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When I was a kid I spent a fair amount of time with my mom, dad, and papa working on various projects. We would build things from bare wood up to something fun (go kart! fort!) or practical (furniture!). But I would never consider myself to be a "woodworker" or really good with wood. Wood is fun - the tools and techniques for handling it are fairly cheap and easy - but it is also really tough to do "well." So, here are my secrets to having fun and making decent wood projects, in an environmentally friendly way. I've listed the secrets as part of narration of a little counter that I built for an empty spot in our kitchen. Our stove left an 11 inch gap going to the wall. Given that we lacked counter space, gaining that 11 inches of extra space became a welcome improvement to cooking happiness.

1. Start with Scrap Wood

It's not just good for the environment, it's good for your bank account and your creativity. Start with scrap wood!

These are leftover pieces of wood selected from among the rotten pieces we tore down when we replaced our fence. We're giving life to something that would be trash. It also gives a fun feeling to the end result: weathered and full of character from the first minute. If you don't have your own scrap wood, go to a construction site and scrounge from their dumpster. They'll be happy to let you do that because it's less waste for them to pay to haul off. Other great sources include your local dumpster, the alley, fence replacement projects(!), any business that deals in large goods delivered in crates, wooden sign companies (they have to take them down too...).

Dealing with scrap wood also helps with secret number two.

2. Measure twice, cut once, but only if necessary

Following on from my post last summer about Concerts in Colorado here's a few summer concerts I plan to attend and a new service.

We went up to Fort Collins this weekend and had a great time. Here are some tips to make your trip up there even better:

1. get tickets to New Belgium early

We started the day with lunch at coopersmiths. Good food, good beer. Not bad. Unfortunately, we should have started the day around 11:30 at New Belgium getting tickets for the afternoon tours. Then we could have gone to lunch and then O'Dells and finished at New Belgium.

As it was, we took the "self-guided" tour of New Belgium, which was great, but not as good as a full tour.

This past weekend I spent a bit of time helping a good friend set up a new site: Silly Ditties For Kiddies.

"Officially" bike to work month is in May. That seems like a reasonable time: the weather is pretty warm and it's early enough in the year that any converts will likely keep biking throughout the summer. I'm taking a slightly more hardcore approach. My bike to work month is February. If I can bike to work most days in February I think the rest of the year will be easy!