Tag Archives: This Odd House

Penultimate Penrose

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My printed tile map.  It identifies the fat and skinny rhombus tiles so that I knew how many to make and how to place them.  It was generated based on a simulation of  an edge length of 250mm and a gap width of 6mm, adding up to a nice binary number.

I suspended this project in order to go on a roadtrip to capture pictures of the night sky in the beautiful deserts of the Southwest.  I am currently working on them, and hope to share them soon, but the Penrose tile floor project carries a higher priority—we want our screen porch back while it is still summer!

Having prepared my tiles to the best accuracy I could coax from my woodworking tools, I now faced how to place them on the floor.  As before, I considered the advice from Ken Adelman, who recommended “dis-aligning” the pattern from the rectangle of the room, to avoid difficult or awkward-looking tile fragments at the edges.  He also recommended identifying a center point and creating reference lines radiating at angles that match the pentagonal symmetries of the tiling.

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Seven Years After

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A panorama taken from the viewpoint at the “elders table”. Officiating the event with his wife Karen, Max Allers had just declared “By the superpowers vested in me, I now pronounce Thor and Poldi truly united!”  (Click to zoom, and see if you can find yourself in the crowd.)

Seven years ago we hosted The (happily ever) “After” Party.  It combined a renovation-housewarming (a year after the “Before” Party), and a commitment ceremony to mark the choice to share our lives in This Odd House.  It had a sixties theme, having both grown up as quasi-hippies in the sixties, and both turning 60 that month, Poldi on that very day!

It has been a wonderful seven years since, filled with love and adventures, and we had hoped to invite everyone back to reflect on them and to see what has happened since.  While many of us have experienced life events and transitions in the intervening years (marriages, births, deaths, retirements), none of us could have predicted we would all be staying at home, avoiding gatherings to avoid germs for a full year.

Eventually we will be back to some form of a new normal when we can get together and exchange those stories.  In the meantime, here is a picture of the setting in our backyard seven years ago.  In this picture we are at the end of the sidewalk with champagne, reveling in the affection and love of all the people with whom we were sharing this highlight moment of our lives.