genius

 There is much to say about my dad who is amazing, some of which I hope to share in the future. For now, this earned an entry all to itself. What is this? I asked the same thing of my dad, the maker of this mighty contraption. It's a book-binder.

My dad builds a lot of things. Without any prior experience for any of his projects, he browses Home Depot, buys what he thinks he needs, and builds. An outdoor stove, a storage house, the stone landscape leading to our front door. But I think this one most sums up why I am so crazy about my dad. My dad reads a lot of Vietnamese books. He decided that instead of buying them, he'd make them. He finds them online, copies them into word documents, and proofreads and edits them (he also proofreads books he already owns). Because he prints four pages on a piece of paper (two on each side), so that they can be folded and read like a normal book, he must first place them in Word accordingly. This is a bit hard to describe, but what it means is that from left to right, pages 4 and 1 are printed on one side of a paper, and pages 2 and 3 are printed on the other, so that when it's folded it reads 1, 2, 3, and 4.

He built the above with some slabs of wood, and this other silver and black device seen that was designed for another purpose (I don't know what), which allows him to change the length of the contraption and keeps the pages bound in the width that he wants. He places glue across the binding, waits for it to dry, and gets to work on the covers...the end product is this:
 
The zoom of my camera lens was too high for me to hold a book open with one hand and take an adequate photograph with the other, so I used a stapler to showcase it. My dad would've come up with a better solution but I ended up liking this aesthetic. After I asked a million questions about this meticulous process and commented on the many details this entails, he laughed and said, "When you actually do it the details keep arising!" When I told him I was impressed, he laughed and said, "If you can think up something, you can do it." These sorts of things have always sounded more right to me in foreign languages.