First up is Building a Strip Canoe, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded: Full-Sized Plans and Instructions for Eight Easy-To-Build, Field Tested Canoes by Gil Gilpatrick. Gilpatrick was recently interviewed by of Wired’s GeekDad blog, and he sounds like a really interesting guy.

I also acquired his newly republished Building Outdoor Gear, 2nd Edition, Revised and Expanded: Easy-to-Make Projects for Camping, Fishing, Hunting and Canoeing (Canoe Paddle, Pack Frame, … Boxes, Bucksaw, Other Trail-Tested Projects), which I imagine I’ll be working through before the strip canoe book.

And speaking of canoe paddles, I also got Canoe Paddles: A Complete Guide to Making Your Own by Graham Warren, which comes highly recommended.

I’m fascinated by paddles. There are plenty of makers out there making all sorts strong and light paddles out of carbon fiber and other space age materials, but I always like the feel of a wooden paddle. It also seems like a completely doable woodworking project. Also, it gives me a reason to acquire a crook knife.

In addition to the books above, there are numerous great articles on building strip canoes online. Here are a few:

• “Light but Strong – Building Cedar Strip Canoes for Wilderness Tripping” By Jay Morrison

Will we ever actually build any of this stuff? I don’t know. We’re pretty busy with all the things a 9-year-old boy is busy with, plus I’m active in Scouting, too (beyond what I do with The Boy), and I occasionally like to go fishing and/or canoeing with other grown-ups, plus I have other, non-outdoorsy hobbies I want to do more of, like playing D&D and making music. Hopefully, we’lll have a lot of time to work on something like this eventually. But, in the meantime, it’s fun to dream.

So, there’s going to be some changes around here. Yes, I know, I say that about, oh, once a year. But, this time, I really believe it myself. I’m going to be doing some intensive WordPress work at the new job, which will hopefully bleed over into this joint (on the backend, anyway). I doubt I’ll blog that stuff unless I think others would find it really useful. But, I have found a re-focus for this blog to document some things I’ve gotten interested in over the last year or so (or my whole lifetime, depending on how you look at it), and I’m going to focus on that. But I’m going to stop with that tease right now. I’ll launch that new focus content on January 1, 2012.

In the meantime, I’ll maybe post up some (hopefully modest) new year’s resolutions and some other cobweb cleaning things.

Stay tuned…

At our first Cub Scouts campount (Fall Cub Adventure 2009), we left behind our camp chairs. Luckily, someone grabbed them, and I got them back a couple of weeks later. At last summer’s Withrow Springs State Park campout, I again left the chairs behind. I managed to get them back, though they were picked up by two different people, and it took me a while to finally get the second one back (totally my fault, though).

More importantly, I “lost” the pocketknife (a Benchmade Mini Griptillian with a combo blade) I’d carried for the last four or five years. I looked through all my camping gear at least three times, but it never turned up. I kept putting off replacing it, thinking it would turn up eventually. About three days before the next camping trip, I finally broke down and bought another knife, a nearly identical Mini Griptillian (this time with the plain edge). At the campout (Fall Family Camp 2010), I was setting up my tent when I saw there was something in the inside tent pocket: my pocket knife! (There was also a headlamp I didn’t realize I had lost, too.)

Well, the latest installment of the saga played out this morning. At this year’s Fall Cub Adventure, I lost my multi-tool (a Leatherman Wave). Again, I tore through all my camping gear and my truck — multiple times — but never found it. This morning, Daniel found it when looking for some YuGiOh cards in a bag we had taken to the campout. I remembered putting it in there as soon as he told me where he found it.

I need to get better organized with my stuff when camping. I know I need to take less stuff camping. I’ve been reading “Woodcraft and Camping” by George W. “Nessmuk” Sears recently. He was an early advocate for carrying less gear when camping, and I think it’s sinking in a little bit, especially after losing those two important tools recently.

Nessmuk had a great many insightful things to say in that slim volume (and I’ll be writing about more of them in the days and weeks ahead), but this one really hits home with me and some changes I’ve been making lately:

We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home; in towns and cities; in shops, offices, stores, banks anywhere that we may be placed—with the necessity always present of being on time and up to our work; of providing for the dependent ones; of keeping up, catching up, or getting left.

More to come. It’s good to be back.

“You can spend $299 on a Windows 7 netbook and do all that AND have a camera,” he said (or words pretty much to that effect).

“So,” I said. “That’s Windows and crappy netbook hardware.”

“Well, I guess they’re selling the ‘Apple Experience,’” he said, finally making sense.

The iPad is not, in a feature-wise sense, the be-all, end-all computer for everyone. It DOESN’T have a camera for video conferencing, etc. That’s not a big issue to me, as I don’t do that much, and I have a camera on my desktop if I need to. But, for people like Jack who do video chats, it’s a deal. I wonder if we’ll be able to get a webcam that will attach to the iPad for people like him?

But Jack is a geek (me, too). On the MacBreak Weekly podcast, they talked about whether it’ll appeal to the mainstream, with mixed opinions. But, I got a good taste of how it’ll appeal to the mainstream last night.

As soon as I got home, I pulled up the iPad video on the Apple website and cajoled my wife into watching it. The Wife isn’t a Luddite, but she’s not far off. She reads the newspaper every morning to get her news, she doesn’t read blogs or even know what an RSS feed is. She doesn’t Twitter or, if you can believe, even use Facebook. Her cellphone makes phone calls. It can send and receive text messages, but she won’t send them because it “takes too long to type them out on that keypad.” So, if I want to text her from my iPhone, I have to pretty much send messages that don’t require a response or can be answered with “yes” or “no” (usually typed as “y” or “n”).

But, when watching the iPad video, she said “wow!” no less than six times. More importantly, when it was over, she said, “That’s exactly how I use the laptop now, only it’s more comfortable.” Then I told her about the iWork apps for the iPad and she said, “That would be the perfect computer for me.”

So, selling her on eBaying the MacBook to get an iPad was easy-peasy (as she would say).

I think the only question now is how I’m going to afford a second one, since it’s going to be difficult to get the first one away from her.

Packing almost the entire house in three days was exhausting — I had NO idea we had that much crap packed into that little house — and unpacking has been extremely tedious. Not only do you have to unpack it, but then you have to decide where to put it! We’re getting there, though. We’ve only got about 30 or so boxes to unpack, and much of that is just stuff we don’t use all that often (holiday decorations, etc.).

I’ll post some pics once I get some taken. The last three weeks have been a whirlwind, but I want to get some taken while the trees are in their full fall drag.

Daniel also got a hiking patch for going on his first hike with the pack last weekend. He’ll get a special patch after he’s hiked 25 miles, and at 50 miles they’re presented with a hiking stick. He REALLY wants that stick! And he loves hiking, so I’ll bet he gets it sooner rather than later.

After a half hour or so of hearing him toss around, I went in to check on him. He was very upset. He said, “Daddy, why can’t I sleep in my bed tonight?”

His bed was at our house where there was no electricity, no heat, and a clogged sewer line that couldn’t be cleared until the power was restored. And it was getting down into the 20s at night. I reassured him that we’d be able to go home soon and he could get back to his routine.

So as I lay there and comforted my son who had held up for the first four nights like a champ, I nearly lost it, too. I had been trying to balance work (in the news business where we were busy covering the storms aftermath with something more like obsession and overkill than completeness) with making sure my family was safe and warm and my house was getting repaired and services restored. It had definitely taken a toll on me as well.

So I rubbed his back and sang the usual bedtime songs to help him get to sleep so that I could get some rest, too. But he piped up with a twist, “I want you to sing me a new song.”

I was surprised and a little nervous. I’m not a singer, and I just don’t know the words to that many songs — at least not ones appropriate for singing a 6-year-old to sleep. Bit it was late and we were both physically and mentally exhausted, so I sang him a new song: R.E.M.’s “Driver 8,” which is one of my absolute favorite songs and the first one I learned to play on my guitar close to 20 years ago and — most importantly — one of the few songs I know most of the words to.

“Driver 8″ is a great song, but not really a lullaby from any direction you approach it. It could be about a deranged train engineer, a long ago failed relationship, just pastoral scenes from the South, or lots of other things. Michael Stipe’s lyrics in the the early days were often obscure and difficult to understand even when you could decipher which words he was singing.

So, I sang this great but possibly inappropriate song to a tired and frustrated little boy who was trying to fall asleep in a strange bed for the fifth night in a row.

And he loved it.

It didn’t really put him to sleep, but we had a long talk about “floaters” and why they would be on powerlines, which lead to a conversation about cropdusters (and trains, of course).

We got to go back to our re-electrified home a couple of nights later, and things returned more or less to normal, including the same old couple of bedtime songs.

But when he’s really tired or maybe not feeling great, he asks for “Driver 8″ and it seems to help him get to sleep. It’s even more my favorite song than ever now.

As a child, I read voraciously. I read all the books I was interested in from our school library by the third grade and attacked the science fiction section of my county library shortly thereafter. My mother turned me on to The Hobbit when the Rankin Bass cartoon came on TV when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, and I checked out the novel the very next day. I moved on to the Lord of the Rings trilogy shortly thereafter, though it took some later re-readings to really tease the most out of those books.

But when I started checking out fiction for kids in 2003, I discovered that there are nearly more good books for kids these days that even a committed bookworm such as my myself could have read!

The Harry Potter books, of course, are often cited as the beginning of the kid lit explosion (and I’ve read and enjoyed those), and that series has spawned numerous knockoffs (some good, some dreadful), but there are librariesful of good kids books out there.

As The Boy gets closer to being able to digest books longer and more difficult than Sammy the Seal, I’m going to read more and more of these great new kids books (and some older ones that I loved as a kid) to help him get started as the same sort of life-long reader his mom and I are. I plan (though my track record’s not awesome) to blog at least quick recommendations (or warnings) about the ones I read.

Books that I read as a child made such an indelible impression on who I am today, and I want to him have that same sort of relationship with books, too.

So, I’ll start with three books that I’ve re-read in recent years that influenced me as a youngster.

I’ve written about A Heart To the Hawks by Don Moser here before, but I wanted to mention it again in this context because it’s such a good book and means so much to me.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George is another nature-related book that has stuck with me. I’m sure I saw the Disney movie based on this book, but it’s the book itself that I remember the most. Every kid seems to harbor desires to run away from home, even if just for a little while. I spent a lot of time in the woods as a kid, and I always imagined myself as a kindred spirit of Sam Gribbley, even if I didn’t run away to the Catskills and survive an entire winter on my own.

Madeleine L’Engle’s popular children’s fantasy-science fiction classic A Wrinkle in Time inspired a life-long interest in science that — despite my lack of science degrees or ability to do complex equations — lives on today in my reading habits. The way it describes things like tesseracts and folding spacetime in a way that young children can understand and get excited about it just flat amazing.

I look forward to The Boy discovering wondrous things in books like these and others that he’ll discover as he embarks on his life as a reader.

All the fallen branches are gone, though we have a lot of small sticks that we’re paying The Boy by the trashcan to pick up to put out for yard waste pickup every week. It’ll take a while, but he’ll get it and, hopefully, learn something about the satisfaction of working hard and getting paid for that work.

Our back porch cover was smashed by a large branch that fell from our sycamore, and it’s been taken down and hauled away. We’re now left with just a concrete slab porch that’s not all that enjoyable or useful. But, luckily, a good friend is an architecture student, and he and a classmate are going to design and build us a new deck. They’re going to start after the semester’s over in a few weeks, so we should have a great new deck by the end of May! The best part is, since they want a real-world project that’s actually been built in their portfolios, they’re going to do the labor themselves for free! All I have to do is pay for the materials, though I plan to help them build it, as well. Look for updates as soon as we get started.

UPDATE: looks like we’re possibly looking for a new house with more room, so we’ve decided to not build the deck for now.

Here are the houses I lived in while I was growing up (i.e., living with my parents) (addresses are approximate for some, as I can’t remember the actual addresses):

434 21st Street, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

I lived here from the age of 1 or so until I was 5. This was the first house I remember living in. They’ve since enclosed the carport. Our landlady lived next door. I was afraid of her. Lived through a tornado (1973? 74?) that ripped the roof off of the house across the street. Saw a bigfoot in the backyard one cold Thanksgiving day.
434 21st Street, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

3199 Debra Street, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

I lived here from the age of 5 (kindergarten) until December of 1980 (6th grade) when we moved to Newport. My dad designed this house, and it was the first home my parents owned (and the only one they ever built, which should serve as a warning, I think).
3199 Debra Street, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

411 Pine Street, Newport Arkansas 72112

I lived here from the age of 11 until 13 or so. Important, formative years. All sorts of illicit things went on that in house. I’ll refrain from telling stories to protect the (not so) innocent, though.
411 Pine Street, Newport, Arkansas 72112

Smith Drive, Newport, Arkansas 72112

I can’t remember the exact street number, but I think it was 2992. I lived here from 8th grade until 11th grade. EXTREMELY formative years. Lots of teen angst. More illicit stuff (some of it really fun). And, yes, our yard bordered a soybean field. In summer, the mosquitoes were so bad we couldn’t use the garage. Welcome to Newport.
Smith Drive, Newport, Arkansas 72112

Bluff View Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

In January of 1986 (my junior year), we moved back to Batesville, which was a good thing, in retrospect. We rented this house for the first month until my parents bought the next house across town. We only lived here briefly, but I still have fond memories of this house. Had my first REDACTED here with REDACTED. Sorry. ;) Oddly, I don’t think this house IS on Google Street View! For some reason, they didn’t swing down this stretch of Bluff View, which is weird. I THINK it’s the yellow 2-story house in this view when you’re facing SSE, though it wasn’t yellow in 1986.
Bluff View Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

1605 Moss Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

Spent the rest of my junior year and until I went off to college in September 1987 here. A really good year, in retrospect. I had a great girlfriend, good friends (many from before I moved away 5 years prior), etc.
1605 Moss Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

2215 Goff Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

My parent moved here in winter of 1988 while I was away at college. I honestly don’t remember the move, as I wasn’t there for it, in all likelihood. However, I dropped out of college temporarily that spring (my first college had trimesters, and winter term ended at Spring Break), and I lived here with them until going back to college that summer. I worked at McDonald’s. On the morning shift. It was a WEIRD, WEIRD time in my life. I learned to play guitar and reconnected with a friend from high school who took a year off after high school so was still around. My parents only lived here for about six months before my father was transferred to Little Rock.
2215 Goff Drive, Batesville, Arkansas 72501

12910 Pleasant Forest Drive, Little Rock, Arkansas 72212

My parents lived in this house for 15 years or so. I lived here with them for a couple of summers during college, including the summer after I graduated, right before I got married and started graduate school (and started paying my own way). They lived here until they retired and moved back to Newport (where my dad is from and where they still had lots of friends) in 2004 (2005, maybe).
12910 Pleasant Forest Drive, Little Rock, Arkansas 72212

Until we bought our current house in 2000, we lived in a succession of apartments (some better than others), and I’m not going to publish a map to my house here.