Give it mustard!

After many hours of driving Amanda mad with the drone of me practising scales up and down the fretboard on my guitar, I decided that a small headphone amp would be the solution. I needed something that would fit into my moulded guitar case, and some distortion would be a nice-to-have. Obviously it needed to be cheap.

So, after trawling about on the DIY guitar projects areas of many websites, I happened upon the Ruby amp at runoffgroove.com. I nipped down to the local electronics shops, and less than R50 later I had all the parts I needed. Well, almost all the parts. Some scratching around in the pantry yielded the final component - the enclosure!


Above, you can see the volume (left) and gain (right) controls, with the input jack (which doubles as the on-off switch) and the 2" speaker - all 0.5 Watts of it!

Here is the top view, showing the headphone jack (which mutes the speaker) and the "spoon lid", which doubles as the 9V battery compartment cover:


It is a surprisingly effective amp, and had its first public outing last night at a work farewell function. Very impressive for such a simple (and cheap) design...

Update on Alex - Bumper Edition

As requested, here is a batch of recent photos of Alex. He is starting to laugh a lot and we are enjoying him thoroughly. Due to this being a bumper update, I will not be giving individual commentary on each photo.

We Friends "Dad and Me" Day

Morgan invited me to the Dad's Day at her school this morning. The children put in a lot of effort to make the Dads feel welcome. They sang songs for us and we were read the special things they liked about each of their Dads.

There was a great turnout and I can safely say that we all had a lot of fun.


After some arts & crafts, playing outside and a cup of coffee, Morgan presented me with a slab of chocolate and a beautiful bookmark.

I feel like the luckiest Dad in the world!