June 2025 – Photo of the Month

June 2025 – Photo of the Month
I can't believe I was lucky enough to catch this. It's not the best photo I have taken, but it's the first time I have ever seen an owl perched, and I actually had my camera. It was a rainy morning and a deer and it's fawn were in the back pasture. I walked out to grab a photo, and a Barred Owl silently glided past me and landed in a nearby tree. I walked…

May 2025 – Photo of the Month

May 2025 – Photo of the Month
I built the wildlife pond to attract wildlife for photography. I didn't expect to get fish at the time, but that has been a wonderfully rewarding detour. With everything settled and established, this year has been something else. This Townsend's Chipmunk is a regular visitor now. He's quite the feisty fellow, loves fresh strawberries.

A Special Place for Tadpoles

A Special Place for Tadpoles
The folks at Hoshi Koi were nice enough to let us scoop up some tadpoles with our pond plants. They said the fish wouldn't bother them, but there were no tadpoles the next day, so I decided to try again with a dedicated pond. I really just want to attract frogs, but I can always stack the deck. I added 6 White Cloud Mountain Minnows and bunch of tadpoles a few weeks ago. I was…

April 2025 – Photo of the Month

April 2025 – Photo of the Month
Sometimes it's just about having your camera at the right time. I was sitting at the pond watching the fish when this Anna's Hummingbird came up and took a bath in the waterfall.

The Wildlife Pond is Alive!

The Wildlife Pond is Alive!
There is still a little weeding and cleaning up to do, but all of the major pieces are in place. The goldfish from last year all made it through the winter split between a fish tank in the dining room and a stock tank in the garage. I built some fish hides last month and got them moved in. This week the pond plants showed up. It has really come together from that nasty hole…

Shop Nation Miter Saw Dust Collection

Shop Nation Miter Saw Dust Collection
I have always had a dust collection system connected to my miter saw, and it has always been terrible. Recently cleaning the shop, I found the internal pipe completely blocked and realized it hadn't been working in a while. Think about that, it's so bad when it is working, I didn't even notice when it stopped. I had seen the Shop Nation videos and decided to give it a go. I bought the DeWalt version…

Chicken Casa Complete

Chicken Casa Complete
I have learned so much about estimations and weather. I thought I could knock this thing out in a few weeks. For those counting, it's been 13 weeks since January 5th 2025. A sprained ankle delayed me a little bit, but most of my miscalculation was due to not being realistic about Western Washington weather. If you watch the build video, you will see me cover my material and work quite a few times for…

Chicken Casa v2 almost complete

Chicken Casa v2 almost complete
Between a sprained ankle and the weather, it's taken me over a month to get 8 good days in, but that's enough to get it completely framed, wrapped and the roof covered. Next I need to install a door, the trim, the siding and the metal roofing. There is some painting and more weather coming, so not sure how long it will take, but I was shooting to have the roof on tomorrow, so I'm…

What years of SBC addiction looks like

What years of SBC addiction looks like
I am a relentless tinkerer. I'm constantly trying to wire something to something else and often single board computers are the glue to some random home automation problem. It's been about 6 years since I started using Raspberry Pi, Arduino and the like regularly. This morning, I wanted to build a little device to monitor a camera feed like a baby monitor and I thought a Raspberry Pi Nano would do perfectly for the job.…