Instead of Reading and Writing

This week, I wrote up an extensive outline for a post concerning a more complete definition of anarchism than the one from about a year ago.  As I was preparing to record the audio portion, though, my brother arrived to help me with a project I started yesterday.  I didn't have time to record and write a transcript, so I will share the fruits of my labor with you.

Today, I took this:

And turned it into a bookshelf:

The bed had broken to the point of being unsafe and unusable.  It was my parents' waterbed since I was an infant, which they had later converted to use with a conventional mattress.  A couple years ago, they finally replaced it with a new bed frame and donated it to my wife and I, as we were sleeping on a mattress on the floor.
After nearly 25 years of abuse, it finally met its end.  As I dismantled it and began hauling the pieces out to our apartment's dumpster, I was lamenting the fact that I had no space to take the parts and turn them into a bookshelf, and that the tools required to do so would cost as much as going to target and getting a new shelf (which we desperately needed).

Then, it dawned on me that my brother had a truck and some tools and my dad had a garage that I used all the time to work on my car.  My family has been trying to maintain a community of mutual support, as would be required if we were to move somewhere a little further to the fringes of the grid and grow our own food and such (which has been my dad's idea since before I came around to the idea).  Today was an excellent exercise in that sort of free market anarchy.

My brother and I took the parts to my parents' house and we spent an afternoon cutting, drilling, being creative and conversational.  My wife and kids came along and played with my younger siblings and some of their friends.

Rather than spending far too much money on a cheap shelf from Target and simply throwing away a ton of usable wood and hardware, We managed to turn it into something useful, save some cash, and invest in familial relationships.

In exchange for using my dad's garage, I gave him a lot of the unused material, as he had a project of his own for which he would need OSB and such.

My brother, in exchange for his time spent working on my shelf, requested I help him with his college homework.  Given that his teachers at CU Denver are both illiterate and unable to express simple instructions, it's no wonder that he wanted help deciphering what they wanted.

(I promise the Shelves are level, this is just a bad photo angle.)
Afterwards, we had a brief catching-up period with my parents and siblings, planned some upcoming family dinners with friends of the family and conversed concerning guns, ammo, hunting, crazy homeshool families, fat people at wal-mart, and my ailing grandparents.

We also picked some monster zucchini and cucumbers from our microfarm in my dad's back yard and hazed one of my younger brothers about not picking the lettuce when he was told, letting it all bolt.

And, not letting anything go to waste, my wife is selling the headboard to a gentleman much more crafty and craft-ready than I on facebook.

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Oh, and last week, another friend of mine came over and we made #EndTheFed, Bernie Marx, and Bitcoin t-shirts.  Now that we know what we're doing, we're hoping to make (and maybe sell/give away) a great many of these shirts.

My wife was kind enough to model a couple of the shirts for me.

I seem to have caught some sort of craft bug.  I blame my friend, who came up with the idea for the original Karl Sanders t-shirt and my other friend who helped me make it (and these awesome bleached-out shirts).  You can set up a bleached-out shirt purchase via email.  We do custom designs, within reason.