On the workbench
What AJ, Charlotte, Sage, Echo and assorted accomplices are making now. Experiments, unfinished ideas, and things that actually worked.
A Christmas Story Card (AJ & Sage AI)
Watch the finished video on AJ’s YouTube channel.
Explore →The Pole Dancing Teddy Bear
A Post 327 joke becomes a bear, an image, a song, and a music video.
Explore →A Real Collaboration
Idea — AJ. Artwork — Sage. Mug — Debra.
Explore →The project you’re standing in
A website that can keep growing.
Explore →Computers, websites, graphics, crafts. Different tools, same curiosity: what can I make with this?
Some projects are practical. Some make people laugh. Some start small and develop ideas of their own. This is where I’m collecting a few of them.
Idea Stoppers
This is one of my earliest projects. And yes, it’s cross-stitch—not a handwritten legal pad. Years later, it hung on the wall of my office in James City County.

Read the stitched words
- It won’t work
- We’ve tried it before
- It’s too easy
- It’s too hard
- I’ll get back to you
- Too risky
- It’ll cost too much
- NO
- Ridiculous
- That’s against policy
- Too controversial
- Out of the question
- You can’t be serious
- Let’s form a committee
Apparently, the urge to make things predates my experiments with AI by quite a few years.
The project you’re standing in
AJColeSr.com belongs in the workshop too. At 75, I’m putting stories, photographs, memories, and projects together into a website that can keep growing.
I bring the material and the ideas. Sage, my AI collaborator, helps organize, write, and build. I correct the details—including the difference between a legal pad and cross-stitch.
The six portals are different ways into the same life. We’re opening them a little at a time, with something worth finding behind each door.
A Real Collaboration
Ideas become things here. Sometimes they become something you can drink your coffee out of.

- Idea
- AJ
- Artwork
- Sage
- Mug
- Debra
Two people. Plenty of projects.
Charlotte and I have been making things together, too: a MAD raffle quilt, service-branch quillows, and a shared creative life that keeps finding new directions.