The time has come for the big unveiling… Ok enough of that. Anyway I am moving my blog back to Blogger. Recently I’ve gotten more fed up with wordpress. So as part of the new year I moved! Sorry for the inconvenience, but I think the benefit is worth the sacrifice… Besides, Aaron and Jordan have blogger blogs, it’s the new cool.
My new/old blog- www.cupfullofjoe.blogspot.com
So most of you know that I like to get into alot of new hobbies. I am constantly making something or in the middle of a project. Recently I got into making knife handles and sheaths. I made three knife handles but quickly grew bored. I decided to move on to making the knife blades as well. I spent some time researching on youtube and other resources until I found some good plans to make a forge. I settled on making a ‘Brake Drum Forge’. I took an old brake drum off of a truck, turned it upside down and bolted a 2″ black floor flange to it. From there I put in a “T” with a one foot section to stick out the bottom of the “T” and a cap to screw on the other end. Then I stole my mothers’ dying hair dryer and inserted it into the non-threaded end of the 1′ section. I also took a thick wire grid and cut it to size to fit over the hole in the bottom of the brake drum. Fill it with coal, lit it on fire and Viola! a working forge.
Now all I have to do it get some metal to throw in, and make some knives. Hopefully they’ll turn out looking like an actually knife and not a ugly hunk of burnt metal.
This article came across on email and I thought is was very insightful. So many people like to frame the president as an uneducated, illmannered cowboy from Texas. If only they would take the time, they would find that he is a much different man than what they would belive. It’s written by Karl Rove, the presidents former senior advisor.
So I thought I would put up a couple airsoft videos from yesterday. We had an Alumni basketball game scheduled for a while and decided to play some airsoft before it. The woods beside my house was elected as the spot. We had 6 guys all together, I only have 4 pictured though.
The guys, and Nathan with his shoe untied…
A fairly normal ‘war’
Me attacking poor Andy…
So ya, Jordan, you need to come down here so I can whoop up on you, in Christian love of course. 
Happy 2009! It’s kinda hard to believe that is 2009. I remember when I was younger thinking how funny some of the year names sounded. I guess they aren’t really all that silly sounding now. Regardless, time does seem to fly even faster. Things are finally starting to slow down, or so it seems. Christmas was alot of fun, we spent most of Christmas Eve with the family. I got mostly clothing and a few other small things, even a really large lunch box.
Winter Camp just ended yesterday, I really enjoyed it. We had four different speakers, and all the messages were first rate. The last day we were there we go 8 inches of fresh snow, that made the drive home lots of fun.
I have some plans for my blog for the new year, hopefully I’ll be able to unveil them soon.
This Christmas take a moment or two to remember our troops…
Never Forget
We’ve never done anything extra special for Christmas, just some quirky family traditions added in with the normal. I, like most American children, was always really into Christmas. I LOVED getting new toys to play with and always hated getting clothes. Our family tradition when I was younger was always to wait until 8:30 or 9:00 to get out of bed. We weren’t allowed to get out of bed before my dad, or we wouldn’t get any of our presents. So I would lay in bed staring at the ceiling until finally after an eternity he would knock on my door. Then came more torture, we would have to wait for my mom to make breakfast, and then eat it. After this we would all gather in the living room and stare at the presents, at least I did, while my dad read the Christmas story and tried to redirect my focus off the presents. Finally we would get to the presents. I normally got to go first, unless I was really rowdy, then I would have to wait till last. As I got a little older things changed, I wasn’t as excited about the presents and was more interested in the sleep. This was when my dad started waking us up at 3:00 in the morning to open our presents. I liked this about the first two years it happened. Then my brothers got married and had kids, so now we spend Christmas Eve with them eating, playing games, and exchanging gifts. Christmas day, normally in the morning we finish opening the gifts we got from our parents and they open their gifts. The rest of the day we spend watching Christmas movies, eating junk food, and just being lazy. One of my traditions has been to put up the Christmas lights on Thanksgiving day, but I flubbed that this year. I was too lazy, and then went to the Eagles game that night, but the past couple years some people in my family have wanted to skip the Christmas tree, that hasn’t happened yet, and hopefully it never will. I still do like Christmas a lot, and it is one of my favorite times of year. I love sitting in the living room looking at the tree all lit up and reading a book, or just drinking coffee. I even like Christmas music, mostly because it is only played for just over a month every year, so it always seems fresh and new. So that’s what happens here on Christmas. Oh, and tonight at 6:45 EST we are starting the live streaming of our churches Christmas cantata, so tune in if you want to! There should be a red box on the main page of our website indicating that we are streaming.
(Edit)
Wisemen tradition… It really isn’t torture, it’s just something we started to make our manger scene more biblical. We take the wisemen and their camels and place them in the kitchen, on top of the microwave so that it looks like they are traveling to Israel, following the star. That’s all… Oh and the snow if to symbolize sand dunes…
Ha, yeah, so I’ve been busy lately, plus I was just too lazy to post. So after a short sebatical, I am back! Yeah, that is a picture of a set of steps that were built for our Church cantata, or “Christmas play with a biblical message” for you people in Alaska! 
Anyway we were going to a first centuryish look, so I poured gasoline on them and lit them up. They turned out pretty good, and structurally sound, I think. Christmas is almost here and things are starting to get even more busy. I do however plan on posting a little more often than once every two weeks, LoL.
Thanksgiving day wasn’t a very typical Thanksgiving at our house. Normally my brothers and their families and my uncle who lives in town come over, but this Thanksgiving everyone was going to other places. So it was just my parents, Rachel, and I. It was a pretty quiet day. I just sat around being lazy, went to the range and made sure my gun was sighted in, and ate dinner. Finally the evening rolled around. A couple weeks back my dad got three tickets to the Eagles Thanksgiving day game through his radio program. Chris and Nathan Gable and I ended up being the ones to go to the game. The tickets were for club seating, and would have been rather expensive, except that we got them for free. When you walk up to the stadium there is the normal entrance, and then there is a special entrance for all the club level seating. People dressed in suits scan your tickets, stamp your hand, and direct you to the right section. The lobby is carpeted and heated with lounge chairs everywhere.
The view was really good too, the seats were up high enough that we could see everything, without anyone’s head being in the way, but not so far away that you didn’t have a good view. There were even people who walked up and down the isles taking orders for food. It turned out to be a really good game. McNabb, the eagles quarterback, has had a rough couple games recently, and the fans weren’t very happy with him to start, but he remdeemed himself and did a good job. We were seated next to a couple hardcore fans that made the game more fun with their comments. Overall it was alot of fun and definately worth going to. Oh, and the seated were padded with a dense foam that was comfortable and held body heat well, so that was nice too. A hotdog was $4.75 and a drink was $3.75 so it was a little pricey for food, but what do you expect for a NFL game…
yeah, I was talking during the picture
David Akers warming
While at one of my favorite local stores, WoodCraft, I discover a knife kit and decided I would try it. The knife looked like this
and the wood like this
(sorry that’s kinda blurry) anyway it’s a drop point knife and the wood is “Bolivian Rosewood”
I had no clue how I was going to get these blocks of wood into the shape and size of a knife handle. So I went a googling and found a couple ideas. I decided to go with the bandsaw approach.
After cutting the wood to the shape of the handle, I took it to the belt sander to bring it down to size.
After belt sanding came drilling the holes for the hidden rivets
Then came alot more sanding, working my way from 60 grit all the way up to 220 for a smooth, gouge free finish. So a couple hours later I now have a new kinfe. Now I just have to figure out how to make a leather sheath for it and I’ll be good to go!
