Xio Synthesizer

I brought this little musical keyboard up with me to Alaska expecting it to be my only connection to playing something close to a piano.  Little did I know that I would become the musician for a church, so for awhile it was just gathering dust in my apartment.  Since I now have an office job it's very nice to have around!  It fits snug on my desk next to my laptop.

I have an office

There was a slight change of plans with my work situation, but I am going with the flow.  I've been helping coordinate a Building Maintenance and Repair training and placement for some Americorps positions.  There is no Youth Build program at the moment but we hope later this year we can get one going again.  In the meantime, my job doesn't require a full 40 hours a week.  Well, I decided I'll show up for all the hours of a 40-hour week but I'll just be doing other things some of the time.  My focus on a construction site is so much better than my focus at a desk so having the freedom to allow myself to have distractions is actually quite ideal for me.  Here is what my office looks like:

Projects

A funny thing I've joked about this month is that since my volunteer term with Americorps has ended, I've become a "real" volunteer. There was about a week's worth of work left on the house at the time my year-long service ended on April 1st. I thought it would be pretty ridiculous to spend all those hours and all that work on the house to just quit right before the finish because I wasn't going to be logging any more hours.  So I decided to stay until the house was done. We finished on the 9th and the family moved in that weekend.

Pardon the cleaning supplies. I didn't have a good chance to take pictures once everything was cleaned. 

Lately, I've been helping a former student build a shed in his backyard. We got the fourth wall up tonight. While we were finishing putting the wall together, J.J., another former student, was walking by and we got him to help us put the wall in place.

This is the SketchUp version of the shed at roughly the same stage as the real one.

I also have been working on the progress of getting this cedar strip kayak built. I say "working on the progress" because I don't feel like I've done very much, but I am getting something done. I will cut-out forms of plywood that are like section cuts of the kayak and they will be spaced out every foot. The shape of each form is a crucial part of the building process and each curve has to be drawn precisely. This book I have, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, written by Nick Schade, has the numbers for all the offsets that define the shape of each form. After plugging the x and y coordinates in an excel spreadsheet, I then saved it as a script file and imported that into AutoCAD. AutoCAD will graph the coordinates and then I can even take that to the printers to print it to scale, or I could piece together sheets of paper and just print it normally. Of course, I had to import the AutoCAD drawings into SketchUp and see what that would look like. ;)

The funny thing is, I don't even own AutoCAD or Excel, but I am very thankful for 30-day trials!

Here's what it looks like in Excel. Excel was useful to sort the x and y coordinates. The graph would've turned out like a connect-the-dots thing in AutoCAD otherwise.

This is the form in AutoCAD. I am not done with the form drawings, however, I have to include the offsets for the cockpit area. After that I'll print these off and paste them to some plywood and cut them out.

And here's what it looks like in SketchUp.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

<3<3<3<3

Joshua

Prelude in C by J.S. Bach on the Kessler Organ

I would just post an audio clip of me playing a song on the organ, but it seems to me there are no host sites that allow mp3s to be shared like there are for video files.

Performance at monthly grind

I finally got this video uploaded.

It's been one year

A whole year has passed since I came to Alaska; it's hard to imagine time has flown so quickly.  Dan, David, and I went out in Dan's boat during work.  It's herring season and that's when Sitka really comes to life.  The fishing season begins with the intense herring openings. Herring seems to be the snack of the sea, so all the other wildlife, like whales and eagles, are out and about.  We were going to try and make it out during one of the fishing openings, but the timing was too hard to manage with work on the house.  When we went out, the department of Fish and Game was doing a herring sampling.  We also saw a very large gathering of bald eagles and a few whales.  We had a good time.

  

There's Dan taking his famous pictures.  You should become a fan of him on facebook.

 

This is my picture of the bald eagles as they perched in the trees watching the activity in the ocean, waiting for a good opportunity to nab some fish. Dan got some pictures of when they were feeding, there were at least fifty of them!

I'll write more later!

<3 Joshua

Camp Victory

I got the chance to go on a little trip for Sitka Lutheran Church.  I was given this opportunity because they needed an adult to accompany a youth member of the church.  It was the All Alaska Lutheran Youth Retreat in Camp Victory about 50 miles East of Wasilla, Alaska.

It was such a fun weekend! I felt more like a kid than an adult. We played tons of games, indoor and outdoor: football, dodgeball, a game called amoeba, card games, broom ball, and basketball. We also did a lot of tubing downhill.

There I go!

This is the lake to the north.

This is out playing broom ball on the southern frozen lake.

The location of the camp is cool because it lies on the strip of land between two lakes. The camp looks like a completely different place in the summer time.