(no subject)
I'm a junkyard boy. There really and truly is no greater place for me than a junkyard. Something about the way my brain is wired just sees limitless possibilities for the ways in which total garbage can be reused and recycled to suit my purposes or to accomplish something. I discovered the Boulder ReSource today, which is a home for donated and reclaimed building materials. Stacks and stacks of things like floor tiles, slabs of granite and marble, tons of doors, cabinets, buckets of screws and nails of all shapes and sizes, sinks and bathtubs, ceiling fans and lighting fixtures, plumbing, chairs and furniture, shelving, gardening tools - truly, it was a wonderland for me. While it didn't have a lot of the raw mechanical parts I would have wanted, it was a reminder to me of where my passions lie. Simply standing in the outdoor lot looking at all of the things there was enough to bring forth dozens of ideas for fitting things together.
When I used to live on base in Germany, people were constantly throwing away perfectly useful things because the Army had a limit in the things they would move free of charge; as a result, I became a salvage baron, exploiting the weekly fillings of the dumpsters and finding incredible treasures within their depths. I built a wagon out of pvc pipes and connectors and would trundle down to the community dumpsters to load up on whatever I thought had use, finding working televisions and vcrs, furniture, lights, cables, you name it. The crowning moments were the days I found the original Nintendos that I so desperately coveted (my parents wouldn't let me have one, you see). What I didn't want or couldn't use, I sold to the thrift stores to make a profit off of the things that would otherwise have been ruined by weathering, compressed and then packed into a landfill. It was my special delight to find gadgets and knick-knacks that I could take apart to see how they worked and I made a tidy profit off my sales from the thrift stores. Sometimes I used the materials I found to build or tinker with things, like making modifications to my wagon for greater storage capacity or axle strength to support heavy loads. Mostly I just collected things in the off-chance they'd be useful to me someday.
I have more than a touch of the tinker and mad scientist in me. I have grand schemes of someday owning land out in the desert where no one will bother ever checking up on me and I can have free reign for me and my experiments. Right now I want a field dedicated solely to blowing things up, a greenhouse for cultivating plants (my other great passion), and a hangar full of workshop tools and half-finished projects. If I could own a junkyard right there on my property too, well that would be just swell, stocked with rusting cars, old refrigerators, piping, and scrap metal galore. It's an odd dream, but junkyards are the source of a lifetime of entertainment for me, a place for creativity to run wild.
Truly, the only thing holding me back from my dreams of building giant robots are my limited knowledge of electrical circuits. I can build and balance structures just fine; all those years of tinkering with legos and robots paid off, but controlling them and unifying the electrical systems are my Achilles' heel. The way I see it, the skills I need to learn in order of importance are electrical wiring and circuitry, welding, the basics of harnessing the motion of electrical and combustion engines, and programming microcontrollers and sensory arrays. Once I've got that kind of education, the sky truly is the limit, and not even then, because I fully intend to make my fair share of flying contraptions.
Oh junk, how I've missed you.
When I used to live on base in Germany, people were constantly throwing away perfectly useful things because the Army had a limit in the things they would move free of charge; as a result, I became a salvage baron, exploiting the weekly fillings of the dumpsters and finding incredible treasures within their depths. I built a wagon out of pvc pipes and connectors and would trundle down to the community dumpsters to load up on whatever I thought had use, finding working televisions and vcrs, furniture, lights, cables, you name it. The crowning moments were the days I found the original Nintendos that I so desperately coveted (my parents wouldn't let me have one, you see). What I didn't want or couldn't use, I sold to the thrift stores to make a profit off of the things that would otherwise have been ruined by weathering, compressed and then packed into a landfill. It was my special delight to find gadgets and knick-knacks that I could take apart to see how they worked and I made a tidy profit off my sales from the thrift stores. Sometimes I used the materials I found to build or tinker with things, like making modifications to my wagon for greater storage capacity or axle strength to support heavy loads. Mostly I just collected things in the off-chance they'd be useful to me someday.
I have more than a touch of the tinker and mad scientist in me. I have grand schemes of someday owning land out in the desert where no one will bother ever checking up on me and I can have free reign for me and my experiments. Right now I want a field dedicated solely to blowing things up, a greenhouse for cultivating plants (my other great passion), and a hangar full of workshop tools and half-finished projects. If I could own a junkyard right there on my property too, well that would be just swell, stocked with rusting cars, old refrigerators, piping, and scrap metal galore. It's an odd dream, but junkyards are the source of a lifetime of entertainment for me, a place for creativity to run wild.
Truly, the only thing holding me back from my dreams of building giant robots are my limited knowledge of electrical circuits. I can build and balance structures just fine; all those years of tinkering with legos and robots paid off, but controlling them and unifying the electrical systems are my Achilles' heel. The way I see it, the skills I need to learn in order of importance are electrical wiring and circuitry, welding, the basics of harnessing the motion of electrical and combustion engines, and programming microcontrollers and sensory arrays. Once I've got that kind of education, the sky truly is the limit, and not even then, because I fully intend to make my fair share of flying contraptions.
Oh junk, how I've missed you.