the illustrations are Japanese-cute line drawings. It doesn’t look like any cleaning or organization book I’ve ever seen, and that is what makes it special. Kondo understands that tidying is a spiritual activity, not an organizational activity. The same week we got this book, we also had a library book out...

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Of paper wasps and scrub jays

Mrs. Homegrown

June 2, 2015

Bees, Gardening, Insects, Nature Awareness

15 Comments

...te a second wasp, delicately picking it apart on the railing, looking very self-satisfied. I thought the show was over, but it turns out she was just enjoying appetizers, because next she launched up and took the entire nest in her beak–random wasps still attached– and flapped off with it into the clear blue sky. Perhaps to enjoy the creamy center in privacy–or perhaps to feed her babies? One wasp returned to sit forlornly in the place where the n...

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