Building things

My school was great - it taught me lots of things like how to decline latin nouns, how to talk to 200 people without getting nervous, that Stockhausen can be a joke and that stage laterns are heavy. But I wasn't exactly encouraged to develop any useful practical skills like sawing a piece of wood in half.

But I didn't let this deter me from playing with bits of wood in order to make Nathaniel a toy. A few weeks ago, Nathaniel and I rebuilt some book cases and he had great fun with the screwdriver. He was remarkably able - he screwed in one of the screws (into a pre-drilled hole) enitrely without assistance!



Add to this a great interest in the contents of the garage "Get srew-driers ou(t) of box", "go to bol(t) shop and buy bol(t)" etc etc. So I decided that we needed a very basic work bench. I toyed with the idea of giant screws and a chubby screwdiver, but decided that this was probably too complicated for me as I would have to sink in a thread for the screw to go into. So I kept it simple and just made a block with various random holes in which to place bolts.

And I learnt lots on the way such as, the cordless drill doesn't have much torque, araldite is not the same as wood glue and it doesn't sand, some wood has yucky sappy stuff inside which you can set fire to if you drill it hard enough!

But eventually, I created this:


It's not great, and certainly not ideal, but it will let me find out whether Nathaniel would really like a toy of this ilk. So far the answer is "yes, yes yes" and requests to use the screwdriver to screw in the bolts!



By the way, Nathaniel has become very interested in the camera, and the second you get it out, he wants to come and see pictures on the screen. He has just about worked out that you have to get in front of it so that a picture can be taken before there is something to see, and we now have a load of posed photos where I have suggested that he does something so that I can take a picture of him and then he can see it on the screen! Here is dancing: