Paul: Stupid Little Projects
In scheduling and doing the library wood shop orientation, it really hammered home to me that I could easily fill the rest of my life doing little projects. In fact, to tie things into my recent thinking about our son's education, if we were even modestly financially independent (as in, had to live modestly but didn't have to work) there's very little question in my mind that I would make his education via Ongoing Little Projects my primary pursuit in life.
I don't know if that means something—probably not—but saying it out loud is certainly in the spirit of this exercise.
To change subjects entirely but also not at all, here's an attempt to clarify what I was trying to explain over dinner and over Tristan's dinner-related objections:
My idea for the moon projector nightlight is to repurpose a cheap camera or projector lens. Light will shine out of it onto whatever wall it's pointing at, displaying a slide of the moon.
Attached to the back of the lens will be some kind of box or housing containing the light source and slide. It will need to be able to sit on a flat surface and bear the lens's weight. Other than that there are hardly any constraints on what it could look like or how it could work.
The more I think about it, the more appealing I find a fixed design that would point the lens directly up. That's both maximally simple and ensures that the moon projection would always be parallel with the ceiling (and thus in focus across the plane of the projection).
I wrote and then didn't post this yesterday, out of Stupid Little Project shame.
The underlying emotions behind SLPism are right there in plain sight: They can’t be failed at. No one is counting on them. The only stakes are whether or not my curiosity is being satisfied.
The satisfaction is ultimately adulterated, though, because when that satisfaction is the only positive change I’m making on the world, it perverts itself—making me a starving man sucking on a piece of candy.