Why I Oughta...

Last week, I showed the final form of the raised hearth - after I stripped the concrete-pouring forms from the four sides and talked about how I can now move-on to actual oven building.    For me, that started with creating a template out of Masonite.  I bought an 8x4' sheet and created a little circle-drawing jig that I cabbage'd together out of spare parts I had on hand.  The sheet is just 48" wide and after thinking about it, I've decided to make a 40" oven (interior diameter), which means the outside footprint diameter is 49".  That meant that I'm going to be a half-inch shy on either side.  That's ok.   I also needed to figure out where the dome meets the inner arch.  I started by attaching the circle-drawing-jig to the center of the board and drew out a 40" and 49" circle.  Then, I started to think about my arch sizes and how the inner/outer arch differ.  I chose to go with a 20-1/8th" inner arch width.   That meant...

I was doing a little thinking/looking at this here online Weblog (or diary as I like to think of it) as it relates to the template.  It has been a number of years since I've done any real housekeeping and moving things around.  As part of that process, I thought I'd let some of the data lead the discovery process to understand how most of you are engaging with my diary.  First...let me say that I continue to be amazed that ANYONE reads any of these posts.  I do ZERO promotion of the blog.  I have no ads and cater the posts/topics to an audience of one:  me.  I write MOSTLY as a resource for my own sanity - and to flex my own publishing muscles.  Seth Godin calls it SUSDAT .  I call it SUSDAP.  Shut up, Sit down and Post.  Every.Single.Day. But, what are *most* of you using to read these diary posts?  By a large margin, you lunatics who are here are reading this post (and everything else) on your mobile device.   And, ...

If you look around here on the blog, you might have noticed a little bit of updates.  Call it 'Spring Cleaning', but a few weeks ago, I ended up updating the fonts site-wide to Roboto, tweaked some of the colors (Blog title, tags, tabs) and added a header photo.  You can see the screenshot of the blog above that includes that header photo of the new set of Frans Fontaine Hornbeam Trees that I recently put in. The last time that I update the look of the blog was back in March of 2017 when I added this responsive template that was mostly blue . While this isn't an exhaustive look at the process, this is the (at least) 11th documented version of the blog over the years.  Here are the first nine versions of screenshots that I have from 2004 to 2016 .  And here's the 10th and most recent .  The fonts are an improvement (imho - and that's 'humble' for sure, btw !), but the real improvement is the header photo.  It personalizes the site a bit, as one of N...