Month: April 2023

As of this morning the radial arm saw is off to its forever home at my wife’s high school in Sutton. Where it will spend the rest of its days cutting chunks of whatever they have to throw at it until it dies. The saw was second hand to me, and most likely from the mid eighties or perhaps nineties. I don’t think it was made earlier than that. A sturdy, and extraordinarily heavy item. I fought with it for a good hour just to get the damn thing into the back of my wife’s SUV. Unfortunately the 2×4 stand it was on could not go with it. It failed whilst being moved to the trunk of the SUV. I ended up having to use a sledge hammer, saws all, and a crow bar to get the thing broken down (the stand that is). No major loss, the tool still works, and I locked it down so it won’t swing around and clang the whole drive there (I hope). They are definitely going to want to have two or more people move it, as it is deceptively heavy. Cast iron, and almost entirely metal parts. A Sears Craftsman item from the 80’s! It’s loaded with metal parts. It would serve quite well as a boat anchor. Now I have freed up more space! Yay! Not sure what else I can do to open up the floor anymore. Well, I mean I do know, I just don’t want to. I don’t have thousands of dollars to buy a 72 inch 3 bank rolling tool cart & hutch, to consolidate all my hand tools etc into one spot. It would leave me with no where to put 2 of my 3 vices. I already need to modify my wood working bench in order to accept the smaller second wood vice. I don’t have a long enough table top to mount a permanent metal vice too. Maybe if my bench were a full 8ft long, but at just under 6ft I can’t afford to give up that much table top real estate. In order to mount my second wood vice I need to cut down one end of the table to 3″ thick, down from the 2×6’s I had used to build it, otherwise the vice sits too low. Not going to happen any time soon, as a project like that needs to be thought about, thought out, and planned for. It will also take me an hour or two of cutting, hammering and chiseling before I can even attempt to dry fit the vice. I have to mount it where it makes sense, but also doesn’t interfere with where I set up my box cut joinery jig at the far end of my bench. Can’t be hasty about this. Have to tamp down my desire to be impulsive.

We have arrived at the Wednesday portion of the week. Far enough in to see the weekend, and far enough away from Monday to settle into projects, meetings, conference calls and whatnot. Once again I’m not certain of what today will bring work wise, so I’ll putter around the house tidying things up as I go. Throw some junk away if I can. Yeah – that’s the ticket! That usually sets my phone to chirping, if I decide to tackle a home project of minor importance. Ciao Bella.

Used to be a fun pass time of mine. Going for a car ride, read. Taking a long distance bus trip, read. Heading downtown on the train, read. Flying across the country, read. But now, if I tried to do it anywhere other than my home or on a plane I would most likely vomit, and/or need to lie down, and try to let the motion sickness wash over me and dissipate as quickly as possible. Even hearing my oldest read in the car while I was driving, was starting to make me queasy, as I imagine the bumping, jiggling words bouncing around in my eyes, and feeling my stomach turn. Ugh! No thank you. I feel in the last ten years or so I have become so much more susceptible to motion sickness, vertigo, and other such things of that nature. I absolutely can not spin anymore. Tea cups, octopus, scrambler type rides will make me very sick. I did this gravity well, spinning thing with my oldest at the Strawberry Festival last summer, and it did not go well for me. I made it through, and was able to walk around the fair grounds for an hour or so afterwards, but once we got home i required a three hour nap in near total darkness to feel right again. My oldest went back on the ride a bit later, went twice in a row, and then immediately wanted to go home, so… i guess i didn’t fare too badly. I do miss being able to read just about anywhere though. No wonder my habit nearly dropped off. All of my free time was during a 2hr each way commute on the train, and if I couldn’t read then, I was likely not going to find an additional 4 hrs a day to indulge.

Tuesday is here! Looks as though the green bin trucks will start taking yard waste again. I see lots and lots of paper bags out at the curb this morning. I am leaving my leaves in the beds as mulch cover, and to add more material to raise up those beds. The earth seems to sink no matter how often I add new topsoil, triple mix, or clay based mud to all of our beds. Last year I emptied out the compost pile, and that didn’t seem to do much at all, except give us pumpkins all over the place. Or gourds, and the occasional random tomato plant or potato plant for good measure. I like growing things that require little from me besides a little bit of water when we hit a dry patch, or cleared space in which to do their thing. That I can do. My thumb is only ever so slightly tinged green. More flesh coloured with a slight grass stained hue.

Still waiting to hear back about a few things, so I’m not 100% certain of what is on the docket for today. Dropped off my tax stuff, so I’ll have those related bills to look forward to at some point next week. Tax time is always fun. No not really. Stressful and nerve wracking is more like it. Times were simpler when I worked for someone else and only needed a T4, and my reassessment forms, and any financial contribution forms from the bank. Not so simple now. Glad for the accountant that’s for certain. All the best out there. Ciao Bella!

Well some, but not that many! I added seven new shelves to the racks. Three very small ones meant for stain cans and rubber gloves, one dedicated to my chainsaw, one for thinner cut off strips, and two general purpose shelves to split up items and give me room to add more should I feel so inclined. I have more shelf space left over so I can add more things from the floor if I need to at a later time. Always good to leave yourself a wee bit more space than you absolutely have to have right now. I am toying with putting my generator back there and/or my welding stuff, to get rid of the manky old rusty tool cabinet I have at the front of my garage. I am fairly certain I won’t get rid of it, after all I pulled it out from the weeds at the farm, washed it, sanded it, oiled the hinges, hammered them back into useable shape & position, and stationed it where it is because I keep small blow torch propane bottles in there. Safely away from everything else, and near a door low down so if they should ever leak it would dissipate outside, and not go up in a ball of flame at the back of my garage near all the paints, thinners, varnishes, and wood dust. So perhaps I won’t get rid of the blue tool box just yet. Still hoping to move the radial arm saw to a new home. I’m on a kick, and need to keep this ball rolling, or else I will just wander away and find something else to fixate on for a while.

Speaking of which, made some progress on the resin kit this weekend after I left it untouched for a week or two. Gorgeous unseasonable warm weather will do that to you. I got it washed and scrubbed via old tooth brush. Dried off and then primed with a rattle can of grey paint. It needs touch ups, but first I want to fix the tough spots that require more sanding, fill some unsightly gaps, and then do all the test fitting for armor plates before I commit to the real extensive paint job. I’m not sure how much of the under structure will be visible either, so no point spending days painting that which will never see the light of day again. I don’t feel like magnetizing all the plates just so that I can see my paint job beneath. Sounds laborious.

Looks as though the months rain is going to all come this week, or there abouts. I’m going to have to service the lawn mower sooner than I thought if this weather keeps up. Buds on trees starting to open. Saw my first bees and a wasp this weekend too. Great patio drinking weather, so I’m sure bars were thankful for that 7-8 day sunny stretch we just had. Before you know it, I’ll be out pulling weeds, and pruning trees again. The ice and high winds this winter broke a lot of branches off of our larger, old maple tree. It’s going to need seeing to. I counted eight or nine broken or dead branches that need to come down, or get pruned back. I’ll also need to pull the loose dead stuff from the tree so it doesn’t fall out spontaneously and hit one of us in the head on its way down. The joys of home ownership. Still have the water softner issue to contend with too. Gotta get a new one, and haul the old one up from the basement. That should be no fun at all. Then the water heater will need looking at. Oh my. I’m a regular ray of sunshine over here today!

Domestic Duties Monday is off to a slow start. I did the laundry yesterday. So I guess it’s floors and a general tidy up today only. Yay!

Partly why I made sure we have apples trees, cherry trees, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, and at one point even blueberries and blackberries too. Not because I am a fruit nut, but because in a pinch I knew we would atleast have something to eat if the pandemic had taken a turn for the critical, or the bottom fell out of the economy, or there was a food shortage of some sort due to either of the aforementioned factors. We also usually have one box growing potatoes, and a couple tomato plants too, nearly forgot about that! This is all at our home, at the farm our in-laws have various other crops growing all Spring/Summer/Fall long. The kids and I do our part with weeding, pulling up rocks, watering the plots for weeks on end once school is out. I don’t want to turn our whole yard into a garden plot for veggies and such, but using a part of it only makes sense. Learning to grow something is a handy skill to have. Teaches patience, planning, commitment, and environmental care (although only on a 2ft by 6ft scale). But still, better than nothing at all.

Besides all the food stuff I also prefer to cultivate various trees on our property too. Not a whole forest worth, but a nice stand of trees all over the four corners of our back & front yards. Over the thirteen years that we’ve been at this house I have planted, transplanted, and encouraged roughly 20 trees of various kinds to grow, not including the hedge row at the back of the house made up of twenty or so Cedars. Not going to make much of an impact to the environment as a whole, but should give us plenty of shade in the future, and provide a home for the local birds & squirrels etc etc… we also don’t spray to eliminate dandelions or wild flowers in an attempt to help the bees and such. We do a little, and that’s about as good as it gets for us.

Nothing too special to report. I washed all of the miscellaneous pieces in a pot in the sink with dish soap and warm, almost hit water. Let it stand to air dry for an hour, and then used a rattle can of Rustoleum grey primer on it. Wore my mask this time to avoid a head ache from the fumes. I bought it for airbrushing, but works great for spray paint too. Now I’ll give it a few minutes to dry, and then I’ll set it down in the box the parts are in, and we’ll see where we go from there. So far I see one or two potential rough patches, where I might have missed with the tooth brush I used to scrub down the resin. Or perhaps it was damp still? Spot fixes are par for the course when I work with resin, so no real surprise there. It looks fairly uniform. I can paint this part whenever I like now. Though I think I’d want to do all the armor test fitting first. Scratch the primer is one thing, scratch a multi layered paint scheme is another!

There aren’t that many items that we need for the house right now, furniture wise. The girls will need one desk each, but not for several years at least. I figure it’ll be at least three years before my oldest will need a desk to be able to work privately in their own room, and three more years beyond that for the youngest to require one. So no use starting either of those projects yet. Too many unanswerable questions. Will they be working primarily on a laptop computer by then, on work sheets & paper with pen and pencil. Do they need room for text books and reference materials, or will all of that be digital by then? Will they paint, draw, or craft at their desks? How many drawers do they need? Does the top surface need to tilt upwards for things like drafting/painting? Do they need integrated power, or tool holders for brushes, paints and rulers etc…? Maybe when we’re a year out I can sit down with my oldest to get a sense of what they’d like to get out of their desk functionality wise. We can doodle on paper to get a sense of size, and utility features needed. Our home, and thus the bedrooms too are small. So no chance of making a bold statement piece like the resolute desk, or some such 8x4ft monstrosity. You’d have to knock down a wall to get it in or out of the house. Not to mention the poor kid would have to sleep on it at that size! Ha.

The youngest is still feral at this point. We are just now picking up speed with the reading. Which is fantastic. I love to sit and listen to them read to me. My wife and I love to read, and have a substantial book collection. Not so bad now that my wife rents books through a kindle/app. We used to go to this used bookstore in NewMarket, the starlight or something like that, and come out with ten books each, on a monthly basis, at least before we had kids anyway. My wife’s reading far outpaces my own. Here I am trying to read 12 books in a calendar year, and she’ll do that in two months. Where was I, oh yeah – desks. So, youngest – feral. Mostly. I have no inclination of what that one will want out of a work station by the time the need arises. Maybe they will both want a sit/stand work station, with over head cabinets, and a pegboard/French cleat system to customize storage and utility? Hard to tell what the trend will be by then. Then there are the choices in lighting. Strip lights, stationary lamp, adjustable long necked artists desk lamp, power bars, directly wired sockets, cord management… the list goes on, and can feel endless. Hard woods, plywood, a mixtures of the two, edge banding, joinery, or built to be modified with very little glue? I just don’t know, I guess we will see when the time comes.

I believe today is Saturday. Not certain what today has in store for us. The weather (for now) is dry and unseasonably warm & sunny. I had to wear shorts. Shorts! In early April, can you believe it! I’m no teenager anymore. This wasn’t “Oh it’s eight degrees outside and the snow is receding, so I can wear shorts again!”, this was “God damn it’s 31°C outside, I’m sweating through my pants, best put on shorts or else I’ll get dehydrated”. Crazy. Not going to lie though. While the bugs haven’t yet come out i enjoyed the outdoors a great deal this week, during my off periods, and inbetween reviews of current projects. Enjoyed a bug free sunset on the back porch. Just lovely. The last two weeks were a bit off due to the Easter long weekend creating two short weeks. Things always feel a tad discombobulated when that happens. Plus i sorted out the garage for a while, and set the resin kit down once i finished building the internal structure. That needs a good wash in warm soapy water, and one layer of primer before i consider what else to do with it. If i go whole hog, it’ll be months of work before i finish it. And I’d like to enjoy the wood shop while the weather is good. So i aim for washing & priming, and can pick it back up in November(ish) when stuff slows down again. Now I’m just rambling. Oh! Oh! I’m going to hit 500 days in about two weeks time (roughly). So, stay tuned to watch me roll over that milestone and totally forget about it. That’s always good for a chuckle. Ciao Bella!

Finished as much of the tear down of tables & carts that I can do at this time. Taking those materials and converting them into additional storage space off the floor in amongst the racking that was put in before we bought the house. For years now i have loathed the very presence of those racks. Stealing precious square footage from my garage shop. Always have to work around them, and be annoyed by them. But now, a decade on, I’ve decided to modify them, customize them to suit my needs. So extra shelves have been added to the existing space, with no additional coverage to my floors. Same amount of stuff, and more room to manoeuvre about in. Glorious. Five (5) new shelves have been put in place. I have enough material to add at least two more if/when i need them. Not to shabby. I’m trying to get my wife’s high school to take my Radial Arm saw, as even though i used it three times today, i want to remove it. I can do as much with a circular saw, or a new compound sliding mitre saw.

I used to be all about having tables & carts, and surfaces everywhere I could fit them. But once you actually need to build anything larger than a shoe box all of a sudden the garage feels like the kitchen on a submarine, and I can’t get around or move things, or do a glue up of a panel and anything else at the same time. Not that I’m over here doing projects 24/7, but feeling squashed in like that makes me waffle on deciding to do something, because I know it’ll annoy me, or scratch me, or cut me open some how. Not the worst thing, but enough of a mental block to cause me to sit on my phone and waste a precious few hours that I should have spent building furniture we need for the house.

So now I am on a reclaim the space kick. There is a finite amount of it, and what I do have is not a great big cavernous plot. I have to maximize what I have. So that’s why I’m getting rid of stuff, and moving consumables up onto the racks, and off the floor. Finding a solution to my bloody great ladder would be of major help too. Not keen on hanging it up out side, but also have no room to continue to store it inside the garage. It’s great for the trees and to gain access to the roof, but far too big to do anything interior related. It’s a 24-30ft ladder when extended all the way out. Heavy and unwieldy. Lots of fun on a windy day.

If I didn’t need my second work bench for my metal vice, I’d swap it for a rolling tool cart of a smaller footprint, but taller, and still have a light on it. Again, more wishful thinking. It also doubles as the right half of my mitre saw station, since I just tore down the left side. But, making progress. No need to spend all that hard earned money in one year to make it right. As I have since learned. What I needed 10 years ago, is different to what I need now. And in another 5-10 years who knows what sort of configuration I’ll want the shop space to be in. So small, wobbly, cash only fixes for now. That’s my unsolicited advice. Ciao Bella.

Not much to report thus far today. Unseasonably warm, almost HOT weather is around for a few days. Got some projects off for review. Completed the tear down and reclamation of space in the garage. So back to groceries, laundry, and floor cleaning until I hear back. I tackled the divot/hump left by the city snow plow when he missed his right turn and jumped the curb up onto my front lawn, blades down. So I flattened that all out. Am missing grass, must be further up the street somewhere. Oh well. Looks better, and I will be able to run a lawn mower over that patch now, so, let’s call it a win! Put 95% of the patio furniture out. Need to make a call on the teeny tiny kiddies stuff. Not certain we need it anymore.

Back to sorting laundry! Ciao Bella!

You ever go way out on a limb in an attempt to create something new and it looks like trash, and you feel embarrassed about it, and have to try and justify it to yourself, or your peers? Yeah – me neither. Right!?! So cringe worthy, oh my!

Yeah so, another potentially busy one today. I have this new report on the docket today, and a new neck tag to tackle for an LCBO promo. Waiting to hear back on a job I quoted to see if I have the all clear to begin. As I mentioned yesterday I did get through the partial tear down of an old work bench that was wobbly and in my way most of the time. I built a second shelf on my main bench that took the power tools I wanted closer to hand when working on outdoor projects. I’m still eyeing up the potential for a few new shelves to house my stains & finishes. Might have to wait on that. No big deal. Garage infrastructure projects (while important to me) aren’t that crucial to my day to day life, and my paying day job as a freelance graphic designer / production artist etc etc…

I believe that it is Wednesday all ready. We went to see the new Super Mario Brothers last night. Took in the 4:30pm show. A bit frenetic, a bit frantic, lots of chaos, but otherwise enjoyable. The youngest is a bit feral and not ready to sit through an entire feature film. Sadly Covid hit before she could build up a tolerance for sitting still! Ha.