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Recent Bios FAQ

-409 Stephen LaMantia <lamantia@u...> 1970‑01‑01 bio
After some gentle hints that I shouldn't be shy, here's my bio.

It's all because of anaerobic bacteria.

We live on the side of a steep hill, my back yard floods from the
runoff, gets mucky like a swamp, it gets all over your shoes, and
down *in* your shoes, you smell like a swamp, and when you go back
inside you make the house smell like a swamp.

So two years ago the wife and I looked into having a deck built.  We
couldn't afford what they were asking, so I uttered everybody's
fatal words, "I can probably do that myself."  I applied myself to
learning enough to do so, and in the process found out I liked
working with wood.

And then I started wondering about furniture.  How was it that
joints were so wonderfully perfect and the wood so flat and smooth,
when the best I could do on the deck was nailed and metal-bracket
reinforced butt joints that mated pieces to only within +/- 1/16" or
so of each other, and when I could achieve angles only within a
couple of degrees, and the wood from the lumberyard was always
anything but straight and flat and was always twisting against me?
(And how on earth did they hide the angle-irons and nails so well on
fine furniture?)

Since I had net access, I ended up looking into rec.woodworking,
where I lurked for a while just soaking it all in.  (I did post a
few deck questions at the time, though.)  In reading the group, I
became aware of the Neanderthals, heard the message, and adopted it
as my own.

By the way, the deck turned out wonderful, even though I half-killed
my back because the saturated winter soil conditions required me to
put a 12x18 deck onto 12 separate footings and I had to hand-dig
them all -- see, an early Neanderthal tendency, even then ;-) --
each 18" square by 3-1/2 feet deep, only in the summer when I built
it the clay soil's not wet, it's like solid concrete.  It's now
survived two rainy seasons where the surrounding soil is so wet that
walking on it sinks you down in muck up above your ankles, but the
deck's stayed dead level, no sinking whatsoever.  It's a definite
point of pride, that bit of civil engineering.  Oh yeah, the
woodworking on it's not too shabby, either.

After that, the front porch I rebuilt from scratch this year was a
piece of cake.  (Well, a 6-week-long piece of cake, anyway. :-)

As for woodworking in general, my only regret is that I didn't step
into that swamp 20 years sooner.

:-)

-- Steve







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