Author: greatwallstudios

Holy-moly that was an intense week that just passed. Hard to believe it was a short week either, with it being so chock a block full of projects, requests, reports, labels, and in store retail items. Wowsers, I mean. Phew! Made it through. Fantastic! My phone hasn’t rung that much in a decade let alone a single work week. Felt like being with an agency again. Let us pray the following weeks are more tempered, evenly spaced out, and steady but not over powering. But as a freelancer I know that when it rains, it pours! Quiet for weeks and then BAM! All things, everywhere, all at once. It was rather intense.

But, now here we are on Saturday morning and it’s cold, grey, and threatening rain for the day. I have one last climbing session today before the next one starts up in two weeks time. I am going to bring both kids today because it’s a fun way to spend two or three hours together. My wife’s plans were canceled due to illness (not a new one for her, thankfully) but her friend awoke with a newly sore throat, so no brunch plans in Barrie for them. Which means that the dog walk at the farm will fall to her while I have the kids active, and out of the house for three hours mid day. Cool? Cool.

I picked up my (on sale — deeply discounted) tool chest for all of my wood working tools yesterday morning. So later today I need to pull it out of the box, stack them, attach the wheels and handles, and tear down the wooden cart it is replacing, and also tear down the cheapo crap work bench I first started with fifteen years ago. I have a light to move and rehang, plus some other things to work out. I think pulling the old work bench apart will take longer than expected because it took FOREVER to assemble all those nuts & bolts. Could be a three hour job, or longer. I remember hating my life passionately.

Then I have to break down the wooden cart too, salvage my castor wheels, and take the carcass to the farms burn pile for disposal. And on Tuesday the cardboard will go out for recycling. And I shall have hopefully reclaimed another few square feet of open space next to my work bench which should allow me to build more freely. I cannot move walks so the next best thing is to organize the space, and condense things down to the smallest, yet still easily accessible foot print. I may have finally achieved that feat. We will see. I have a lot more stuff than I realize I do. I learned that the hard way when I tore down that rickety old shelving unit to erect the red steel one. Pretty soon I might even be able to move a 2×4 around the shop freely without having to play interior space Tetris to reorient a bit of wood. Piv-ot! Piv-ot!

I currently have a small cart where my Mitre saw sits, and that will get a slight upgrade. I’m going to transfer the work bench top to the cart so that I have a wider surface for my saw to open into, that will then have nothing around it, on either side, to interfere with cutting planks down to size. Sounds counter intuitive, but I’m going to make it work. My metal vise will get transferred to a wood block so I have clamp it to my bench because I don’t use it all that often. Just to sharpen lawn mower blades, and my loppers, which I do once in the spring, and once in the fall. I don’t fabricate metal things, so it’s in the way the rest of the time. I’ll store it under the Mitre saw cart overhang. Easily accessible, but out of the way. Boom! That’s a win. That’ll be all she wrote as far as the garage goes. I’ve decided that I will simply purchase wood closer to spec rather than buying a bandsaw myself.

I might have to add some support struts to the Mitre saw table top, but I can look into that if it feels tippy or too floppy. For right now I have plans for underneath the overhangs. Nothing crazy, but you never know until you get there if you haven’t done it before. I do have a sneaking suspicion that it will need a frame, struts, or some additional legs out towards the ends of the overhangs. Just a hunch.

I’m not looking forward to unscrewing all of those drawers, drawer slides, legs, and supports for the modular work bench. There are plenty of folks around here whom will pick up scrap metal so the aftermath isn’t a problem. Anywho, best of luck today.

Nothing like file transfer issues to amp up your Friday. Not getting anywhere with the current methods, had to resort to both WeTransfer, and SendThisFile. I’m about ready to give up. I need to eat. I’m annoyed. Good day sir!

Getting kinda crazy around here as of late. Not much time to talk, let alone think or ponder. Good news though, taxes are paid up for another year. Best be back at my business. Game on!

And the stars dimmed briefly in our grief, but fear not sharpened warrior, for we knew of his coming. We had been warned. And of our great bounty we did break off a percentage to be held, quiet and alone, for just such an occasion. Though the Tax-Man did heweth deep, he did not strike bone — this year. We live on. We fight on. The Tax-Man does walk on to thy neighbours pastures. Feeding, ever hungry, year after year. Or so the story goes.

Happy Wednesday. See you all in line at the bank!

And it’s coming from inside the document! Ta-da! But seriously, this was the first time I have been given artwork created in Figma to use in illustrator and the 45 Mb source document is now over 3 GB in size. So I have eliminated all but two elements and gotten it down to just under 900 Mb, but for what it is that’s still way too high. So either the two remaining speech balloons, or the QR codes are jacked right up coming out of Figma. Haven’t had the chance to figure out which is the culprit — yet. But I intend to because these ridiculously high file sizes will greatly impede my ability to upload them once approved for printing. I would say that 200 Mb each would be big as far as I’m concerned, let alone multiple gigs each. Yikes!

But deadlines are looming and I may not have the luxury of pulling each item apart to see which is the memory hole since I didn’t create the elements in question, and I don’t have any experience with Figma beyond a cursory exploration of the website about two weeks ago. It’s supposed to be vector based, so maybe it uses an absolute shit tonne of points which makes the sizes so large for even the simplest of objects. I don’t know. Maybe it’s an artifact of exporting for Adobe Illustrator. I just don’t know at this point.

Otherwise it’s Tuesday and the kids are heading back to school after four full days off. My back is a little lumpy after running the Bobcat & raking leaves for hours on end to help clean up this weekend. We’re almost out of groceries but I’m too busy to go shopping today. Will have to do with no milk, juices and snacks for another day or two.

Take care out there. Ciao Bella!

Which is awesome. All free of course, from here anyway. I hope they enjoy it. Makes me happy to know somebody else other than me has read at least parts of the thing. That’s a big win for today. I’m well chuffed about that.

It is Easter Monday and I am on call waiting to hear about edits, changes or approvals on a handful of projects. Have to go to press for Tuesday so it is a big deal to get them done today. Life of a freelancer yeah? Evenings, weekends, and holidays are all in play. Maybe if you were a bigger name or a major attractor of clients you could maintain a closer to 9 to 5 schedule, but little ole me needs to work when I have it. I’ve had considerable down time this winter/spring. So I’m not missing any vacation days as it were. I do need to do some driving around today before the kids go back to school tomorrow, so that is my sticky wicket for today.

Best eat some breakfast and see what’s what with the extended family. Ciao Bella!

Weeping painful eyes? Probably took several face fulls of ash and heat off of the fire you are keeping roaring for the evaporator. Not the most fun thing to have happen. Could be a whole lot worse. But after running all of our sap through the reverse osmosis machine we have far fewer buckets to boil down. Still have had the evaporator running full tilt for nearly twenty four hours with two full pails left to start boiling. This stuff is going to end up being espresso dark maple syrup because it’s real late in the year for this operation. Luckily we pulled out all the spials, and washed the buckets & hoses too. Looking forward to calling this job done, and leaving it alone for another year.

A cool compress to the eyes, a nice shower, and a splash in the hot tub kept my eyes from going to awful from the eye toke. A face shield would work wonders if I could just remember to find it when I need it!

Happy Easter Sunday.

This seems nuts, the 19th, now? Today! I can’t even with this place. So much to do, so much to see. Thankfully it is the weekend so maybe we can start to get some things done and it will stop feeling as though the month is rushing past with nothing to show for it beyond a tax bill, and an early voting euphoria.

I have gotten the lawn mower started and running for about 5-10 minutes, which is a good sign. I have uncovered the AC unit, and lubricated the fan, though I could not get the unit to turn on, might have been too cold a day to do so, or the old girl has finally died on us. Will likely need servicing or a whole new air conditioner. It took a wee bit of doing to get it going last year, so I might be jumping the gun by worrying about it now. We will see. I took a moment to bring out the patio furniture for the front porch and the back patio. I have left the deck clear so I can power wash the mildew off of it. Wanted a warmer day for that. I have also done a first pass on trimming the back patio hedge row so that all seats at the table are accessible, and we can use every square inch of patio stones that were laid down. I will need a scaffold or step ladder to Square off the tops, but that can wait until I have a free weekend in May, because it’s a real chore. I nearly tore a bicep doing it several years ago. Left me hurting for weeks afterward. Perhaps this time I’ll use a saw and not loppers. Save myself from the harmful struggle.

Back when we were still getting snow and ice storms I took the rotting potato box apart and delivered the old cedar boards to the farm burn barrel. I have damaged tree limbs that need to go out to the brush pile too. Get the grass all cleaned up ready for mowing in the next couple of weeks.

At some questionable fish last night for dinner. Have been paying for it ever since. Heart burn, upset guts, roiling belly, you know the full works. Not how I planned to spend my Friday night, but here’s to traditions! Yuck. Feeling kinda gross at the moment. I wonder if I can get away with not bending over a whole lot today? Fingers crossed.

Well, now what?

Time to just keep on keeping on or do I try to find some divine reason to keep things going. It’s not out of some desire to bloat my views counter because according to year over year analytics data, I’m currently in the toilet, but triple digits, so that’s cool. I don’t write for the views anyway, thankfully, as that would be most tragic. No, I write here to keep my head clear, my thoughts in a line, and to make a note of anything extraordinary, unless it has legal ramifications in which case I keep those sorts of things under my cap, as it were. No point poking a hornets nest if this go round it has decided to focus its interests elsewhere. But that’s beside the point, more an exception to the rule. I write everyday now, and have done so for a few years now because it’s a habit. I did it consistently enough every single day to make it a habit. The gamification of the daily writing streak helps to keep me interested, but ultimately that fact that I don’t care how long my posts are, or what they are about has gone a long way to keeping me coming back.

So, Friday of a long weekend. Though I will likely need to work on Monday due to some scheduling issues out of my control. But that is what the laptop purchase was for. So I can be nimble, and move around and still work when needed. However, after stacking several cords of wood I might not be so enamoured of my ability to work from anywhere with an internet connection. Sometimes being hard to access is a good thing.

Looks a bit grey and dingy outdoors. I was hoping for more sunshine and blue skies. At least I know that sort of weather is coming, eventually.

Once upon a time my writing streak was up to 831 consecutive days, when I attempted to fix a post that wasn’t uploading properly due to a higher than usual number of photos, and my streak was cut down to 130 days because that was how long I had left the post to languish before attempting to fix it, thus cutting my streak down to nothing. I was pissed. I was fuming. So took my last Florida/Disney trip off from writing as a vacation and came back and picked it up again. Now here i am a year later and my streak is going strong once more. Not that a year is anything to smirk at, but my last big stretch covered the May 2-4 Jericho storm & resulting 26 hour power outage, also having COVID, and various other difficult situations. I was trying to reach three years, and missed it by that much! Oh well. It honestly only really kicked off because COVID was here, we were all isolated, lonely, and scared and I started to write really short micro sized semi-fictional short stories. I had THE best year for readership and views during that time. I have not managed to come within 2/3rds of those numbers since. Mainly because I write drivel like this, and about the weather, instead of making new creative stories. I had one about some killers that I thought was interesting, but I can’t find it, and I think about adding to that story line a fair bit. But I also want to play my guitar more, and spend more time sculpting, and doing paid work, and making wood based projects in my garage shop, and cleaning slash purging junk from the house, and painting miniatures or building war gaming terrain from scratch. Instead I putter about on my phone while I wait for work emails, or I spend my time doing Domestic Duties around the house. I’m my own worst enemy.

So here we are 365 days completed once again. It feels good. Sun is out, and I think we have seen the very last of the snow and flurries for the season. Pretty soon I will have to break out the lawn mower, and the hoses, and patio furniture and get to living life outdoors again. I can also pack away the long johns for a few months! Even better.

Thursday before the ultra long weekend. Girls are going to a Frog Symposium tonight so they should really enjoy that. It’s an hour away, and then 90 minutes long, so that should occupy them for nearly four hours this evening. Just me and the dog here tonight then. I foresee more long walks in my near future. Perhaps into the cemetery? Or over to the school? I don’t know, the world is my oyster.

Next week is a short week for the kids too. Here’s hoping we have enough activities available to keep them occupied, and engaged so as to not fight constantly the whole time. I had hoped to take a daddy daughter day and walk them through Square One and have lunch, and maybe catch a movie on Friday, but those plans were squashed in favour of helping the farm clean up after all the maple syruping done earlier this spring. I’m sure my youngest will love that. Washing buckets, spials, lids and hoses for the weekend. Washing, drying, stacking, and putting them up into the rafters on their shelves. It’s a long and tedious process. All hands on deck!

I need to check some emails, so happy Thursday. Ciao Bella!