Mad Dad Cannot Abide Anonymous Acts of Kindness

Somebody is fucking with me.

Who sends a super nice gift anonymously? What’s your angle? And why a coffee grinder? WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH?!

24 hours ago this came in the mail.

At first I thought maybe I got drunk and sent myself a present. I'm pretty awesome like that, but It wasn’t in my recent orders. I looked closer and found a gift receipt, but with no name. What. The. Fuck? It’s a bomb. No other explanation. So I open it. Nope. It’s just a really nice coffee grinder… rigged to explode. So I smashed the shit out of it. Nope. Just a really nice broken coffee grinder. Maybe I can say it was damaged in transit and get a new one. Amazon customer service is great.

Wait a second… who has my address? My new address... My ex doesn’t even know my new address. It’s a short list. A very. short. list... Time to make a chart.

Maybe I’ll post about it nicely on Instagram in hopes of luring this son of a bitch out into the light, but that didn’t work. WHO SENT THE GRINDER!? I am not all about mystery in my god damn life right now!

And then, as I turned the box over and over, a small slip of paper fell out.

“Would you like to send a thank you note?” oooh yes, Amazon. I want to send a thank you note straight from the depths of HELL! So after 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to work a QR scanner, I found it. OOOOOOHHHH yeah. I found you, motherfucker. Here’s your thank you! I’ll teach you to be thoughtful and nice!

There's only one problem... I don't know anyone who goes by "James." So it's back to square one. I will find you. And when I find you, I will thank you and then tell you to write your god damn name on the gift next time! What the hell, "James?!"

Seriously, though. Thanks. This grinder is awesome. What an incredibly nice gesture. I’ll find you.

-Mad Dad

The Mad Dad Built Something!

Hey, welcome to the final headboard update. I wasn't really digging the microblog series thing, so here it all is. The end. Finished... Kinda. I mean, it's not finished yet, but I'm not writing about it anymore.

So if you haven't read the other two posts, go back and read them. Then read everything else I've written, follow my page, share a third of all my FB posts, and tell your friends. If you don't want to do that, then I'm building a headboard and it took two blog entries to get to the point where I actually bought the fucking wood.

So wood is expensive and Home Depot employees are poorly motivated. After what seemed like 10 hours waiting for some high school afro wearing stoner to cut my wood down to size, I was able to get out of the store and back to the house. Now it’s time for sanding and playing with stain. Woo!

Oh, and sanding fucking sucks! At least I had help.

Once sanded, I could play with the stain. Typically, it’s not a bad idea to wait until after a project is finished to stain, but I didn’t want to fuck up my headboard when it was finished. Better to fuck it up before I put the thing together. All in all, by rubbing an ebony stain over the kona, I got a color that ended up looking pretty great. Amateur stuff, but I was still pretty happy with myself.

Now here was the tough part. I had a vague idea of how to build the frame, but I really needed some technical help which is where my buddy really came in handy. He’s somewhat well-known and didn’t want to be identified here, so I’ll call him “Dan.” Dan beasted this frame together while also showing me how not to fuck it up. Once the frame was together, we just screwed it to the backing and we were set. Thanks, Dan!

Now for the texture which is made out of shims… A lot of shims. Sherri from Hazel + Gold Designs uses a brad nailer to nail down each shim. This is the smart thing to do. I’m not smart. So I declined to buy a brad nailer and glued them down instead. This added about 4 weeks to my project time. Turns out that shims are usually made out of shitty quality wood and a lot of them required that you clamp them down for 30 minutes to let the glue set otherwise they’ll warp and start peeling upwards. I didn’t have clamps. Or a brad nailer… but I have a lot of whiskey. My method meant I could place about 3-4 shims every 30 minutes. Way to go, Mad Dumbass. Now that it’s together, though, I couldn’t care less how long it took because it looks awesome.

So it ended up looking awesome, but I still had a lot of work to go. Had to sand down the frame and then apply stain to the whole god damn thing. So much stain... so much. And so much sanding.

Once it was done it ended up looking like this! Kapow!

So there it is. My very first woodworking project. I still need to put a few coats of polyurethane on it and install the lights, but I’m 90% of the way there and it feels great. Oh, and check it:

Custom back lighting! Boom! All I need is that pumpkin spice candle.

Once again, big thanks to Hazel + Gold Designs for the concept and how to. Thanks to K-Liss for the custom artwork I used to the header image. And thanks to "Dan" whose big guns have increased my fan base by at least 9.