The Plentiful Vintage

So, I started coming down with a cold last Saturday, which by Sunday was full blown and nasty, so further work on the bench got postponed. I managed not to miss any days at work, but I was miserable all week, even more so than when I had the flu in November. The symptoms finally started easing Friday, so yesterday I finally felt good enough to head back down into the basement. It was also mild outside, almost into the fifties, so it wasn't quite so cold down there, definitely good news.

( Measure once, cut twice... )

What a gorgeous weekend it turned out to be. (The weather critters had predicted mostly cloudy and in the 50s today. Nuh uh...)

I rode yesterday, and today I rode the Washington Secondary path. (As an aside, I don't get why it's called Washington Secondary. It's not in Washington County, nor are there are any towns or villages with that name in the state, much less along the path.) I dressed appropriately for both rides, so there were no temperature comfort issues. Yesterday it was in the seventies. Break out the t-shirts.

The good weather seems to have prompted an amazing amount of pollen production amongst the local flora. My nasal allergies seem to have ebbed somewhat over the years, but I could feel it today. What's really killing me now, though, are my eyes. Really itchy and watery. I had a Singulair this morning, but I needed to pop a chlortab when I got home from the ride. Feh.

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I missed a good chunk of the good weather yesterday as I was at work rebuilding our mail server. I'd done most of the work Friday night, so the remaining stuff should've only taken about an hour, but things got messed up thanks to Firefox failing to realize that the server's web interface pages were not exactly the same as the pages it had in the cache, and me failing to realize that I was working with cached pages. Bozhe moi!

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This morning I spent way too much quality time with my table saw. ( Table saw hijinx... )

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I have seedlings! In my biodome! Even some of the three year-old seeds sprouted. Now if I can just avoid killing 'em...

I didn't post a projects update last weekend, but that was more from laziness rather than lack of accomplishment. The first thing I did last weekend was to cobble together the second office chair from the leftover parts from the new chair and the two dead chairs. Not much to do there other than elongating two screw slots on the base plate to fit the old leather seat bottom. After that it was just screw it all together. Worked great.

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Next up was a real project.( Overthinking workshop furniture... )

How is it that once upon a time I was able to get at least nine 4 x 8' sheets of 3/4" plywood down the stairs into my basement, and yet the single 4 x 8' sheet of 1/2" plywood I bought tonight refuses to make the corner at the bottom of the stairs? And those two 12' long one by fours have no shot, no matter how bendy they seem to be.

If it's raining, it must be the weekend...

I had all sorts of lawn and garden type stuff planned, but it seems hurricane season has come early to New England (well, a nor'easter, anyway). That leaves me with the great indoors.

I did venture out into the weather this morning to get an oil change, and to have them check the weird squeaking noise I'm getting at low speed from the rear wheels. I also had them flush the transmission. I assumed the squeaking was something brake related, and therefore potentially expensive, but they couldn't find anything wrong with the brakes. In fact, they failed to find the source at all. The manager says it's probably just some dust from the brake shoes. We'll see.

I finished painting the office a week ago, and have done nothing in there since except sit in front of the computer and watch TV. All the pails, tools, drop cloths, and such are still spread about the office and the kitchen (which was my staging area, figuring that if I managed to dump a large quantity of paint, it was far better to do it in a room that didn't have wall-to-wall). I suppose the first thing I should do is haul all that stuff downstairs. Then it's time to think about furnishings. ( Much more behind the curtains... )

I hereby declare the bookcase project officially finished. This very day I have sorted through, grouped, and arranged neatly on the appropriate shelves, the last of the books that are destined for the bookcases. Not only that, I even found my stash of autographed baseballs, and put them up the shelves, too. I consider it quite the accomplishment considering I started this project just over two years ago, and actually finished building the cases more than a year ago. It's like my own personal Big Dig. They should should give me a Nobel Prize in procrastination, when they ever get around to awarding them.

I spent quite a bit of the day going back and forth to the attic, because I kept coming across caches of books that I hadn't brought down yet. The most egregious of such finds was when I noticed that I only had one of Norm Abrams' New Yankee Workshop books amongst my pile of woodworking books. Now I knew I'd bought several of his books, so back upstairs I went to poke around. Yup, there they were, tucked away on a shelf behind a file cabinet, along with a couple dozen other woodworking books that I'd completely forgotten about. Yes, I might just have a book problem...

There's still a little room for a few more books on the shelves, so that's good. There are still a few things that need to be addressed. I've got boxes and boxes of culls that I'm going to have to figure out what to do with. And then there are the paperbacks. There wasn't enough space for all the mass-market size paperbacks I have, plus they would have looked a bit out of scale in these bookcases. What I need to do is build some smaller versions of the cases to hold them. I'd probably only need one or two. But that's another project.

Meanwhile...

I really like Corelle dinnerware a lot, if for no other reason than it's usually pretty sturdy. However, when a piece does break, it frelling explodes. I just managed to drop a dinner plate, and it shattered into a gazillion fragments. Sigh, down to service for six on my twenty year-old set.

So... I made a quick trip to Woodcraft for more wood, then set about redoing about half of project #1 from scratch. Actually, now that I know what I'm doing, it went a lot more quickly. I was able to get to the point of final glue up by the time I quit for dinner. No new disasters. Go me! It actually turned out for the best. Upon examination of another of the old pieces, I discovered another potential problem, so it was better to just start over.

Anyway, projects #1 and #2 are in good shape, and should be done by next weekend. I haven't done anything on #3 or #4 yet. There's not a lot left to do on #3, so I can still finish it if I hustle. I'll be starting from scratch on #4, so it's getting unlikely I'll get to it. Shrug.

Ack! Christmas is only three weeks away. I have projects to finish, presents to buy, a Christmas card to design, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped. I'm also worried I'm coming down with a cold. I started feeling sniffly and irritated throaty yesterday afternoon at work, so I sucked on a zinc lozenge. Today I feel fine. No idea what's going on.

Today is project day. Despite traipsing around all over Rhode Island, I was unable to find the bit of hardware I need for project #1, so I bought some sheet brass at the hobby shop, and today I'm going to attempt to fabricate what I need. I spent some of the time I was sucking on my zinc lozenge yesterday using Adobe Illustrator to make a pattern for what I need. This should be interesting. I made sure I got plenty of extra brass.

I also need to come up with a design for this year's Christmas card. I getting desperate here. I went through a bunch of photos looking for any kind of decent source material, but no joy. I'm even starting to consider collage. Well, let's postpone that until I finish the brass work.

Crappy weather, quiet weekend. Despite my best intentions of just lounging about, I even got some stuff done. Saturday was spent in the basement, working on a project that I had to put aside last year because I'd damaged one of the pieces through incompetence. I managed to fix the part that I damaged, and cleaned it up and sanded the pieces. Okay, it's a little shorter than the original design, but the proportions may actually be a little better now.</huge rationalization>. The hardware I bought for it last year turns out to be unsuitable for what I want to do, though, so I need to make a side trip to Woodcraft to get something better.

The other thing I worked on was a wooden lighthouse I got when we divvied up my late aunt's belongings last year. The top part, where the light would be, had come unglued. I glued it back together, with the addition of a dowel to add some structural strength to it. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. It's about 16" tall. My original thought was to place it out by the tomato patch. Unfortunately, it looks like it's made out of pine, and the interior has no paint or other preservative whatsoever, so it wouldn't last long outside. It's really too big to be displayed in the house. Maybe if I ever build a porch.

Sunday I finally got around to finishing hauling books down from the attic to put on the bookshelves. I think I've got pretty much everything down, including boxes that have been packed for upwards of fifteen years or more. Initial conclusion, I really own a lot of Asimov.

There is nowhere near enough room on the shelves for all the books. I'll address part of that by culling a lot of them. Some of the culling will be easy. One of the first things Nutty said to me as I was showing her around my place way back when was "You belong to a book club, don't you?" in reference to the piles of identically sized books on the staircase up to the attic. It's true. I'm also absent-minded, so I've often gotten books I wouldn't of ordered on my own. Sometimes, it works out. I got Varley's Red Thunder that way, and enjoyed it a lot. I got my first Garrett collection that way, and I've since read the entire series. OTOH, I've also gotten a pile of Star Wars universe books which I shall never read. Likewise the piles of Tolkein ripoffs. Those are headed for greener pastures. There are also a lot of hard cover technothrillers by Tom Clancy wannabes that I've read, but have no intention of reading again. They can go, too.

Then again, some of the culling will be very hard. Do I really need to keep The ELIAS Baseball Statistical Yearbooks for 1986-89 inclusive? All of the information is on the web now, and yet I still haven't been able to convince myself to let them go. The same goes for that second-hand copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia.

The other thing I have to think about is what to do with all the paperbacks. A lot of those will be culled, too, but do I really want the remainder in the same bookcases as the hard covers? My original thought was to keep authors together, regardless of cover, but it just looks odd. In my old apartment, I built a separate bookcase for paperbacks. It was about half the depth of a standard bookcase, and it fit perfectly in my hall. I still have it, but I don't really have a good place to put it. i suppose I could do something similar.

I'm going to need more places for books anyway. What I really need is some motivation to start working on the living room. I'll have most of the week after Christmas off, so maybe I can get a start on it then.