Somnium Exertus The home of my 365 day metaproject.

 Sometimes I find my living quarters slowly decay into less than ideal conditions. It's partly because I have so many things here that I use fairly often. Most of them are in arm's reach (not hard in this apartment) so I can grab something, use it and then put it aside for a second, only that second turns into a week. The other reason stuff starts to pile up is because, no surprise, I'm just not a neat person by nature. Today you get a sneak peek at my tray of goodies...


Yep, my goodies... and by goodies I mean my tools. I spend significantly more time and energy than the average person making/fixing/altering things, so I have a somewhat small selection of tools and other implements that I use daily to weekly. Conveniently, the desk in my room came with a keyboard tray already installed, so not having a desktop computer, I naturally use it as my sliding tool tray.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

Here's the tray in all its majesty. Yeah, we'll go with majesty. Anyway, some explanations of what you see:

The ruler is solid brass, in 16ths on one side and 32nds on the other. The numbers and marks are stamped into the metal, then painted. The reverse side has both a protractor and a center finder on it, individual degrees on the protractor and the center finder is broken up into 40ths of an inch, major divisions are the decimal numbers (1-10, yay!) and each of those tenths broken into quarters.

The Staedtler geometry set is very well machined, I find that their products are always worth any extra cost over the competition. The blue pen in the bottom right is a Pilot drawing pen that uses pigment ink, which is great for illustrations and inking in technical drawings. Naturally they get used together a lot. As for the other marking devices, you'll see a trademark fat Sharpie marker and a Pilot black ink pen.

To take care of my face fur, I use the mirror on the left with my homemade mustache wax, that black disc cut into wedges. Sometimes I pass the combs though the stache, but I don't really need to train the hairs anymore. If there's a problem hair that a razor would be unsuitable for, I'll use the tweezers by the fork.

Everything else is completely multi-use beyond description. Stirring devices for paint and pigment mixtures, blades and cutting tools for cutting/carving/scoring, micro screwdrivers for disassembling and drilling tiny holes, nail file for smoothing things off, the tins for storing small things temporarily.

The three tools I use the most are the forceps, the scalpel/exacto knife and the tiniest screwdriver I have, a flathead 1/32nd across. The forceps are great for holding all kinds of things and can lock in place, pretty much a third hand with the added bonus of not being connected to my nervous system, so heat and pain don't bother it! The exacto knife is rather versatile as it can be used to start prying open a seam on plastic casing, I use it to cut most non-food items I work with, of course I still use scissors when they are the obvious answer. The screwdriver works very well at scraping and prying due to the fine hard edge, hence why it also doubles as a drill of sorts.

Song of the day: Django Reinhardt - Vendredi 13 (Friday the 13th)
Page of the day: Worst Cover Ever?
Pocket change: $0.20