I arrived in Vemont yesterday to a light drizzle. The rental car place dropped me off at the Brattleboro Coop, a brand new colossus of cooperation quadruple the size of the old coop grocery store they tore down next door. If I had any doubt I was in Vermont, the Kung Pao Seitan in the hot food bar was proof enough and after a quick lunch I headed up the hill to Mocha Joe’s for a coffee and then back down the hill to the Amtrak station to catch the train. I managed to get myself a little soaked through all of this, but nothing that an hour to dry out on the train couldn’t solve.

The train journey south to New York Penn Station was quite pleasant: power, wifi, leather seat that reclined almost fully and vegan burgers in the snack bar; what more did I need. I polished off an episode of Man Men and two of Mr. Selfridge and 6 hours later we arrived in New York.

Where it was raining.

Seriously raining. Torrentially post-tropical-storm raining. Taxi drives by you and you get splashed and suddenly your trousers are sticking to your legs raining.

I was determined, nonetheless, to avoid taking a cab to our rental apartment in Brooklyn: it’s so handy to the East River Ferry that it seemed a crime not to go by boat.

I found my way out of the station, found 34th Street, found out how to pay for the 34th Street bus, hopped on a bus and rode it down 34th, fortunately hearing the driver announce “next stop 28th and 2nd” while there was still time to jump off.

With the river in sight, I walked the rest of the way down 34th and got really, really wet in the process. Shoulder-bag-filled-with-water-passport-soaked wet.

I arrived at the ferry terminal just as the 7:19 boat was about to leave, but they held the gate for me and I stumbled on. Twelve minutes and $4 later I was at the North Williamsburg wharf getting wet again as I tried to find Kent Avenue and then, once found, tried to figure out where on Kent Avenue our apartment was.

After some wrong turns I righted myself and 5 minutes later I walked in on Catherine and Oliver negotiating with the landlord about the leak in the carriage house (nothing a pot and a towel wouldn’t solve).

I peeled myself out of my clothes, set my money and passports on the mantle to dry, and by 9:00 we were eating Sicilian Rice Balls down the street at Monk’s Pizza.

When we travel, it rains. It rained on us for 3 days in Bilbao when Oliver was young enough to be in a stroller (Oliver’s first words were “no bags on feet!). It rained on is in Porto. It rained on my father and I in Plitvice. It rained on my parents and Oliver and me at Fortress Louisbourg to the point where most of our weekend was spent drying out in the laundromat. It rained on us in Venice two years ago to the point where the platforms came out in St. Mark’s Square. We have acquired tens of umbrellas in as many cities. 

So we know how to do this and are undeterred.

Now, coffee. Fortunately we are in Williamsburg, where every second storefront is an artisanal coffee roaster.

Oh, and the rain has stopped.

I took the “desk hole filler” (naming things is obviously not my forté) and tinkered with it a little to create a hole for a USB extension cable. You can grab the upgraded design on Tinkercad. Here’s what it looks like in my desk (I’ve since corrected the type-the-wrong-way; you’d think if anyone could get that right it would be me, but I have a limited brain for 3D transformations):

This pierce by Laura Chapin broadcast last week on CBC Prince Edward Island’s Island Morning is a touching portrait of Eileen Higginbotham’s Prince Street Puppy Project. It’s a sad story – you will get tears in your eyes listening to it – but it also drives home why this project is a valuable and important one.  KaBoom was the resident dog in Oliver’s class this year, and several of the students you hear are his classmates.

About 8 years ago the word on the street here in Charlottetown was that you could get a great deal on adjustable desks at the Summerside Clearance Centre. I ended up buying two, one for myself and a smaller one for Johnny, and the boys at silverorange bought a number of them as well. They are great desks: solid, durable, and easily adjustable up and down. Here’s what mine looked line on moving-in-day at the old office:

There are two types of plastic parts on the surface of the desk, one type for the “cable pass through” holes and one for the crank that allows the desk to be adjusted up and down. Over the years we’ve had both go missing here in the office, and with nowhere to turn for replacement parts, we just lived with this.

With the availability of 3D printing at the University of Prince Edward Island, however, I realized that I could simply fabricate my own parts, using the originals I still have as models. The return of the browser-based Tinkercad design tool last week coincided with this inspiration, and so I set to work with my Canadian Tire digital calipers to take the measurements of the originals and translate them into Tinkercad models.

Once you grasp the basics of Tinkercad – assembling simple shapes together to make complex shapes – it’s surprisingly easy for a know-nothing like me to make a complex model:

That model is two cylinders in the base, with a box on top, four boxes for the “legs” and four “round roofs” for the little nubbles that hold the part in place inside the desk.

With the model designed and measurements checked, I fired up Tinkercad’s fuction for generating a .STL file:

…and sent the .STL file off to Don Moses at Robertson Library for 3D printing. The next day I got an email back from Don that the part had printed and was ready for pickup. And so here it is:

And here it is snapped into place in the desk:

If you have the same or similar desk, you can go and grab the Tinkercad model for this part, tweak it as needed, and print your own.

This was so much fun that I kept on going and designed up the “crank cover” in Tinkercad too:

It came out of the 3D printer looking like this:

You can grab the Tinkercad model for that part too.

Both parts, I was delighted to find, find into their respective holes like a glove.

To this point I’ve thought of 3D printing as a novelty, an impression only strengthened by the propensity of people with 3D printers to print cats and key chains and parts for more 3D printers. Being able to print parts for my desk, parts there was simply no way to produce until this point, has me thinking there might be something to all this.

I’m going up on Monday for a tour of UPEI’s about-to-be-a-Fablab, which is an exciting development in this regard; I’ll report back on what I learn.