Mortis and Tenon...

More technical activities have been superseded by building garden beds for the wife.  As opposed to doing it the easy way, which might have taken an hour, we opted to use a mortis and tenon joints.  Hailed as the strongest joints one can make with wood, the beds took me about 7 hours (half of which was spent figuring out the best way to do a mortis and tenon with the tools I had on hand).  A plunging router with a 1/2" chuck coupled with a mortising bit would have made life so much easier, alas I made do with my 3/8" chuck router coupled with a drill and a shitty Ryobi jigsaw (which couldn't cut a straight, vertical incision to save it's life).  Note: I have plenty of Ryobi power tools, they're cheap (I don't needs something a tradesman would, so I opt to pay 1/3 of the price for most of my tools) and generally get the job done, but not this damn things (it started out subpar and has continued to disappoint).  Anyway, here are the results of plenty of sweat, a few splinters and lots of wood chips:

(5'x3' bed)

(behold the strongest of joints)