Two posts in one night

Here is what I have been working on in my free time over the last 6 months. the biplane is scratch built to my own plans. It started out as a sketch on the back of a poster that I then converted to working plans with a CAD program on my computer. I cut everything out (there are LOT of ribs with two wings), built up the frame over the plans and made the tail and wings.


The problem was, the nose way too long and there was no way it would have balanced without a lot of extra weight in the tail. So I chopped it--even though it is hard to tell from the next pictures. If you look close, there are three holes cut out in the nose of the first picture, and only two in the second.
By the way, I cut all those holes in the landing gear too. That was fun.

To show off all the beautiful frame work, I covered it with translucent covering. here is the finished product:

But wait--there's more! Okay, not such a big surprise for those that already know about this project, but since I have alienated all of those people by not posting forever, only complete strangers will ever see this posting, and you, my new, strange friends have no idea what I am talking about. So here it is. . .



Drum roll, please. . .



a little more suspense . . .




It has lights!!! (the soldering was a real bear. Thanks Jon, for the help.)
but it looks cool under the Christmas tree. It should be really visible for night flying--the original intent of the design. I am sure almost no one cares, but it was a lot of fun to design and build. I sure hope it flies.

Am I in?

Now that I have avoided posting on my blog for long enough that it is just me again talking to the air, I will probably do two posts here maybe even tonight. A while ago my brother joined an exclusive group started by one of my friends from high school. The stone lions are the biggest rage of the internet. I hate being shown up by my little brother. So I had to find a stone lion that was stone-lion-y in a Deutschlehrer kind of way. This lion is in fact over a fireplace in the Goethe-Institute that I visited in Boston last month. I saw it in an assembly room during a very crowded reception for German teachers during a convention for language teachers in general. It was the bright point of the evening--except I didn't have a camera with me. Luckily there was another reception the next night, which I was late for, which meant I had to stand in the back next to the wine for an hour--which would have been fine, except I don't drink--but great accomplishments sometimes require sacrifice. When the talk was over (it was an author talking about her book about--and I am not making this up-- two siblings with a sick cat that they cured by feeding it a very specific type of coffee bean that they then recycled after the cat was finished with it, by roasting the passed beans, grinding them, and making coffee out of them--which they then sold. The high point of the evening was when friends of the author served coffee according to the recipe in the book. There are days when the Word of Wisdom really comes in handy. Anyway, when everyone got up to enjoy the "refreshments" I snapped this picture. So, Charlotte, am I in?