Eli Vande Voorde
eli@soupbones.com

What's with this page, anyway?

This page is just a way to share pictures that may be of interest to family and friends.

Just click on any small picture to view a larger version

One of my favorite pictures - Margaret, Sarah, Butch, and myself in the living room.

Two more of my favorite people - Teresa and Maritza at Mom's house for Christmas.

Chris took this picture of Teresa and me at Multnomah Falls on our way back from Mom's house.

A short clip of Matt playing the Uke - one of his very first attempts!

A short clip of Jake playing lap-slide Uke; I believe the boy's got soul!

A short clip of Khalil working on his slide uke technique!

We took Bob out for chinese food the other day (when are we going to learn?); he got into the beer and had a better time that all the rest of us put together! Looks rather ethnic with that salt-shaker cap hat, don't you think?

Mark and Matt stopped by and helped me with some home-improvement projects, including putting these two windows in the East wall of my living room, installing a solar tube at the end of my hallway, and shortening the island between my kitchen and dining room. This is after all the work but washing the windows was complete.

A closer view of one of the windows. Nice drywall work, don't you think?

This is what the hallway looks like now - that bright thing is the solar tube, not a light fixture. I'm forever reaching for the lightswitch to turn that thing off when I leave the area!

I removed a hanging cabinet that was over this island (peninsula?), and Matt and I took 12 inches out of the cabinet there, to make it less of a barrier between the kitchen and the dining area. This is after all the drywall work.

Teresa and I visited some antique stores in Albany and I found this round mirror, which I think looks great!

I've found yet another new hobby - water rocketry. You build these rockets, usually based on two-liter soda pop bottles, fill them about 1/3rd full of water, install them on a laucher, and pump them full of pressure with a bicycle tire pump. This example is two parts, the nose cone will contain a parachute! There are people out there working on multi-stage rockets carrying video cameras.

I thought about what a shame it would be if my only rocket broke on it's first launch, so I'm putting together three more, simpler rockets to play with. These have foam fins, cut out with a hot-wire foam cutter.

Here is the entire stable of rockets ready for launch, except that I have to make the parachute for the tall one. I'm doing a bit of experimenting here, as you can see. The one with the Pepsi lable is the control group!

Sarah got to playing with the hot-wire and created this little display.

Margaret saw Sarah's work and did this - it is quite a trick to put together.

Speaking of new hobbies - I've recently discovered the world of flower arranging. I always had this idea that arranging flowers meant chopping off the stems so that the whole bunch stood at about the same height in the vase you dropped them in.

It turns out that there is more to it than that, and if someone wants it to, it can be an art somewhat akin to bonsai.

Flower arranging has some serious advantages over bonsai - the end product is only an hour away, you don't need to hire a babysitter if you are going away for more than a couple of days, they don't need to live outside, and if you come home and discover the dog has eaten the entire collection, your lost investment is not so great as all that.

There is some money in the purchase of flowers, if you want something that is not growing within reach, but it's easy to flesh an arrangement out with stuff found outside.

This one, for instance, is circled by ivy I clipped from my backyard. The container is the bowl I brought away from the gift exchange at Christmas.

Part of the appeal is finding interesting containers. I find that old coffee cups work well, and always find something that might work when I visit thrift stores (something I do regularly).

The container for this one is a small bowl Jake made for me for Christmas.

I'm not pretending to be good at it - only saying that I'm enjoying it and find the completed arrangements more fun to view around the house than the "vase-o-flowers" thing I used to do.

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Here are some other links of interest to Vande Voordes;

< Mark's page.

< Matt's page.

< Lucy's (and by "Lucy's" I mean "Matt's") Family Blog - check it out!

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That's it for now!