Oboe Lamp

Robyn says I have to get the gross picture of my finger off the top of my blog, so here's a new one. A few years ago I got the bright idea to make a lamp out of an old oboe. I started trolling Ebay for just the right oboe, and after several months I was finally able to buy one for less than $100. It always amazes me how much people will pay for worthless instruments; now I guess I'm just one of those people! This "oboe-shaped-object" (OSO) came packed in a nice, sturdy hard shell oboe case, which I promptly re-sold on Ebay for about $60, making the net cost of my lamp much more palatable! We bought a lamp kit, base, and shade at Home Depot and set out to wire the thing up. First, Tim got out his Dremel tool and had some fun trying to open up the bore at the top of the thing so we could actually fit a wire through it (the top joint of an oboe has a narrow bore which gets very small at the top). Then we put it together and glued a few strategic places to make it fit together. It looked cute and worked fine, but when it got knocked over, it pretty well self-destructed; the top joint even snapped into two pieces. It's been sitting around waiting for a makeover for quite a while, so Ben got busy last week and put his mind and a few tools to fixing it up right. Now I just have to find the right place in my house to display it!

Just in case you were wondering, here's proof that our bodies can do a terrific job of healing, even without antibiotics or stitches. I did, however, go through dozens of bandaids of various shapes and sizes during the 12 days that I kept it covered!