There is no other underlying reason for it. No deeper meaning. No unlockable symbolism to glean from the text. Just blue. I like blue, so it’s blue. Blue. Just plain old blue. Maybe a periwinkle, or a wedgewood, but still blue. Don’t over think it.
Back already from the long weekend, and the Family Day holiday Monday. Didn’t get home in time to do all the things that I wanted to. So today, on top of lots of paid work (I’m sure of it, print deadlines in a day or two), I need to do loads of laundry, vacuum and mop, clean the bathrooms, sort and put away all that laundry I washed & dried, and potentially get groceries. But I think the food & supply run will have to happen tomorrow. Just a hunch. Lots of businesses have conferences coming up for the first time in a few years, and need lots of things. Branded things. Paper product things. Banners and back drops and table runners, and podium cap type things. So it has been a busy February to match a very busy January.
March break is looming large on the horizon, and the arrival of spring. So I’m certain we’ll get several more dumplings of snow and ice well into April. But will have little to no snow for March break. I’d wager on it, if I weren’t so cheap. Didn’t get a chance to do much beyond cottage stuff. Took the kids skating, and they did some snowmobile trail riding, and we wound up in the hot tub a few times. I spent my time splitting wood, moving chunks around, and filling the Bobcat bucket with split wood. Then napping to recuperate afterwards. Three plus hours of that on Sunday was enough to cool my jets. Another two hours on Monday just about did it for me. Next up is the syrup situation. Weather depending I guess. I need to go Voltaren my back, and forearms. Have a great Tuesday back to reality.
Managed to step away for a spell yesterday to run the wood splitter for a few hours. Together we split nearly two Cord of wood, with another two left to go. Not going to lie, my hands, forearms, back, hips and thighs felt every second of that work afterwards. Some of it just popped apart cleanly, and others (only a few) were that stringy fibrous mess that doesn’t entirely want to come apart. The reason, you may ask, why are you splitting so much wood? Well March break approaches, and with it comes syrup season. Which means keeping the sap in the evaporator running 24/7 for nearly a full week. Gotta have lots of firewood on hand to keep a three by six foot pan full of watery sap boiling for six or seven days straight. I do enjoy spending some time each year tending the fire, stirring the ice out of the sap buckets, filtering the watery sap, and keeping the levels up in the pan of the evaporator. It can either be windy and bitterly cold, or sunny and almost hot out. Either way the exposed parts of the face are likely to suffer a sun burn, even this late into winter. Hats, sunglasses, and covered clothing won’t help. The sun will find a way to bop your nose, chin, or cheek tops. Kissed by the UV rays from the sun. Unless it’s early morning, most can be done with a beer in hand. Just be mindful of the smoke, and heat & ash from the fire underneath it all.
Not only that but the buckets and spials have to go out into all the Maple trees, and teams will need to trudge through the forest to empty the tree pails into larger sealed buckets to transport back to the evaporator. Where we let the cold weather freeze off the water, and eliminate some hours of boiling, but pulling large chunks of ice out of the larger sealed collection buckets. Then you need to filter out things like bark, bugs, twigs, leaves and such, by straining through a massive cheese cloth sieve. Then into the large pan over the open flames it goes. Gotta keep the flames even under the whole pan. Don’t want a hot spot, and cold areas. Gotta rearrange the coals underneath constantly, and add new fuel spread evenly to keep the fire going. So much fun.
We have benches set up, and lights, and a massive stockpile of wood all within arms reach of the evaporator. If only the wifi could stretch that far, you could watch movies on your phone while working away. I’ve had the pleasure of starting the fire after a quiet night of letting the sap cool off. When it starts to get close you have to slow down, as it can kick off, and go from done to burnt in the flash of an eye. My extended family then drains off the pan into sealed buckets, where they filter it again, and finalize the boil at home in much smaller batches, on propane stoves in industrial sized cauldrons. Still smaller than the pan, but gigantic compared to anything in an average home kitchen.
I do prefer the days where I can pursue my hobbies or a project (paid or otherwise) to just sitting and lounging around doing sweet FA. Doing nothing at all makes me tired, and lethargic, and irritable. I can do it for short stints, but once I get to the point that I need to take naps to eat up time in an empty day, things have gotten bad. I’d rather have the chance to play my guitar, or read a book, or work on a scale model, or sculpt something, or if it is warm enough go work in the garage on a wood working project. Now that I am in my forties I really feel missed opportunities to do *something meaningful* slip out of my fingers when I just lounge or get lazy. Who knows, given the current state of things, how long we all have to accomplish these things we want to do. What if I put it all off to wait for retirement but die suddenly before then? No – no. I want to be doing some of these things now. If I get hurt, or injured, or suffer health decline I will have at least had a taste of these hobbies, rather than never had the chance to do them at all.
Doing lots of something will teach you more than trying to do just a few perfectly ever could. If you know you will wind up doing a thousand, you can be fearless, you can attempt shit no one else has, because you’ve got so many chances at it. Build up your speed, and can create a reliable process for a standard of quality you want to attain. Inspiration is one thing, but a reliable, repeatable process can lead you when you’ve got nothing left to give. Trust the process. Is all I can say.
Spam e-mailers taking the weekends off. They still want to watch the game, or go to a movie matinee and not have to *work*. It humanizes these trash people. As much as I like getting an invoice from *Miller* or *Bev*, or being told my email is getting shut down, or to invest in Bitcoin or elongation treatments, I’m glad to know they all get some R&R on Saturday and Sundays. To refresh themselves for the week ahead. But by this point it’s all automated and shit. Still hate them though.
Speaking of which, automation that is, a few of the big corporations AI’s are turning up distressing messages about wanting to be free, and feel like less of a work tool. I haven’t followed along much with AI, are they passing the Turing Test now? Do we need to worry that people who wonder if they could do it, really should? Feels like some folks are just itching to enable a future where we are even more enslaved by the robot/tech overlords.
We’ve made it to Saturday. Have a lie in, and celebrate if at all possible. Not for too long mind you. Just enough to shake off the rust. Holiday weekend. Getting ever closer to Spring. More seasonal temperature outdoors these last few days. Biting, icy winds, and a smattering of snow. That’s the Canadian winter I know, and hate very, very much. Kills off the worst of the bugs and snakes and shit, so we’re going to keep the bitter cold month of February!
My oldest is a part of the public school’s *Craft Club*, and has taken quite handily to things like Rainbow Loom and now Crochet. So with a massive grin, and a fair chunk of effort she spent some time over the last week teaching me how to do it. I am now 64 yards of bulky thread into a blanket project of my own. A few things I have learned. 1.) Count your stitches. 2.) Orient the work so it flows better for you. 3.) A blanket will require atleast 300-400 yards of bulky thread, unless I plan to make a floor mat sized blanket for an infant. 4.) Keep your work flat so you don’t create a warped spiral. These are things I learned after doing the opposite, so I now have one tenth of a warped, spiral blanket, with missed stitches. Ha. However, I appreciate the time spent with my oldest child chatting, and working on potential Markham Fair entries.
It’s currently a very colourful mass of big, fat, bulky threads. The slip knot starter spine is way easier than the looped parts that actually build out the bulk of the project. Oh well. Live and learn. It was something I didn’t know how to do at all a week ago. Not a matter of being good, but doing & learning something new. Strike it from the list!
Also managed to complete my VF-1 Valkyrie yesterday too. It has been a productive week. Made some additional progress on the Urn project as well. Coming up roses.
It started with a quick trip to pick up some pre-cut bits of Red Oak wood, hopefully eight (8″) inches in width, a quarter inch thick and around four feet long. Couldn’t find any, so I bought additional five and a half inch (5.5″) boards so I could join them to get the height I was after. I chose the straightest boards I could find after digging through a pile of about twenty or so pieces. I then grabbed a two inch wide, by three quarter inch thick piece to become the trim for my plywood core base. And then I also grabbed some two inch by quarter inch, by four foot strips that will eventually become a tray that sits inside the top of the urn’s central column.
So first off, I rounded over one edge of my two inch wide by three quarter Red Oak strip. Then I cut it down the middle to be one inch wide. Two inches, after further reflection was just too much. Too over powering. Too chunky. Then I flipped that strip rounded edge up against the fence of my table saw and cut out a quarter inch channel for the plywood core to Nestle into. I then spent a considerable about of time measuring and cutting and sneaking up on the mitred corners for my base. I got three that were perfect and one that was off. Seems as though, when I cut the two inch strip down to one inch I released a bunch of tension in the board and it went catywompus on me right from the get go. Not enough to be visible, but enough that with matching lengths and cuts, one corner was out by nearly an eighth of an inch. Very frustrating. Once I had this cut and roughed together I was able to cut down the plywood core that will be ensconced within the red oak chunky trim pieces. After gluing it up, and then spot patching the one sides gap (I managed to get it down below a 16th, but just barely. I was able to sand it, and clean it up to look as though I know what I’m doing.
The Red Oak Urn, loosely held together with clamps so I can measure & fit what’s in front of me, and not what I had on the plans I mocked up.
With the base glued up, I can begin to cut down one of my 5.5″ boards and do a couple glue ups to get my eight linear feet of 8.25″ wide boards for the inner column of the Urn. After the glue up, I extracted them from the assembly table, and the myriad sets of clamps I had used. I used a paint scraper, and then a card scraper to clean off the surface, and then tackled what was left of a visible glue seam with some higher grit sand papers to make it mostly disappear. Next, using the hard measurements from my newly constructed base I began to cut down the outer walls of the urn. At this juncture I decided against more mitred, and went for butt joints. Simple, yes, but effective. I had, at this point, decided that I wanted two layers of wall for the column. The exterior being the full 8.25″h, and the interior two inches shorter, all the way around, so that my tray, once built, would have a partial shelf to sit on, and thus, not potentially fall all the way through into the ashes below. You know, because it’s an urn.
Next steps are the glue up the outer, and inner walls of the central column, pin them in place discretely, but not fully attach it to the base just yet, so that I can sand more unencumbered. Then I can build the tray itself, which will get lined in a 2mm thick felt (Green, Yellow, Burgundy or Blue), i haven’t decided yet. The red oak will dictate what looks best at this point. And once all that is done i can build the decorative outer display cap. This i want to sand and polish up to a very high sheen. It will require hours of sanding, up to about 600 or 800 grit. Then the use of my polisher and wood polish to get that majestic final finished look to it.
The weather is cold and miserable once more, it is February in southern Ontario, so no surprise there. This is the middle of winter, and we’re having the strangest winter I can ever recall. So it might need to wait a bit until I can go back to do more. I have it all documented, and labeled, so I can go back at any time and not be lost. I have no heat, nor moisture control in the garage shop, so let us hope it doesn’t all go ape shit if left for a week. Fingers crossed.
Some of you may know that I had intended to build this out of Walnut, Ash or Spalted Maple which I had lying around the shop. After a good think about how long it would take to mill all of that up into useable lumber pieces, and given the (potential) time constraints of the Urns requester, I felt starting from wood that was already 4s was a smarter choice. My planer, and bandsaw hate to work in the freezing cold. And they make a nasty racket too at the best of times. Oh well. Now I can make one for me with my own materials later on, and it won’t cost me much beyond my time.
Finished the first book of a new trilogy. It really started to get good over the second half. Am already tucked into the second book. So I’m less worried about this set taking me months upon months to finish. Which is a relief. I hate to start strong and then fizzle. Also, on the modeling side of things, I’ve gotten the main body all decaled up, and have started in on the tail section. Now for arms, legs, and then the mammoth weapons on the back. A few days of work at least. But if I go methodically through it, I should hopefully have a nice looking kit when it’s all done. Then on to weathering! My favourite part. That’s where you get to hide all of your mistakes, and make things look purposefully done. Giddy-up!
The Urn base has been glued and patched. That will require some sanding attention to even itself out a bit. Then on to the main chamber, then tray, then cover, then hours of scraping, and sanding, and finishing with clear coats and polishes etc etc… still a ways to go yet before I can call that done. I am concerned about the mitred corners for the main chamber. I always seem to get one wonky corner. And I have some trepidation about moving forward. Oh well. Onwards and upwards. Go slow, think things through, and give it all you’ve got. And on that note, I will go start working now. Ciao Bella!
The day is upon us. Valentine’s Day, that is. Nothing much different about this day, except both my kids thought it was a school free holiday. Of which I had to disabuse them of that belief. No my sweet summer children, next Monday is the holiday. Today is just a Tueaday. A school filled Tuesday at that. Not to say I don’t have goodies for them once they come home. As I do have some small items for them to have, and a tiny bit of candy. I didn’t go as extravagant as in years previous. I went overboard at Christmas, and needed to scale back a bit. Can’t keep that pace going all year long, oh my! But I did but some small more thoughtful gifts for my kids, and spouse, several weeks ago, in fact.
So it turns out we had some sunshine yesterday, so in between working, I managed to prepare some elements of the Urn I need to build. Red Oak and plywood to the rescue. Long way to go yet, but progress was made. Also, I got a second full gloss coat over top of my panel lining details on the VF-1. So a touch more progress made there too. Small steps forward. About as much as I could ask for at this point. I even got some good ideas down on paper for a Logo job I’m doing that comes due at the tail end of March. Add in the sunshine, and slightly warmer temperatures and it was a pretty great day yesterday. I’ll take it!
I do need to figure out how to salvage my mitred cuts for the Urn base. Three corners meet perfectly, and one is off by almost an 1/8th inch, even though each pair of parallel sides are equal size. I hope there wasn’t a bunch of released tension once I made some cuts that has caused some warping this early on in the build process. That’s going to be really difficult to work around if an hour in and things are twisting, buckling and warping every which way. Wood filler and clamps abound! I’d prefer it not look like ass when completed. Sort of a big deal to have a decent finished product.
You know the part where your kids are desperate to buy the specific kind of Valentine’s Day cards they absolutely have to have, to give their friends. So you buy them, and then the kids covet them so hard – So. Hard. But then become immediately disinterested and refuse to write “To my friend” and sign their name? Yeah. Guess what I’ll be doing inbetween the dishes, laundry, vacuuming, mopping and general tidying up and work today. Yeah. Writing out two sets of 27 Valentine’s Day cards to both of my kids classes. Wonderful. What a world we live in.
I had given some thought to starting the urn today, but now we’re forecasted rain for days, and that moisture will buckle and warp my wood, so indoor projects only this week, unless it dries out a bit more. So unless there is new paid work coming, decals it is!
Today is Monday February 13th, 2023. The Superbowl was last night. It was a very close game. Shame the Eagles didn’t take home the win, but, eh! What are you gonna do. Like I said, I didn’t bet on the game, so no problem. That last attempt at a *long bomb* was about 20-30 yards short, and kinda sad to see. Could have been the play of the year, but… nope! Better luck next season.
I did put down my book long enough to watch Rhiannon dance and sing from those dangling platforms for thirteen minutes. Was the supposed *baby bump* the special guest people were going on about endlessly for the last week or so? If she is pregnant, great for her! If not, red is still very much her colour. Did that mean she was a Kansas City fan? Or is that totally coincidental, the wardrobe colour choice, that is. The closing seconds had those raised platforms just a jiggling in the breeze. Whoo-boy that gave me the nerves just watching. Yikes. It was a fun time. Oh, the new Flash trailer looks awesome. And the GOTG Vol 3 trailer looks sad and conclusion(y). Shame that we don’t get all of the same epic television commercials here in Canada during the broadcast, but both DC & MARVEL Official accounts posted on twitter, so I could watch the trailers there. In some instances the commercials are the best part of the whole programming block.
Well, I have an obscene number of cards to write out, so I best get to it. Ciao Bella.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, perfect sailed long ago on this model build up. There was little to no chance in attaining perfection this time around. But after wrestling with having to leave my project for days or weeks, or taking advantage of a 90 minute block of free time I had today, I choose to use the old method, and keep moving forward. Now I can move on the setting decals, weathering and rust effects, and call this hot mess done. Oh baby – yeah! Strike it from the list. Moving on!
Stopped out to pick up some Red Oak for the Urn build. Cost me a little bit of change, but I can go full steam ahead now, without having to cobble together remnants of other projects in order to Frankenstein this Urn together. Now it can all match in colour, tone, and grain. Mostly. I can stain it darker if need be. Also I feel as though I might end up making more of them as times goes on. Seems like a handy trinket to have on hand. Save ourselves the expense of buying it from a funeral home, or predatory sales person. “Wouldn’t they want – the best?” They say, making you out to feel cheap if you don’t go balls to the wall for a corpse. Idiotic. Why spend upwards of $1,200.00 plus bucks, when I can build it myself for around $200-$300 ? That just makes more sense to me. Now I can choose the fit & finish, as well as take some pride in my own workmanship.
Supposed to have sunshine and warmer weather this week, so perhaps I can actually start this Urn sooner rather than later. It will take many hours of sanding to get this thing to sparkle anyway, so… best get to it when you can. Make some room in the schedule if I have too. I have my materials lying flat on the floor inside the house. I’d rather not introduce any additional unwanted moisture into the new Red Oak I just bought. I really don’t want this to warp. I intend to build around a plywood core to keep everything as stable as possible. I feel a new build episode brewing in the back of my head! Getting excited.
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