Our first evening in Costa Rica there was an orientation meeting of the tour group before supper. The tour director (aka ‘our guide’) had written a few notes on a flip chart, of which two were the most important phrases in Spanish to know for traveling in CR: ‘gallo pinto’ and ‘pura vida’. Gallo pinto …
Author Archives: deanb
Home from Costa Rica
If you haven’t noticed the latest couple of items on my twitter feed, I’m back from ten days of a trip to Costa Rica. I have a lot of pictures to process and post and a lot I’d like to write if I ever get around to it. To summarize, I went to the edge …
Squirrel Cage Swift
I did get the squirrel cage swift finished over the weekend. I realized that I hadn’t bought enough maple to make a frame for it, so I put together a frame out of some mahogany (probably it’s lauan, Philippine mahogany) that Matt had originally bought for deck flooring and brought up to Casco for bridges …
Fish Sticks puzzle
Late last Thursday afternoon (Dec. 24) we went up to the Ocean State Job Lot store near the Oxford/Norway line because Arlene wanted a handful of cheap putty knives for printmaking (getting ink out of cans). Of course we spent way more than six times 80 cents, but she did get those putty knives. Among …
Walk around the block
In Casco, it’s three miles around the block; or, at any rate, three miles around the smallest loop of roads that goes around our house. On Christmas Eve we went for a walk, and took the left fork on George Hannon Road so as to take a slightly longer route, maybe fifty yards or so …
More camera practice
I took Matt’s old camera (and really, I’m entitled to call it my new camera now. I paid him for the body, and he and Anne gave me the lens for hanukah) outside yesterday to practice wildlife photography at our bird feeders. It has the big advantage over my little point-and-shoot that you can focus …
Cigar box guitar progress report
This is something I started a couple of years ago and have just got back to, a cigar box guitar. It’s not really made from a cigar box, rather from a box made of thin plywood from a lauan hollow-core door, but it’s cigar-box guitar level technology.
Squirrel cage swift progress report
Back in county fair season (the date on the photo says September 13) we went to the Oxford County fair. I saw a yarn-handling device labelled “squirrel cage swift” — think two hamster exercise wheels with a skein of yarn around the two of them. It takes up lots less space than an umbrella swift …
Native American style flute
Last weekend I finally finished a Native American style flute from a kit I got several years ago at the Shoshone-Bannock powwow at Fort Hall, Idaho (down the road a piece from my mom’s house). Here it is — (no snide remarks please) On the way home from Pocatello a year ago we had a …
Hanukah 5770 (or ’09)
We had our kids, their SOs, and their cousin from Southboro and his wife and kids over on Wednesday for a Hanukah party. Nothing remarkable, but a couple of pictures — And here’s our old old hanukiah up in Casco on Friday, the eighth night —