Watcha doing?

[tango]

Wrangling little girls for a good chunk of today.

Our daughter visited for Easter with three of the grandchildren. Last time she was here we had some family business that needed to be discussed so we couldn't play with the girls as much as we normally would, and we promised we'd play with them today. So today it was time to deliver on the promise, which involved bouncing balls, wrestling and tickling, Easter egg hunts and exploring the attic that they've never been allowed in before. They still aren't allowed up there unsupervised but since I was with them I figured it would be OK. They were intrigued and had all sorts of ideas, mostly unimaginably impractical, of what we might do with the space.

My plan is to shift some stuff around in the basement. I want to make a space that's safe for them, under supervision, because I want to be able to make some wooden bricks for them to play with and a cart to carry them around. What I want to do is to rough-cut the bricks and show the girls how to sand them with a sanding block, then let the girls paint the bricks. Then I'll do most of the prep work to build a cart to carry them, and let the girls use a screwdriver to put the screws in to hold it all together. We currently have a set of bricks that once belonged to my late father-in-law, and it would be neat if the girls could have their own sets that they helped make, that in turn they can pass down to their children.

[tango]

Tuesday I turned a couple of bowls out of a log. They're sitting in damp shavings in a box to slow the drying process. Yesterday my wife didn't want me playing with the lathe because our daughter was visiting in the evening so we had a lazy day. Today it's fair game to play with the lathe, so I might turn something again.

Last night my daughter admired a live edge bowl sitting on my shelf in the woodshop. Had my wife not claimed it I'd have given it to her, so maybe I'll turn another one for her.

[tango]

A bit more fun with the lathe today. I turned a somewhat flat piece of sycamore into a small square plate, then turned a round bowl from a section of branch. I really like the bowl. My wife really likes the bowl. I sent my daughter a picture of the bowl and her response was "I love it". So the issue is who gets to keep it, although my wife decided to let my daughter have it.

I have a couple more pieces of the same branch so tomorrow I suspect I'll be making another one for my wife. It's kinda fiddly hollowing out the middle of something so small but I seen to have managed it OK. I hope it doesn't crack as it dries.

[IMINXTC]

Waiting af the shop for arrival of 2 Michelin Defender LTX M/S tires and much needed 4-point alignment. Tires were late.


Terrific excuse for sitting on one's caboose.

[RabbiKnife]

Waiting af the shop for arrival of 2 Michelin Defender LTX M/S tires and much needed 4-point alignment. Tires were late.


Terrific excuse for sitting on one's caboose.

Hopefully your mortgage for the tires was pre approved

[tango]

Yesterday I went to see a friend I haven't caught up with for a while. He works in forestry so could turn into a convenient source of random pieces of wood. He gave me a couple of pieces of wood from trees I didn't know anything about at all, so I'll need to figure something to do with them too. Soon I'm going to need to figure out how to cut the bigger pieces I've got kicking around, partly because I want to try turning something larger and partly because I'm running out of space to store wood in my garage.

These next few days I need to do my taxes, but aside from that I suspect my lathe will feature heavily on my "things to do today" lists.

[teddyv]

Time to prune the trees as spring is finally approaching. Tulips about 4in above ground.

[Cloudwalker]

I have an agreement with my plants. I don't mess with them, they grow for me. I have a brown thumb.  I kill plastic plants.

[Fenris]

15 bags of mulch and it's only a start.

[tango]

I got another bowl turned, this one is for my wife. It's a fairly small bowl with a live edge top. It's kinda like the one I made for my daughter, but this one is kinda teardrop shaped where my daughter's bowl is more or less spherical.

[IMINXTC]

Watched a fellow today in Union Square doing his fetching impression of a deranged derelict, as a Japanese couple did their quaint impression of frightened tourists.


(Thought at first he was running for Governor).

[tango]

Not much time for the lathe today, it's about time I got my taxes done. The usual headache, but they are done.

[Cloudwalker]

Recovering from yesterday.  I had a doctor's appointment in the morning.  Our church choir had a preformance at a nursing home in the afternoon, and we had a rehearsal beforehand.  After that I stopped by city hall to renew my car registration.  Then spent quite a while on the phone confirming other appointments, setting up others and giving providers biographical, and physical information.  I have another doctor's appointment today.  This time with Beltone.  I got an offering for a free hearing check.  I don't think I have any hearing problems but it's free.  And at my age prevention is  worth the time.  I did check my insurance and discovered, to my joy, that they will pay for 2 hearing aids, one per ear, per year with no copay.  After today I'm done until Sunday morning. 

[tango]

So far today I've created 5 gallons of maple shavings.

Take a wild guess how.

I still have some red oak upstairs awaiting my attention to turn it into windowsills. But on Friday my granddaughters are coming and they like to play in the room, so it's probably easier to accept I'm not going to make any progress until Saturday, than to start cutting, sanding, staining etc and then have to move absolutely everything out so they can play, then put it all back. They could play elsewhere but they particularly like that room and, since it's going to be their room when they start staying overnight here, I'm more than happy for them to claim some ownership of it.

[tango]

Now my granddaughters have been and gone I can cut some windowsills.

Today I got the two sills in their room cut, routed, sanded and ready to stain. Then I cut the first one for the adjacent room and realized that the window frames are different in that room than every other room, and the wood I ordered to make the window sills is too thick. So now I'm not sure whether to get it planed down to the right thickness, or use a router to trim a little nock in the very edge of it and hope that kinda sorta works out. I'm tempted to trim a nock to see how it looks and get it planed if I don't like how it looks.

It's really tedious having ordered thicker wood, paid a premium for thicker wood, and now need to plane away a bunch of the wood I paid extra to get hold of, but I guess them's the breaks.