Almond Bread

All this talk about food and microwaves got me hungry. But being me I branched out on another idea.

A couple of years ago a friend gave me a microwave oven that she thought was broken. It wasn't but so it goes. I buried it in a mound in the backyard as a decoy for anyone using metal detectors to find my buried treasure (editor's note - there is no buried treasure, but no one need know that). Over time the soil eroded and there it was - white goods (as they call appliances at the salvage yard) poking up through the dirt. So I dug it out and dragged it into the tractor shed.

While reading various trade magazines I kept coming across some interesting patterns burned into wood, to wit:

I thought that was kind of cool - has kind of an Asian vibe to it, and it's done with electricity, and one of the preferred sources for power is a used high voltage transformer from a microwave oven. Hmm, I have one of those. 

So I started doing some research and what do you know - now fractal wood burning is being banned by various groups due to people getting electrocuted during the process. That's not good. I mean it's a nice design and all, but is it worth dying for? Not to this old lumberjack.

A wiser approach would be to use software to generate fractals and Mandelbrot sets and Julia sets and all of the other, many variations on that theme.

Alice set set to Beethoven - trippy, man!

Anyway, I ended up taking the microwave to the scrap yard, got four cents a pound for it (what's that, a dollar or two?) and decided to stick with tried and true old-time woodworking using my 3D modeling software and my CNC:

The old ways are still the best ways, eh?

Who else could I link to based on the title of this post?