fri nov 4
It’s Day 4 (of the month) and nothing blog-worthy has happened.
I’ve been working on things I should have finished long ago.
Wiring downstairs. Siding. Grinding the hood. Stuff I’ve already bragged about finishing, so it kind of rings hollow when I say I’m still making progress. That last 10% is always the worst.
sun nov 6
Remember the gutters? Solid steel, and they work good.
Used to work good, anyway. I noticed that the downspout next to my office window has sprung a leak, like it’s blocked by a birds nest or something, and it overflows all over the ground. It’s a pain in the ass, but I’ve gotta fix this.
So I got a lot of tools, unscrewed the pipe, and took it down. It didn’t take long to figure out that there was a skunk stuck half way up the pipe, blocking the water. (Like the glass half empty / half full, it’s not clear whether the skunk was stuck half way up the pipe or half way down it. I’m hoping half way up, because if he was half way down, then how did he get up there in the first place?)
The skunk was really stuck good, and I poked an electrical fish line thru the drainpipe (and thru the skunk), put a block of wood on the end of it, and pulled hard. But the stuck skunk held fast, and wouldn’t come out. Even with Mary standing on top of the drain pipe for traction, it surfed across the gravel, and the skunk didn’t budge. In the end, we braced the drainpipe against a rock, and the stuck skunk proved to be no match for brute force. The wad of decomposed skunk that came out was a 4x4x4″ cube, and it stunk (like skunk) so bad that Mary almost hurled.
The skunk was -um- compact, but inside out when he came out of the drainpipe.
We had friends over for dinner, and we tasted all 8 of my ciders.
I’m one of those people who, when I go berry picking, I focus on picking, and sometimes I only eat a berry as an afterthought. I mention this because I spent a lot of time and energy pressing all these ciders, but I never got around to actually tasting most of them, much less comparing them. So I made it a point to finish all my measurements, plotted them out, and they looked like this:
The four ciders on the left were from the eating apples we picked at Hackett’s orchard with the kids. They all have low sugar and acid, and they tasted like grocery store cider.
The other four are from our property and were really lively. Lots of pizzazz, you might say. Sweet and tart and, while they all tasted like apples, they all tasted different. You’ll have to trust me on that, because English just doesn’t seem to have words to describe the differences.
Nobody got sick, and a good time was had by all, but wait till next year.
When I had to disguise our septic system’s manholes, I built the ellipse and a garden around them.
For the new propane tank next door, I made a stone circle and called it a garden. “Keep it simple” is my motto.
wed nov 9
Yesterday, I got out of bed, peed, brushed my teeth, washed my face, put on some clothes, but I couldn’t find my processor.
I looked everywhere.
I looked everywhere again.
I asked Mary and the cat whether they’d seen it, and then I looked everywhere yet again. It turns out it was on my head.
After the election, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, and I ended up pulling weeds in a light drizzle. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Say what you want, but Trump won fair and square, and he won’t be the first president to fuck things up.
I cut off the sharpened re-bar on the range hood and needed a way to re-grind the ends to an attractive, uniform shape. So I made a grinding jig.
I drilled and tapped the end of each piece of re-bar so they could have interchangeable “terminations,” and I broke a tap doing it.
The broken tap was a disaster, and I had to remove and replace an entire rod.
The surgery went well.
From my trial fitting, I knew that the right-hand rod was out-of kilter by about 2 degrees.
It took me 2 torches, going full-blast to supply enough heat to bend the #9 re-bar a smidgen.
I harvested tulips and crocuses from the ellipse …
… and planted them in the new propane tank garden. Plenty of fertilizer and some still-warm horse shit from Juliet, down the road.
Part of the barn’s roof blew away in a windstorm last year, and I picked a nice day to repair it.
You can’t beat the view from the roof of a barn.
I needed a way to support the fan hood’s border, and made some brackets which provide 1/2″ of adjustment in 3 directions. Brilliant!
fri nov 25
That’s 16 days since you’ve last heard from me. How can you stand it?
In 1978, when I sold my ’66 beetle, I gave it a good cleaning and even took the wheels off to clean the hubs. When I put them back on, I didn’t cinch the bolts tight enough, and they un-screwed themselves during a test drive, and the guy who wanted to buy it had to pull over to tighten them because the wheel was rattling loose on the lugs. He bought it anyway, so it must have been a good car.
I mention this because the other day, I put the spare on while I got a leak fixed, and the crud on the hub kept the bolts from cinching it tight, and when I put the regular tire back on, the spare was rattling around, loose on the lugs. Could’a been worse, though, since I’d be the last one to hear the rattling before it fell off.
After my physical exam last month, the Dr wanted to run a bunch of blood tests they run on 60ish men who seem to be running just fine. My B12 is low. Not zero, but ‘out of spec.’ So I’m going to be getting B12 shots for awhile, and we’ll watch to see if my weight, pallor, energy, nerves, bowel health, or mental acuity improve. (Not that there’s anything wrong with them now. (At least not most of them, and not most of the time.)) So I’ve gone from taking zero medications to getting shots once a week for symptoms I don’t even have, and it makes you wonder… If you google it, you get: low B12 accounts for everything from ‘pernicious anemia’ to neuropathy, so I decided I need the shots in the arm like I need … a shot in the head.
After I heat-bent the re-bar leg downstairs, I put the hood up ‘permanently’, only to find that I’d bent it a smidgen too far. So I brought my torches into the kitchen, climbed onto the countertop, and bent it in-situ.
(this is one of those photos where you see yourself from behind, and you say to yourself: “Good Lord, is THAT what I look like?”)
After a few freeze-thaw cycles in the front yard, my giant pumpkins were turning to mush, so I harvested the seeds and composted the rest.
Better luck next year!
wed nov 30
I’ve been chipping away at the green house, preparing for sheetrock. Lots of blocking to put in, lots of little air leaks to seal. Last-ditch carpentry and electrical. A couple more weeks, and it will be ready. It’s taken me 25 months to get this far.
After a couple months of stop-and-go effort, the kitchen hood is permanently secured in place and it looks great. The colors, textures, shapes and fasteners all ‘work’ together and, among other things, I’m relieved, because – let’s face it – re-bar in the kitchen sounds crazy.
I still need to finish the lighting and wiring, but I’ll get that done along with the cabinet fronts, which in ‘on deck’ in my project list.
You’ll notice that I’ve cut way back on my blogging this month. With the onset of “programming weather,” I’m trying to spend more time on c3pr, and there just doesn’t seem to be time to do that and to blog too, so you’ll have to settle for the best I can do.
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