The Making of Jedi

You might wonder what it is we've been doing since school ended.  Well for me work has been crazy and several of my dearest colleagues have left for other opportunities making life on the job just that much less fun.  Bird on the other hand has the summer off with the boys and made pretty quick work out of getting the house back in order.  That is until the boys wanted to start some projects.

Bird did a bang up job on the office and the first task given to me was to clean up the corner of the office filled with my computer stuff.  There were two old computers in the mix and the boys and I quickly decided we would try to make one good working computer from all the parts.  Soon the entire office was covered with dust and scattered computer components.  After dismantling both computers down to bare metal we put all the components together that we wanted to keep and ... zippo, nada, nothing; it wouldn't even turn on.  So we stripped it all down again and put back together the smaller and newer computer.  This started but wouldn't boot.  After playing with the BIOS we were able to get it to load a Linux kernel and the boys were stoked.  They have a computer to tinker around with now, but it crashes every so often and after a couple of days they've lost most of their interest.  In the end we burned a few days and my corner has much less junk piled in it now.

Much more interesting was the day I came home and found a bucket of parts in the kitchen.  Justin had found some instructions on the web for building your own lightsaber and he talked Bird into taking the speeder to Home Depot and Lowe's (like 12 times) to barter with the local Jawas for several items so he and Sam could complete their Jedi training!  It's a fun and slightly challenging project.  While the instructions are fairly complete and easy to follow they are also 10-years old and finding all the components takes some patience; but nearly all the parts are pretty common if scattered about.  What's more challenging is that I've had to dig out nearly every tool I've ever bought to construct these things.  After using a tape measure, speed square, miter saw, hammer, hacksaw, pipe cutter, hex key wrenches, socket wrenches, long handled pliers, a riveting tool, screwdrivers, a utility knife, a drill, and several drill bits here is our progress so far.

Today during our 247th trip to Home Depot the boys started getting creative with other things they found.  When they started messing around with the plungers and were getting rowdy I threatened them with suction which turned out only to fuel the fire.

Now those are Jedi if I've ever seen them!