As great as we have it here, there are questions to be answered regarding our collective history. So take pride, but be aware that our history is not pristine, and free from horrible acts of cruelty.
The Canada Day/Strawberry Festival is upon us. The fireworks, though late (at 9:52pm) were wonderful yet again.
It is currently just after 8:00am on Friday July 1st, and The Summer Break 2022 is officially underway. Sounds as though the kids woke up on or around six something this morning even though there is nothing much going on until 11:00am. These kids have got to learn to sleep in, as they are exhausting when they get up early and then make demands they know cannot be met at that time. Unreasonable, logicless children. Primal savagery contained in minuscule bodies full of too much energy and not enough introspective self awareness. Trouble in waiting these kids are. When do they start to sleep in? When does that phenomenon begin to take hold? I desperately need to know, so that I can set a countdown clock for it in the back of my mind.
Not going to lie, the weather looks sketchy at best outside these windows. Could downpour on us as we attend the town’s events. Drizzle is one thing, but a full on deluge from the heavens is another issue entirely. Drizzle will limit the crowds and we can still have a good time, a downpour will cause everything to screech to a halt, and will kill the vibe. Plus it’ll set the kids to whining and crying in disappointment. We’ve tried not to shield them from disappointment so that they could learn to deal with it, and build up resilience to things not going as planned, but both being under eight years of age, means tears and moaning endlessly regardless. The Joys of parenthood. We’ll make the most of whatever we can get.
Nine weeks with the children at home. Well technically eight, as the kids both go to dance camp for one week this summer when my wife goes back to work, and they weren’t scheduled to be back in school yet. So we have eight weeks to try to stay sane and keep them occupied enough not to kill one another. A razor’s edge of keeping them busy without falling over into over tired territory which is just as bad as bored and irritable. I get it now, why our parents smacked the shit out of us in our youth. Not that we condone it, but I get it. I hated it, but I get it in a very visceral way. How much simpler it would be to solve every irritation with a slap upside the head, or a slipper to the behind. But all that does is breed resentment and more outbursts. Though calm talking and time outs only worked well when they were very little. The hankerin’ for a spankerin’ as The Simpson’s said, is growing some days. May cooler heads continue to prevail.
I have started to think alot about a live edge waterfall coffee table build for the fall. Can I just say, what a relief it is to have the screen door build finished. We’ve had many cool breezy days where it has seen use, and I am in love. It’s what I always envisioned for the house. And I’m still very interested in a slab table build project. It will depend greatly on price, as wood is kind of expensive still. I know plywood is not anywhere near as cheap as it used to be. So I can only imagine what the price of hard woods is doing these days. Maybe instead of Walnut, we use Cherry or one of the more locally sourced species like Ash. Of which I have a bunch all ready. I just need it to be 1″ thick or thinner instead of the 9/4 it is now. Which is heavy and unwieldy. Things to consider for the fall. Unless a very specific request comes in from my spouse, I won’t be building any furniture for at least eight child filled weeks. Yesterday’s rushed rabbit hutch was the last of it for now. Unless we need an outdoor over sized hutch for the rabbit to live in.
More akin to a hidey hole safe spot than a full blown hutch. Had to hurry as the kids are in school for less than a half day today. Summer break starts at 11:31am! Yahoo. So I rushed a bit, and that’s ok. I felt a bit lost yesterday with no projects in the shop. I did, however, start on a packaging job, which should last until August/September. And I have reports coming at some point soon. Plus it’s a long weekend, and the town has many events planned.
In between projects I’d like to get out on our bikes for a bit, swim a bunch, use the park far more than we have been doing, and get the kids to help weed our garden beds, so it’s not just me 100% of the time. Feels odd to have an actual, really real last day of school. The last three school years ended with us all at home, so it feels a little surreal. Normalcy in a time when that’s not yet warranted. Denial will get a whole lot of people killed, or critically injured internally over the next 18-24 months.
However, most are off on travel adventures, so we’ll become isolated once more! Less likely to get sick if we’re all home alone anyway. It is Thursday, the last one in June of 2022! Crazy how this year is moving along so quickly. It won’t be long before those “See You, in September!” Ads begin to play on tv. Ciao Bella!
Among many awful things, wasn’t click bait journalism something detestable that has developed out of the later 2000’s, and the rise of the internet. Oh, it’s deplorable. Loathsome even. I hate to see it, and do my best to avoid stuff like that, though it is far more widespread than you would think. Lots of what I would have considered, upright journalism, is presented this way with utterly ridiculous tag lines and head lines written by fools. Ugh. What a waste of an important medium. Gotta get those clicks, and eyeballs on ads though. All about the revenue. Bah!
It’s a gray day here, overcast, with some minor spitting rain. No torrential downpours as of yet. My straw for a lawn could use it though.
I finished up my tapered legged end table made of Walnut & Hickory yesterday. I used Danish oil for colour, and Osmo clear poly to protect it, and add just a touch of sheen. Looks nice. My through and through mortises could do with a bit of work, but I’m happy enough with it as is. It’s all a learning experience at this point. Some might recall my sculpted Ogre Rogue bust which I’ve placed on top for photographing the table. The splines don’t pop as much as I’d hoped. I think the bleached sap wood from the walnut mutes the contrast a bit. No matter, live and learn. Moving along!
The final Monday of the 2021/2022 school year, oh how time flies when you forget about all those endless long days from before. And yet, here we are. 3.5 days from the end of term, oh my! We’ve got a cooler day today for a bit of a change up. It’s lovely outside. Sunny, with partial cloud cover and not quite 20°C. An intermittent breeze and lots of bird song.
Actually had to cut my grass today too. Well, more so the weeds and crabbe grass that grows regardless of rain water. Everything else is heading towards the beige/yellow crispy straw that we keep short for eight or nine weeks. It’ll go green again come September/October & November.
It’s a Monday, which means yet another swing at the Domestic Duties inherent to household maintenance. Laundry, dishes, tidying up, vacuuming & mopping the floors. I tackle toilets, sinks and the tub as needed, so every couple of days with these youngling savages that I live with. Also known as children under eight years of age. I foresee a great purge come September, as we have far too much stuff yet again. I keep on clearing it out, and they continue to bring new stuff in. Maddening! Madness! Miscarriage of justice I say.
Heading towards another long weekend which means fire works, food trucks and local town events. Perhaps even a funnel cake to look forward too! Icecream, powdered sugar, and all the fried waffle batter strings you can ingest before acid reflux kicks in your throat. Delicious! Truly some gourmet shit fit for kings.
I am indulging in a late breakfast. Had errands to run after school drop off. Then I started laundry before heading out side to mow the lawn. So I’m now both hungry & thirsty after working a bit without eating yet. Not as bad as shoveling sixteen plus inches of deep wet snow without having eaten first. I now know that that is a huge no-no for me as I am middle aged ( or there abouts) and my body doesn’t take kindly to that sort of shock/strain. The truce with the fridge remains as tentative as ever. Risked use of the ice machine which threatened a cascading failure like before, but we were watching, and backed off, shut down the ice maker and staved off disaster. It was tense there for a few hours. Luckily it did not dampen our date for our wedding anniversary and movie night. Much obliged Kitchenaid refrigerator.
There are more than a few daily entries which i don’t recall writing, nor do I remember what is contained within them several weeks or months later. It’s a real trip to get notified of a new like for something that doesn’t ring a bell. Then I go back and read it and I’m like, yeah – I totally wrote that, I drips of me. Reeks of my sensibilities. I might write on the daily, but it sure isn’t about quality at this point. More to the point, it’s just about the act of doing. I’m so close to 200 days now. I can just about taste it.
Had a great day with my youngest’s birthday party. Spent four hours in the pool, and my skin is shouting its obscenities at me now. I didn’t know it would go on for four hours of the mid day high uv sun, but it did. It was a blast. Then tonight I had a drink round my friends house, chatting on the porch. Got three healthy Rye’s in and now I’m watching The Watchmen, in an attempt to not get the spins when I flop into bed. I also napped for an hour or so today, due to all of the sun exposure and I’m not as tired as I would be otherwise. Could be worse. The aloe came to my rescue. I’m not lobster red, but I feel it, even after several cool water plunges to take the worst of the radiant heat out of my back & shoulders. Kids all had fun, and no one got hurt. A win all around. I’ll take it.
My wedding anniversary is coming up asap. We hope to have a lunch or dinner together to celebrate. Been a few years since we’ve had a childless date. I think we saw Jerry Seinfeld in Oshawa a few years ago. That was a fun evening, no bad seats in such a small venue. Oh, pre Covid times, how I miss you so.
Lots to do, lots & lots to do in preparation for tomorrow’s birthday festivities. First up, earlier in the week was a provisions shop. Juice boxes of five different flavours, fruit gushers for the adventurous, three types & brands of chips to be voraciously consumed. A suitable candle to mark the occasion! My wife ordered the take home goodie bag contents, and paper plates. We’ve had confirmation for all expected attending guests. Pizza will be delivered, and beverages for adults are currently chilling waiting to go over to the venue.
Today I will go over to clean up the shrubbery and grass. And next on the docket is to wrap gifts of asymmetrical design and packaging. I long for the days of rectilinear boxes with 90° angles and few to no curves, domes or jutting angles. But I will not be so fortunate this day. A true test will be if my kids haven’t secretly used up all of my cello tape on private art works leaving me in the lurch… Fear Not! I have enough (I just checked).
Perhaps an early morning pool vacuuming will be in order, so I have that to look forward to tomorrow at 9:00am. Looks to be great weather, warm and sunny. Perhaps tonight I’ll bake a cake for the occasion? Who knows, maybe I actually will. You never can tell.
Yesterday I completed a dry fit test for my end table. Now I need to sand the interior and glue up the top box. I ordered dome clear satin Osmo to finish it off, but delivery tells me I could have to wait until July 12th for it to arrive. So maybe more Danish oil to finish it off? Time will tell. I do have parts of next week to work on it, assuming my next report comes in today or this weekend at some point. I do have hours of sanding to look forward to so best get cracking! Ciao Bella!
Slept like shit for some reason, youngest was having multiple tantrums this morning. She popped a lense out of her new sunglasses, and had a wobbly over not having them to wear anymore, even though she threw them, dislodging the lense. Finally got them to school with only moments to spare before the bell. Now I’ve pulled the car apart looking for this mirrored lense and I can’t find it. Twenty plus minutes later and the damnable thing eludes me. Fuck. Brand new pair of children’s sunglasses too. Hopefully it’ll pop up sometime soon. Couldn’t have gone far, unless it flopped out of the car on a shoe or backpack. Then it’ll be gone but good.
Only have an hour to tinker today, as it’s volunteer day with youngest’s class trip. Which is about four hours of middle of the day. I’m happy to see her interact with all the other minions. Should be a lovely day for it. Yesterday was awful hot, today the humidity is way down, and it feels almost cool in comparison. The difference a day can make. Huh.
May try to cut some more mortise edges today, but I don’t think I’ll get very far. Had some terrific news on the marketing report side of paid work. A potential for six reports over the course of the summer and into the fall. That’s great news for me. Not so much my wife! Means I’ll be tied up working over the summer holidays, but it means cash on hand for our little family trip in October. Fingers crossed they all go off without a hitch, even with Sar2 Covid BA/5.a or where ever we are at now. They sort of stopped giving it a name after Omicron came through. Still mutating, and still a major problem. Stay safe out there people. Ciao Bella!
It all started when I was gifted some Ash boards from the family farm, that were rough sawn, and stored in a shed for twenty plus years. I gladly took them home after sawing the sixteen footers in half by hand, and tossing those heavy suckers in my van.
I planed them for what felt like hours, and then had to man handle them across my jointer. Which took forever to do. This was back when I had my tiny 10″ Ryobi table saw, which kicked on full tilt, and scared me to death. Cutting 2 inch thick ash boards that were 80 plus inches in length took some doing, and set my heart to pounding. I settled on four inch wide boards by roughly eighty inches long, and two inches thick.
I then cut down four cross members, two in Ash, and two in a douglas fir that was pretty heavily knotted. It was at this point that I began to run out of warm season, and all my flat, square milled lumber got shut away in the garage for seven months.
The following spring I dug out my lumber, which was still square and decided to hand cut some mortises for the top and bottom of the door uprights. I first used a circular saw to cut two slices through the end grain about four inches deep. This was super sketchy, and my super old school, under powered Kawasaki circular saw died after a cut & a half – twice. So I finished it off with a Stanley hand saw. You know the old kind that weirdos play with a violin bow to make high pitched whiney muzak. I had to climb up on my work bench in order to get this to work.
I gathered up my chisels and a hammer and got dug in cutting away the channel where the cross members would rest. This would prove a difficult and arduous task. It took several days, and my channel was not straight, nor were they even. I took a file to them, and worked that for a few days too. It was at this point that I started to refinish a rocking chair for my very pregnant sister in law, and that took my whole season.
The following year ( this year 2022) I took some rasps to my channels, and evened them out a fair bit. I then used a brand new Dado blade to cut some even tenons for the cross members. It was an endless cycle of dry fit testing, rasping, filing, and planing until I had a suitable snug fit. Then I measured out my center line, and cut out two mortises for the third, and final center cross member. I hugged it out with a forstner bit, then used a multi tool to cut through the rest, and then hand chiseled it to a clear rectangular hole. It worked quite well. After assembling it all as a dry fit, I noticed my angles were all wonky, and then realized my flat, square lumber, was now bowed, and twisting ever so noticeably. But as I was about to begin sanding I hit the most egregious spots with a hand plane, and sort of made the best of it.
I took the time to glue the frame together. Then in each corner I drilled out a 3/8ths hole and glued some dowels through the joints. Flush cut those, and then did endless rounds up through the grits on every single surface of the door. I stopped to add copious amounts of filler, which meant no more natural wood look, but I was now going to have to paint it all white, to match the house trim.
I used an oil based primer to paint on four coats of pristine paint. Then I cut down some Cedar strips, 16 lengths in all, which would sandwich my screen mesh in place, for the two openings on my screen door. After much cutting and sanding i put the first layer in place. Cutting the mesh material was far simpler than i was imagining it would be. So i put those in place, and pin nailed my last strips on, holding the mesh as tight as i could get it.
It was at this point I placed my hardware on the door. Pilot drilling holes for the handle and a push plate. I also then hand cut in my hinge recesses. Drilled and attached those. Fought with the door for an afternoon to cut in the receiving hinge slots on the house, and hung the door single handedly (do not reccomend). I then added backing trim to stop the door swinging too far inwards and binding. Added a latch, and an extra handle, and Bob’s your uncle. Done like dinner.
I didn’t take any photos while cutting the cross member tenons, but they’re there, and I did them myself.
This time around I thought I’d go a little bit fancy. Which is, or course, a relative term. To me that meant attempting repeatable tapered Hickory legs. Which required me to build a whole new jig/sled to accomplish exactly that. And would you look at that it worked. I was duly impressed with myself.
Then I cut down my skirting, and added a relief to the underside, which recieved a round over, to soften it up a bit. Followed by setting up the dado blade as fat as it’ll go, and cutting the slots for said skirting, and adding the .75″ long tenons to the end of each leg.
I rounded over all four faces to each leg, and did a test fit of the skirting. Wouldn’t you know, three of the four were spot on, and the first was a touch loose. Not a big deal. I can manage.
The glue up of the three Walnut boards to make one large panel was mostly uneventful. I had to joint a bunch of complementary edges, and RIP off the bark, or ruined portions. Use thirteen clamps to wrestle the twist out of the boards. Scrape the excess glue off, and then move through a series of hand planers, and my Bosch electric hand planer to even out the end product. I also took my card scraper for a spin to get a better starting surface once I complete the structural elements and begin the sanding process.
I saw a tutorial somewhere that said for tighter outside edges on a mitered box, you should over shoot 45°, for something like 44.8°. But my table saw doesn’t do that, perhaps a higher priced Cabinet saw would, but mine does not. So a straight 45 it was. Praying for no slips or binding against the fence. We will only know during the glue up.
I used a 1″ forstner bit to hog out the bulk of my mortises. I had intended to chisel out the rest, but I cracked an edge, so had to pause to blow glue into it, and reclamp it. Switched over to a coping saw to save any undue stress on the base piece of Walnut.
I will progress through, 60 / 80 / 100/ 120/ 150 / 220 / 320 grits with an random oribtal sander. Then after I glue up and I need to do touch ups, the very top most surface with get a hand sanding at 400 grit.
After assembly of the hollow top, I will cut in eight (8) splines on all four corners, to add some visual interest. Then round it all over to look a bit cleaner. The tenons of the legs are through & throughs on the base. So a pocket of colour should be seen when you get up close to it. Not finished yet, but you get the gist of it.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
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