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The little stinker did it again

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JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF PORSCHE

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Today is Sunday in Stuttgart and the Mercedes Museum was so much fun yesterday that my colleagues and I decided to visit the Porsche Museum today. It was very cool but very different from the Mercedes Museum. While the Mercedes Museum was about the history of Mercedes with no holds barred. Meaning that during WWII, while Mercedes became an armament factory and had to use forced labor to build the Third Reich’s ammunitions, they owned up to it and spoke matter-of-factly about it. They pointed out the error of their ways and how the Allied Forces bombed the factories to smithereens. The museum was as much a timeline of world history as it was a museum about cars. Porsche, on the other hand, glossed over all the bad times and focused purely on its successes. And all of those successes stemmed from the design flair of curvy fenders and fast engines. Porsche has never strayed from the iconic shape and it was awesome to see the history of the brand all under one roof. The picture here is the stainless steel ceiling at the museum. Since we all know the iconic shape of Porsche, I concentrated on the mosaic-type ceiling that shows a reflection of our world as an abstract painting; broken yet whole.
When my son is old enough, I’d like to take him here. And show him which of the Porsche’s I’d like him to buy me for my 70th birthday.
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DESIGNING AND BUILDING A ROCKING HORSE FOR CONOR

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I always thought it would be cool to build a rocking horse and now that Conor is 1 year old, I thought he might enjoy it. I've been collecting rocking horse pictures for about a month now and curating them on my Pinterest account. This morning, I drew up a few plans and the parts list and headed out to a lumberyard to get the wood.

I was planning on making it from walnut but there wasn't much to be had so I decided to make it out of spanish cedar. I've never worked with Spanish cedar but I've heard that boat builders love it because it's so easy to work with. I got the wood home and began to cut out the parts. At first, I thought the hardest part was drawing the head from scratch. But it wasn't actually that hard. I just sketched it on a piece of plywood and it looked like a horse's head so I cut it out. I still need to trace the plywood template onto the cedar but that can wait. The hardest part was cutting the compound angles for the legs. What was I thinking when I designed that part? It ate up most of the day but I think I' got it looking pretty good. I'll report as I build. But here's how chaotic my workbench looked today as I was working. - See more at: http://dadsdecoded.com/blog/index_files/archive-nov-2012.html#sthash.h2mNdtr6.dpuf
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