2014 Family Vacation - Day 1 & 2 - Buffalo and Miami

Planning our family vacation for 2014 started way back in October of 2013. Around then we were talking about a Disney trip and how great it would be to take the kids on a southern adventure this year. We counted our pennies, looked at the Disney websites, did some math and had a heart attack. We decided Disney can wait until we win a lottery and instead put together something a little different. We also decided we would keep it a surprise.

Surprising a 3 and 5 year old doesn't take a lot of work, but to surprise a 16 year old is tricky. I decided on misdirection to get her there. For Christmas, we gave Chuck a suitcase with an envelope promising a weekend shopping spree at the Buffalo outlet mall. Many folks around here plan weekend shopping trips down to the states, and although I understand the allure (low, low prices!!) I am not a fan of the whole cross border shopping idea. A 16 year old, drawn by stories from friends about cheap clothes is thrilled at the idea of a weekend of shopping though.

Her weekend in Buffalo package included a waiver form from "Sky Zone trampoline Gym" and dinner reservations at a super fancy restaurant (pack formal clothes and shorts!) as well as some cash and a hotel reservation (need swimsuits for the hotel pool!). One catch though, no room for friends in the car since the whole family would be there.

Chuck cried and told us how awesome the weekend would be, and how much she was looking forward to it. We agreed it would be super cool.

On Feb 1 we packed the car full of everyone's stuff (including extras for Chuck that she didn't know we had stashed for her) and drove the family to Buffalo. Once we got there, we hit the outlet malls and bought a few things. Mostly we got shoes. I got a pair of Adidas and Chuck got a 2 for 1 deal on Converse. Then it was off to the hotel, and to bed early since so much was planned for the morning.

The Bus to "Sky Zone" was coming by at the ungodly hour of 6:00 AM, and that meant we had to get to breakfast for 5:30 at the latest with all our stuff. I had an elaborate story about training schedules and whatnot for Chuck in case the whole Skyzone thing sounded wrong, but luckily she didn't clue in that 6:00 was a little early for a trampoline gym.

At breakfast, we decided that we wouldn't be able to keep up the charade, so we let the kids in on what was going on. An airport shuttle was on the way to take us to catch a plane from Buffalo to Miami. We explained to the boys that in Miami its so hot that butterflies can stay there all winter long, just like its summer. There we would stay one night at a hotel before boarding Carnival Victory to go on a cruise. Here is what a couple sleepyheads look like at 5:30 AM when they find out they are going away for a week:

Not long after that pic, we hopped aboard the shuttle to Buffalo airport, and cleared airport security. Keeping Buddy and Cuppa busy at the airport was incredibly easy - they were mystified by the whole place and just wanted to watch the ground crews working on the planes.

As the sun came up, more workers appeared, and the view of our plane got better and better. For Chuck, the airport mostly meant sitting and waiting, but what did she care, she was headed to Miami!

Once it was sunny out, the airport helpers told us it was time to catch our plane, and we all found our seats. This was pretty exciting - especially for Carlton (Buddy's bear).

Cuppa's bear was happy just to sit still. Before long the airplane helpers told the story of the cartoon with the people hugging their chair cushions and riding on the boats hidden on the plane, and sliding on the slides. We never got to see those rides though, our plane just used the airport to get people on and off.

Once the pilot got our plane going, the boys played with magna doodles and had naps. That's the best way to fly.

The plane stopped for lunch in Charlotte North Caroline, where there was no snow, but it was still too cold for butterflies. Then we caught another plane to go to Miami. In Miami it was HOT - really hot. So we put on shorts and went to the park to play.

At the park Dad tried for a family photo, but well...

Pick the least worst one.

Our hotel in Miami was the Marriott Biscayne Bay, which was a very nice hotel. our room was way up on the 23rd floor (or so) and the pool was way down on the 5th floor, so we got to ride a lot of elervaters or alligators depending on which of the boys you asked.

The room and hotel were really nice, and I would stay there again. The room had a pair of queen size beds, and a cot for Cuppa. The pool and hottub were lit at night, but the decks around them weren't so you got glowing pools to look down on, and Biscayne Bay to look out on. With some effort we were even able to pick out the cruise ships docked over at the port of Miami.

Mostly we were happy to have gone from -30°C to +30°C and finally be where butterflies go in the winter.

For dinner we walked around the block and found a Checkers drive through nearby. I remembered some fun times at Checkers in Georgia when I was in my early 20's, so I thought it would be fun to get dinner there again. It turned out that Checkers in Miami is where a lot of the homeless gather. When I let a couple guys in line ahead of us, they weren't sure what to make of it. One guy came up in a wheelchair, and after having the menu read to him, ordered "same as yesterday" which the waitress packaged up for him. Obviously this was a daily event. He paid and wheeled away without his food. I grabbed the bag and ran it over to him, and he wasn't sure how to receive it. I felt bad for these folks, and hoped Chuck was seeing them through compassionate eyes.

After we ate, we returned to the hotel for a post dinner swim and a soak in the hot tub before bed. The next morning we would have to check out and head over to the Cruise ship terminal.

Part 2 follows here!

Our trip to erm, well, sort of Buffalo

You may have noticed that this space has been kind of quiet for the past 10 days or so. You may also have noticed that a shopping trip at outlet malls in Buffalo isn't really in character for me/us.

There's good reason for both of those things, but I'm really too tired to put together a post about it right now, so instead, here's a teaser.

Go ahead and guess - where was that pic taken, and why are we all wearing shorts and sun hats in February! Stay tuned for the whole story!

Bench with Shoe Storage Tutorial: Guest Post from Boxy Colonial

I'm feeling a little lost with what to post this week! We are all so consumed with stuff that I'll be posting about NEXT week that I have absolutely nothing to put on here right now! Luckily I have a blog friend in Gretchen, and she offered to share an article here. I love this idea, but don't know how to fit it into our place! Tell me what you think!

Hello to all the House of Frost readers, and thanks so much to Chris for having me! The post I'm sharing today was actually written by my husband, Dave--one of his two blog posts ever!--detailing how he built a bench with a shelf for storing shoes for our foyer. It was a pretty simple project, but making it ourselves meant we could get it exactly the size we needed for the space and finish it however we wanted. We made a coat rack with lots and lots of hooks (we have four kids, so we can never have too many hooks) at the same time.

You can read where I talk about the non-bench building parts of the whole project here, and you can read my nine month later update on how it's working for us here. The part where it's Dave writing starts......now!

This project was pretty fun.  Since we have plans to build a farmhouse table for the kitchen some time (sooner rather than later, hopefully), this was a good warm-up project.  While I’ve built things out of wood before (fence, stairs, baby gate), this bench was the first piece of furniture I’ve ever done.  I really wanted this to look nice, even under close inspection, and I think I succeeded from certain specific angles. “We can just make sure that’s the back” was something Gretchen told me maybe five times throughout the process.  I finally had to remind her that only one of the sides can be in the back …

Gretchen got Ana White’s book for Christmas: The Handbuilt Home: 34 Simple Stylish and Budget-Friendly Woodworking Projects for Every Room …and we used the farmhouse bench (project #11) as a guide.  I had to modify the plans a bit to fit our needs, though.  Firstly, the bench in the book is 59.5″ wide and the foyer wall is only 53.5″ wide.  Secondly, the shelf under the bench in the book is narrower than the bench top.  This allows for a few inches of overhang on either side of the bench legs and room for some creativity in the trim.  Since our bench needed to be wide enough to hold four shoe baskets, I opted to eliminate the overhang, push the legs out to the full length of the bench top, and maximize shelf space.  Finally, I wasn’t wild about the curly shape that was cut out at the bottom of the legs, so I changed it to be a simple triangle shape.  Added bonus, straight lines are easier to cut!

After reading through the plans in the book, I came up with the following diagram.  It’s pretty rough and on a piece of old envelope (as is most everything else that I write), but it helped me come up with my cut list.  It is, obviously, not drawn to scale.  I didn’t have enough envelope to make it long enough.  So before you ask, no, my bench is not 6 feet tall.

Cut List

1×12 pieces:
One 53.5 inch (bench top)
One 52 inch (shelf)
Two 17.25 inch (side legs)

1×3 pieces:
Two 53.5 inch (top trim)

1×2 pieces:
Two 50.5 inch (shelf trim)
Four 15.5 inch (side trim)

This translated into the following shopping list:
Two 6-foot 1x12s
Two 6-foot 1x3s
Three 6-foot 1x2s

Other materials used:
Molding & Trim Nails (size 8D, whatever that means) that are 2″ long
Wood glue
Sandpaper

Tools used:
carpenter square
tape measure
circular saw
jigsaw
pocket hole jig (I have a Kreg jig)
clamps (Kreg 2-3/4-in face clamp and Kreg right angle clamp)
power sander
hammer
power drill

To the workbench!  Ari, my eldest son, was my helper on this project and took most of the pictures.  Here’s me carrying the 1x12s to the basement.

You’ve heard the saying “Measure twice, cut once”?  I’m more of a measure four times, cut once kind of guy.

This project has taught me that it is nigh impossible to cut a straight line with a handheld saw.  A neighbor loaned me his miter saw when I was building the fence and I was really missing it here.  Eventually, I figured out a way to cut nice straight lines with a guide, but this poor bench got maybe two of these guided cuts.  Most of them are a little wobbly upon close inspection.  Learning experience!

(I just googled “cutting a straight line with a circular saw” and found that I’m not the first to discover the trick.  This video explains it pretty well.)

Here I am inspecting a wobbly cut.  I am displeased.

Another job Ari assigned himself during this project was to label each piece of wood I cut.  While it was a little silly, it was not entirely pointless.  I wasn’t going to get these few pieces mixed up (only four 1×12 pieces on the first stage), but I can see this being a useful technique with more complicated projects.

After the bench top, shelf, and two legs were cut, I measured and cut the (simplified) design at the bottom of the legs.  The distance from the corner of the wood to the base angles of the triangle are 3/4 inch.  The height of the triangle is 4 inches.  You can see a small mark at the bottom where I measured the midpoint.  I then used the carpenter square to find the apex point of the triangle.

After cutting some wobbly lines with the circular saw, you’ll see that the triangle is not detached yet.

If I cut farther, the top of the cut would go into the leg.  Ugly!  Structurally unsound!  This is when the jigsaw comes in handy.  Apparently, Ari was off labeling pieces of wood when I was using the jigsaw, so you’ll have to use your imagination.  Incidentally, I learned this technique when building the deck stairs last fall.  This guy talks about it at 7:55 if you want to see it done.

After the 1x12s were cut, we broke out the Kreg jig to get the pocket holes ready for some fine wood joinery.  Joinery is my new favorite word.  I had used my jig once before to build a very simple garden bed, just to get a feel for how it works, so we were ready to tackle the pocket holes on the bench. We made three holes spaced 4 inches apart per joint.  We used 1 1/4 inch screws, as suggested by Ana White.  (I actually tested a pocket hole joint with 1 1/2 inch screws on some scrap 1x4s and, sure enough, the tips of the screws poked out.  1 1/4 inch is the way to go when joining 1 by’s at right angles with the Kreg jig.

Now would be a good time to mention that I held off on sanding the cut pieces of wood until the bench was assembled.  I say this now, because sanding at this stage would have been appropriate.  After the wood is joined, there are tough angles to reach with a sander.  So I wouldn’t spend a ton of time getting everything super smooth before assembling, but a quick sanding the rougher parts would have made future sanding more efficient.

Unfortunately, Ari did the drilling.  This meant that he was not available for the documenting.  I fell down on the job and we have no pictures of Ari making the pocket holes.  But he did this thing where he mimicked the sound of the power drill while he was drilling.  I appreciate Ari’s sense of humor.  Fortunately, if you’re really itching to see one of my sons drilling pocket holes, you can see Gus doing so on the garden bed tutorial.

The garden bed didn’t require super flush joinery, but as I mentioned, I wanted the bench to hold up to fairly severe scrutiny.  This required some sort of tool to help keep everything in place before the screws were doing that job.  Enter the right angle clamp!

Once two of the screws were in place, the clamp is removed and the final screw is drilled in.

I remembered to take a picture!  We used the weak old battery powered drill that holds a charge for 5 minutes for this part.  (The corded drill is not adjustable and is better suited for making holes.)  The torque was set on a medium low setting to avoid screw stripping.  I didn’t remember to glue these joints, but they seem solid without it.  Fine wood joinery!

Ari hasn’t seen, but would enjoy, the “I’m crushing your head” skits from Kids in the Hall.

So here’s the bench thus far.

It looks like a passable bench, but when you sit on it, the top sags.  So turns out the trim isn’t just for looks, it serves a stabilizing purpose.  Back to the circular saw and a few more wobbly cuts.  Before gluing and nailing the trim on, I decided to predrill the nail holes on the trim.  I figured that would make it easier to keep the trim in place when hammering.  I didn’t know the best size hole to make, so with some scrap wood and some trial and error, I found a hole size I was comfortable with.

You can see that these nails have practically no head, so it was important to make the hole small enough so that the wood wouldn’t just slip off.  The 3/32″ hole probably would have worked fine, but I opted for the 7/64″ drill bit.

I was careful to mark where the holes would go … measure four times, drill once.  The nails were going through the trim and into the 3/4 inch side of the 1x12s.  So I used the carpenter square and tape measure to evenly(ish) space 7 nail holes in the top trim pieces, 6 nail holes in the shelf trim pieces, and 2 nail holes in the side trim pieces – each hole being 3/8 inch from the edge of the trim (half of 3/4 inch).

Then to glue and nail the trim on.

(Ari went through a period during this process where he got very concerned about copyright laws and wanted to cover up every single logo with some painter’s tape.)  When nailing trim on, it is possible to bend the wood so that the wide surface of the bench top (or shelf or leg) is forced flush with the thin surface of the trim.  Holding that in place when hammering each nail will help with some fine wood joinery.  You may notice the tiny hammer I’m using.  It’s the kids’.  I didn’t feel like going upstairs to get the man-sized hammer.  I think I preferred the little hammer for this job, actually – it’s better for accuracy and I didn’t need, or even want, much power.

Once the trim was on, I wanted to neaten up the joints.  In two places, there was significant mis-measuring where the trim went past the bench by 1/8 inch or so.  Fancy pants me decided to pull out the circular saw to trim off the excess.  The first cut was a bit of a disaster, as it ate into the part of the bench I wanted to keep. I was much more careful with the second cut and things worked out better.  I was pretty depressed about that first cut, but was pleased to see how several minutes of power sanding can erase such mistakes.  I didn’t get any before shots, but this is what the corrected edge looks like.

Here are a few more close-ups of fine and not so fine wood joinery.

I was extremely pleased with the efficiency of my wood purchasing.  Here is the completed bench with all of the scrap wood.  Of particular note are the itty 1×12 slices on the bottom right.  Apart from the triangles (which can’t be counted as waste, I think), this was the only leftover 1×12.

So there you have it!  My first piece of furniture.

(Gretchen again): He forgot to mention the parts where he sanded it with the power sander and stained it (the color is “weathered gray”). He did all of that, and then it looked like this:

Opinion: Kids and Trades and the National Economy

In high school my parents steered me away from trades courses and encouraged me to focus on maths and science. Luckily for me, I was involved in Sea Cadets, and there I got exposure to marine engineering (think of a train's engineer, but on a boat), and I worked in a hardware store which meant I got to puzzle my way through tonnes of stuff and learn from tradespeople who came in for supplies. I was inquisitive and curious and took things apart. After high school I found a job in a machine shop and paid the bills by turning big pieces of steel into little pieces of steel. Today I work in engineering. I also have a ticket as a marine Engineer thanks to cadets, and as a CNC machinist.

But its different for kids today. When Chuck entered high school, I actively encouraged her to take a trades course in grade nine. She took an 'intro to the trades' class where they learned CAD, and talked about production, but never actually made anything. She watched a lot of movies in that course. She still doesn't know how things are made, has never run any shop equipment, and can't fix a broken whatzit, but she has all the trades classes she needs to graduate high school. To be fair, I had the same amount of school training in the trades when I graduated high school.

I remember being in the hunt for my first job, and my friend Jim showing me how to spin a wrench so that a bolt would be tightened faster than normal. I remember him proudly telling me the story of competing for a job, and being able to assemble a machine faster than anyone else in the room. I remember how proud he was of what he could do with his hands. For me Jim was a role model. He still is. If its broken, Jim can fix it.

While working in the shops, I watched as buyer after buyer came from India and China and bought up our equipment. We watched presses and shears go out the door, and get replaced by laser and hydraulic driven technology. An engineer would sit in the office and program the new equipment to make parts and then the equipment would spew out hundreds of parts until something went wrong. Then the labourer would call in a trade to reset the machine. We had a handful of tradesmen and dozens of labourers. Eventually, the shop began outsourcing the CNC coding, and we were left with a bunch of workers who didn't understand the voodoo behind the machines they were running. Tradespeople would be on the phone with engineers far away to get help deciphering code when all the notes were in a foreign language. Eventually, tradespeople servicing the equipment were also coming from far away as our skilled people left, and weren't replaced.

Our schools seem to be producing kids who at best, will be labourers - if we even have the equipment for them to run. In Chuck's school there is no talk of shop classes. They still offer auto shop, but I don't think they offer woodshop or machine shop - at least not to the intermediate and advanced level kids. Maybe those classes are reserved for the basic kids so they can be the best at something. Maybe the cost of maintaining the shops is too high. Rumor is the liability is too great to have kids working on machines. I don't know. I do know that the thinkers of tomorrow can't think if they don't know how a big piece of steel becomes a little piece of a machine, and how those little pieces will work together to become the machine itself. You don't learn that by watching movies. You learn that by playing with Legos, then Erector sets, then making things with wood and steel or bricks and mortar. Maybe the techno-equivalent - Minecraft - is teaching the same skills electronically. I don't know, I've never played it.

Since we are shipping so much equipment and so much knowledge away, I fear what jobs will be left for our kids. Manufacturing is a shell of what we could be producing here, and the remaining jobs are not pulling in an income to support a healthy economy. Even our health and lab jobs are moving away. Kids seem to be being trained in human services and soft-skill based careers - which are needed, but again, how much does a personal support worker actually make? How about a daycare teacher? As we erode the skilled labour and income base, we undermine the buying power of individuals, and ultimately shatter the foundation of our own economy.

It would be great to have an entire economy of bankers and lawyers, but who is going to fix their cars and make their office furniture? I guess the free market will take care of that, right?

Recently it was pointed out to me that if China was to shut down trade with the west, we wouldn't have the skills or equipment to make the parts needed to keep our basic lifestyle. Without being able to maintain our roads, communication and commerce we wouldn't last long as a society. No one is left in North America that makes consumer electronics. Computers are obsolete in 2 years. A 2 year trade embargo would give China the technological edge to swamp us. Think about that for a minute.

All of this is fed by our ongoing lust for cheaper, replaceable goods rather than quality items that will outlast ourselves. And retailers like Home Depot, Target, and Walmart thrive on low value, imported goods because they know we live in a minimum wage society where we want more stuff now, and cheaper is always better.

If our schools can't and won't give smart kids a shot at learning skills that will allow them to change a tire or replace a headlight, then we better take those kids out into the garage with us and show them what we know. We may be labelled "irresponsible" when our kid slips with a screwdriver and needs a couple stitches, but to me that's a whole lot better than our kids becoming adults who have no idea how to be productive.

Chuck is working on making her own marshmallow shooter right now. I need to get her involved in more projects. I worry for her. I worry for her generation. She wants a 'cool' job, but not a trade, and I support her. At the same time, I fear that without understanding the mechanics of how things work, one day she'll go to flip a switch at her job, and find that the switch just won't be flipped anymore, both literally and figuratively.

Her generation is in an exciting time, one where things could go in any direction. I hope she is prepared whichever way the opportunities come. How on earth can we get them there?