Watcha doing?

[tango]

I now have power in the workspace. New wall studs are added, a backbox is on one of the wall studs, and wired to a receptacle. When it's all finished it will be replaced with a GFCI but for now a basic receptacle will do the job. Now I can get rid of the honking great 20A extension cord that trails all over the place, usually tripping me up when I least expect it. That alone is progress.

I thought I was facing a problem because the cable I ran months ago didn't give me quite as much reach as I hoped. I really didn't want to have to run another 60-odd feet of cable for the sake of adding 12 inches to the end but the alternative was putting a power socket behind where the door will open, which didn't seem like a good plan. Thankfully I had a bit of extra wiggle room on the cable and managed to get it to reach without pulling it horribly tight, so for now we're good.

I also got the threshold floorboard cut and screwed down, and another landing floorboard cut to length and put more or less in place. Soon I need to figure how I'm going to stain the boards in a way that lets me wipe away the stain without staining myself too badly in the process. "Old Americana" is a great color for floorboard but not so great for knees and feet.

[tango]

My suggested workout today wasn't what I hoped. After the last couple of days I hoped for an easy day but the suggestion was a 90 minute base workout. I decided to do a 90 minute open run instead, so I didn't have my watch constantly beeping at me telling me I was doing it wrong. It was warm and humid so it ended up being harder than I originally planned.

Then came a quick trip to the local lumber yard, so I now have a nice stack of 2x4s ready to frame some more walls. I need to fit the top bar, which will involve cutting some cross braces and screwing them into place in a very confined attic crawl space above the room but, once that is done, I can get on with the top bar and framing the last wall should be straightforward. The trickiest part is probably going to be setting the top bar perpendicular to the adjacent bar. It's not a difficult process in principle but trying to hold everything in place at ceiling height, then screwing the 2x4 into the ceiling, all without letting the angle shift even as the torque of driving screws tries to turn it, can be tricky. At least when I'm screwing beams into the floor I can stand on them to stop them moving.

Once the last wall is built I can fit electrical back boxes to that section, then run a cable between all the back boxes.

[Cloudwalker]

Got a text from the director of our drama ministry yesterday. He's putting together another production.  It will be reader's theater, so no lines to memorize and little movement.  Rehearsals are Tuesday and Thursday evenings with the performance being next Sunday at both services.  Naturally, I told him I'm in.  No Idea what part I'll be playing.  All he said was most of us will be playing kids and it's about Paul's conversion.

[tango]

Took the kids at church out for pizza. The original plan was bowling but we got to the bowling alley to find it was closed so we went for pizza instead. After eating pizza my suggested workout of sprint repeats wasn't happening so I went for a walk. It was hot, I was glad I didn't do sprint repeats. Maybe I'll do them tomorrow.

[tango]

Sprint repeats, which were fine until I found myself overheating and then strained a muscle. So I took a long break half way, and then cut the workout short because sprint repeats were turning into fairly fast repeats because that was about all I could muster.

It's mostly OK now, but pulls a little if I walk too fast. Tomorrow's workout is going to have to be a lot tamer. Probably a base level run, whatever my tracker suggests.

[tango]

Nasty sweaty job securing some struts between joists in the crawl space behind my attic. It was a warm day and it was very warm in a confined space under a metal roof. But I got the boards moved around, fiberglass moved out of the way, and the struts I needed are now in place. That means I can secure the top beam for my new wall into place, which is progress. Although now I'm realising I will need to use two pieces of 2x4 so I might need to get another strut in place. If needs be I can go and buy a longer piece, or just cut two pieces such that they meet under a strut rather than meeting in the air. The struts are wide enough to easily carry two ends, and the offcuts can become the sections that sit in the middle of a door frame or something.

[tango]

Gentle run made too difficult by heat and humidity.

Then I decided to attack the job of fitting the top bar for my new wall. With one hand I hold a large square to make sure it's perpendicular. With another hand I hold the end of the beam to make sure it's positioned correctly. With another hand I support the weight of the beam and with another I drive screws through the beam into the struts I secured in place yesterday.

The observant reader will spot the issues with the described process and regular human anatomical limitations. Thankfully my wife was on hand to provide two of the hands. Once the first piece was in place it was easy enough to fly solo and fit the extension piece to go from the end of the first piece to the other end of the room. Then I got the first several wall studs cut and secured into position.

I need to figure out what size and shape I want to make a small closet, and whether I want it to have a drawer at the bottom and doors opening to a space to hang clothes, or something more like a walk-in closet. The only difference at this stage is whether I put the bottom bar across the bottom of it. If needs be I can use an oscillating tool to cut off that piece of the base bar, but I'd really rather not have to do that.

Crucially for now, I've got enough wall in place that I can run cable to join all the electrical back boxes together. I'll need to fit new back boxes to the section of wall I just framed today, then I can fit the insulation panels between the studs and run sound proofing across the front of it all. That will be an interesting process, although probably easier than running it across the ceiling. Trying to fit a sheet that's 48 inches wide, 13 feet long, and weighs 52lb, into position so I can screw upwards through it into the ceiling joists, while trying to maintain its position against one edge of the room, when nothing is quite straight, and without letting too much weight hang so it doesn't pull free of the screws already in place, took a bit of thinking about how best to solve it. At least with the walls all I have to do is hang something vertically and what I'm hanging it against is mostly straight. I'll be working with sheets roughly 4 feet by 8 feet that weigh 32lb.

[Cloudwalker]

Looking forward to tonight's rehearsal.  Picture 5 adults portraying rambunctious kids and 1 adult trying to tell the story of Paul on the road to Damascus.  Tonight is the last rehearsal.  A lot of work, but fun.  We will be doing it at both services Sunday.  If you're interested in seeing it hunt up the church's website and watch one of the services.  It is St Cloud First United Methodist Church in St Cloud, FL.  I've been told that it will eventually be posted on YouTube.

[tango]

Threshold level workout suggested today, and I decided to give it a shot despite the heat and possibility of rain. And it was hard, harder than I had hoped it would be. I had to ease off the pace a couple of times because the workout gives no consideration for hills - it sets a suggested pace so it's easy to hold it running down a gentle hill and then impossibly hard to sustain it going up the hill at the end. And then the heat made it harder to do much of anything, but I got to the end of it even if I did need to take a couple more walk breaks than I hoped, and didn't manage to meet the goal pace for as much of it as I hoped.

Along the way I clocked a new lactate threshold which, curiously, was the target pace I was trying to hit and sustain and four seconds per mile faster than the previously clocked threshold. It helps explain why I was finding it hard sustaining the pace it in the heat.

Now I'm pondering what to do next in my work room. I'm not sure whether to run more cables or look to frame out the closet space. My wife and I talked about the design of that and decided a huge drawer at the bottom wouldn't be useful so it's going to be a "step-in closet" (like a walk-in closet but without a whole lot of space to walk around in it). I may yet put a smaller set of drawers that only take up the back half, but I can decide that later.

ETA: I drilled some more holes and ran cable all the way around the room so far. There are going to be two more back boxes installed that I didn't put in yet but that's an easy enough thing to do. I got sidetracked because I went downstairs to retrieve a tool for marking where I needed to drill and ran into my wife who was just getting back from shopping, and helping her bring everything in and put it all away disrupted the process, as did an afternoon coffee.

Now the holes are drilled it was mostly easy to run cables between everything. The one tricky part was in a corner, where I have two wall studs touching each other, enclosing a small space in the very corner of the room. With hindsight a small gap between them would have made things easier, but I could feed a fine wire through one way, hook it to the end of my cable reel, and then pull cable back through it. Slightly tricky, it took a couple of tries to get all the angles just so, but I got there in the end. I'll probably drill a few small holes in the corners and fill the cavity with spray foam so I don't have a nasty gap in my insulation.

[Cloudwalker]

I just finished my latest online course with Hillsdale College.  This was my 8th certificate.  This one was on C.S. Lewis and Christianity. 

[tango]

Easy workout today because I ran yesterday and then went bowling in the evening, so I have muscles that are a little tight that I forgot even existed. Today's suggested workout was a 30-minute recovery run, but I decided to go for a long walk instead. So things were at a slightly lower intensity but for longer. I'm glad I wasn't running, my legs felt like dead weights for most of my walk.

Then I got busy with a little more work in my workspace. I got a couple more back boxes fitted, and got cables run from each box to the next one and all joined up. Now I just need to connect the chain to the first socket, the one with the power, so I can get power elsewhere around the room. Trying to figure how to frame the closet I want to put in is a little tricky, I want to widen it a little from what it was before but need to figure what to do with the existing floor before I can do that. The adjacent room is a bathroom so the floor will be under a layer of plywood, so it doesn't matter if that part isn't pretty, but I would prefer to avoid nasty joins in the flooring in the closet spcae.

I'm also trying to figure the best way to get a load of old wall studs out of there and stored somewhere else. They are worth keeping - the chances are they are chestnut and probably 90+ years old - but there are a few of them and they take up quite a lot of space. Once this room is finished I'm probably going to claim it as an office/study, and my plan is to build a desk using the chestnut to make a worktop. It will be a bit of work to take a load of rough cut studs and get everything smooth and even but I think it will be worth it. At some point I need to move things out of there so I can clean up the entire space, and I'll need to clear space before I can get drywalling people in there because they'll probably have silly ideas about being able to actually get at the spaces I want them to drywall.

[Cloudwalker]

I have another story for my "war stories." I have learned that anyone who spends any time performing has a few stories of the type of "if the audience knew what went on backstage they would wonder how we got through."  This morning I ended up in one.  But this one happened in plain view.  The "girl" behind me had my arm behind my back, planned.  Just as we were just about in place somehow I fell.  The others reacted so perfectly that everyone in the audience thought it was planned.  I wasn't hurt, and the rest of the show went on like it was supposed to.  Every show has a few of those.

[tango]

Went for a walk in the woods after church. For the first time ever I passed a cyclist while walking. It was on a big long hill, about three miles of mostly steep gradients. I walked up about a mile of it but she would probably have cycled more than a mile before she passed the point where the trail crossed the gravel road. I wasn't sure if I was gaining on her for a while but sure enough I was, and eventually passed her. I was pushing quite hard on the hill, and she was struggling with the gradient. At the top of the hill I saw a guy in cycling gear holding a helmet asking if I'd seen another cyclist - presumably he was her riding buddy.

All in I got about 7.5 miles and sweat a lot in the process. It was a good walk.

[IMINXTC]

Tossed the winter boots today for lightweight techs.  What joy!

[tango]

Didn't feel energetic today and my suggested workout was "recovery", so I decided to walk one of my longer routes. In the end I jogged for much of it but at a gentle pace and pausing to walk whenever I felt the urge. Curiously today I made a point of jogging into the wind when it blew in my face, because it was nice and cooling.