sat sep 2
I’m bummed.
My cat won’t eat and hasn’t shit for a week. We have an appointment with the vet, but at an ungodly hour. Bummer.
My tooth is infected and I’m on antibiotics. Bummer
The apples are ready for picking, but I still haven’t got a decent size mill or press. Bummer.
My pumpkins died. My peppers died. My lima beans never came up. My tomatoes won’t turn red. And my sunflowers are half the size they were last year.
I’m blaming global warming. Bummer.
My morning glories climbed all the way up the trellis, but there’s not a single flower. Bummer.
wed sep 6
I went to the dump today.
As usual, I filled up the back of the truck with debris, and the overflow went into the back of the cab, and more overflow went onto the passenger seat. Then I got my coffee, my phone, and my Notebook, and headed for the dump. It took me awhile to unload: Metal in the metal bin. Recyclables in the recyclables bin. Garbage in the garbage bin. And when I finally finished, I reached for my notebook, to scratch “go to dump” off my to-do list, but my notebook was gone! WTF? I replayed my morning in my mind and watched myself putting my notebook on top of the pile of recyclable cardboard (since there was no place else to put it), and then dumping the whole box of cardboard into the dumpster, which auto-feeds into a compactor.
“Bye bye Notebook,” I thought. I’ll miss all those out-of-date to-do lists, but it won’t kill me.
Ummm … what about my insurance cards? My Sears Charge card? My Costco card? My Amex card? My various expired gift cards? Lets just say I rounded out my morning with a little dumpster diving, and I got Lucky.
See that nest of wire on top of the mattress? That’s not just barbed wire, it’s heavy-duty prison-grade fencing that takes a bolt cutter to cut, and it was buried under years of weeds under a bump on the field I was brush hogging.
Needless to say, it wrapped itself tightly around the brush hog’s rotor and stopped the tractor dead in its tracks.
Twice.
thu sep 7
Fuck this “bummed” bullshit. Where is your Can-Do attitude, anyway?
This is a man who decided, in the first week of December a few years ago, to make silver bullets for gifts, and then made them in time for Christmas!
No cider mill? No cider press? No problem!!
I’ve got plenty of wood laying around, so ‘all I need’ is an acme screw and nut, some stainless steel strapping, a motor, some sheaves and bearings, and about a dozen crazed hours in the shop. What can go wrong?
Truing up the cider mill flywheel.
Rather than trying to dream up a design of my own, I’m basically building one out of a book.
sat sep 9
I’ll tell you what can go wrong.
I had the bright idea that I would mount the mill motor such that (if you do the math) the tension it puts on the belt is (weight-of-motor)/(tangent of motor-tilt-angle).
i.e. when the motor support is almost horizontal, the belt is nice and tight.
Well I dropped the flywheel sheave on the floor and put a microscopic dent in it. When it turns, the v-belt rides up a tiny bit, and the pulley-to-pulley distance wants to shift by about a millimeter. But since the motor-tilt-angle is so small, 1mm horizontal corresponds to about 1/2″ vertical for the motor, and when you turn it on, the motor bounces up and down and the whole thing shakes and rattles like crazy. My 500# workbench wants to walk across the floor.
I got rid of the dent and it’s better, but I’m going to be making another motor mount.
Looked good on paper.
Better luck next time.
The utility sink at the green house is a problem. I only had so much space to work with, and I managed to fit a washer, a sink, and a kitchen pantry into a space that was only big enough for 2 out of 3. The tradeoff was a tight space for the sink.
When we finally got around to trying to buy a compact sink, everything that fit was ridiculously tiny, so I decided to put in a decent size undermount sink, and mount the faucet on the wall. Naturally, the wall was already sheetrocked, plastered, and painted, and the studs had been placed sideways to save a precious 2 inches. All of which made it a little harder than I would wish.
Another remodel of the remodel.
mon sep 11
I’ll tell you what can go wrong.
I had my first bad woodworking accident in many years (if you don’t count all my ‘good accidents, that is).
Years ago, at Wendy Lane, Dad told me that the jointer was the most dangerous tool in the shop. I didn’t exactly agree, but I was young. This morning, I was putting an angled bevel on the cider press’ basket slats, when my hand slipped and my left ring finger hit the blades. In no time flat, my entire first knuckle was thinly sliced down the sawdust chute, and I was hopping up and down yelling “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Mary was nearby, and I told her: “We’ve got to go.” We dropped everything and, while I squoze my finger to stop the blood and tried hard not to black out, she drove like a maniac to the ER, where they did a fine job of patching what was left of it. It was a ‘clean’ injury, with a perfect flap of skin to fold over the stub, and the prognosis is good. Repeat after me: Nice job, jerk!
Perversely, the thing that was going thru my mind as they worked their medical magic was:
“So much for cidering season!”
wed sep 13
Back in the ’90’s, when I was a bicycling maniac, I used to enjoy having dogs follow (chase) me until, one year, I got bitten 3 separate times. Ouch! Aside from the puncture wounds, this messed with my head, and I started to hyperventilate when I’d ride past a dog’s territory. It took me 2 years to get over it.
In the wake of cutting off my finger, the last thing I want to happen is to become afraid of my tools. So the very next morning, I headed downstairs and did a sober post-mortem on what had gone wrong. I spent 5 minutes (!) cobbling up a safer set of hold-downs and push-sticks, and then I ran the rest of the sticks thru the machine. I feel better already.
The case of the incredible shrinking wall cabinet.
The drawers I made are 5″ too wide!
sun sep 17
Most days, I wake up and I’ve got a long list of things to do. Today, that list was:
Pick apples.
And that’s what I did. High up on a 10′ wooden ladder on uneven ground, pressed hard into the tree branches, so they catch your shirt and scratch your skin. One hand for picking, and one for holding onto the bucket, the ladder, and the tree (Two out of three if you’re lucky). And all this with a filthy ace bandage on a very sore finger. It was a long hard day.
I think the big lesson I’ll take away from this year’s cidering is that I need a better way to pick them. Hauling a ladder from site to site sucks. Teetering on tiptoes near the top of a tree is for the birds. Toppling to the ground with a full bucket of apples and a busted hand is dangerous (The ladder only fell over once. In slow motion. I landed like spiderman.) My trees are full-sized, and the top branches, with the best apples, are out of reach. Even for the small trees, you have to move the ladder half a dozen times. I have some ideas ….
Between working on the green house, my busted hand, and plain old procrastination, I got started late and most of the trees I wanted to harvest were early varieties which had already dropped their fruit. The deer are fat and happy.
It’s been a weird year, and the apples are earlier and smaller than usual.
I complain about the drops and the ones I can’t reach but, really, I picked plenty.
Seven (of nine) of this year’s apple varieties.
(Only 2 of which I picked last year.)
Cats really do have 9 lives.
Carbon the cat – the one who stopped eating and shitting – went to the vet, and he couldn’t find anything obvious wrong with her. Gave her some shots, sent her home, and she continued not eating. We decided against heroic measures, kept giving her food and TLC, and let her come and go as she pleased. One night, she didn’t come home, and we figured that was that. As the song says:
But the cat came back, she wouldn’t stay away,
She was sitting on the porch on the very next day.
The cat came back, she didn’t want to roam,
The very next day she was home sweet home.
And so it went. A day at a time. Two days at a time. And all the while, she’s getting really thin and weak. We haven’t seen her for a couple days, and I think she’s done.
I wish I could say she was a great cat, but … we gave her a good life.
tue sep 19
It was a beautiful day yesterday, and we pressed apples.
With a brand-new mill and a brand-new press, I had expected that some fatal design flaw would rear its ugly head right away and stop me in my tracks, but we managed to press 3 varieties, for a total of about 6 gallons of cider. Not too shabby!
Mary dropping apples into the mill.
It is a fearsome brute (the mill, not Mary) which pulverizes apples instantly – when it doesn’t launch them back at you.
The pulp is pretty coarse, and it tends to spew the pomace onto the ground instead of into the bucket, but I’ve since tweaked the design…
The press works OK, but it’s too tall and it tends to fall over. A couple of tweaks will get it through this season, but I need to re-think this one.
wed sep 20
Before: The beard kind of makes my nose and mouth look like … that other curly place.
After: Oooh! He’s a handsome devil!
Until a few months ago, there was only one place on my body where my hair was curly.
Then I decided to let my beard grow out, and it came in curly.
The snarls in the curls hurt to comb out in the morning, but I kept growing it.
Mary said it was ugly, but I kept growing it.
Pretty soon, even I thought it was ugly, but I kept growing it.
After awhile, it started to ‘catch’ when I took my motorcycle helmet off, but I kept growing it anyway.
Then I broke the earhook off my hearing aid while taking my helmet off and trying not to let it pull on my beard, and I spent 5 minutes on my hands and knees in a parking lot looking for the hook.
So to heck with it. I cut it off.
fri sep 22
Testing ciders for sugar and acid.
Can a Meth lab be far behind?
sat sep 23
The girls were here and ‘helped’ crush and press more apples.
Almost 10 gallons from 1 small tree, picked ‘right on time.’
Just imagine what could happen if I got my shit together!
I bottled most of it ‘sweet’ and prepped a 5 gallon batch for fermentation.
mon sep 25
We’re having a hot spell, and the tomatoes finally decided to ripen, so BLT sandwiches was on the menu. I went to the store, paid for my stuff, and managed to leave one bag of groceries behind at the checkout counter. The one with lettuce and mayonnaise in it.
I still made a bacon and tomato sandwich, but it just wasn’t the same…
fri sep 29
It used to be that we’d finish off maple season with a ceremonial stack of pancakes.
A glass of fresh cider is just as good.
I won’t be forgetting the season of ’17.
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