In mid November, and the day was dreary, grey and cold. The leaves have long since fallen from the trees, and everything is a mucky mixture of crushed leaves and water logged grass clippings in mud. The wind has started to pick up and what was a bland flat lit day is now quickly deteriorating into a murky black dusk. Perfect timing for it to begin to down pour now that we have to pack up all our things, muster the kids into the car, and head home after the impromtu long weekend spent at the cottage preparing for the coming of winter. It has been a bitterly cold, and long weekend spent out of doors, tackling chores that were better suited to the warmer days of late September or even early October. But alas, priorities for all involved were not exactly aligned at that point in the year. So here we are, two tired and mopey children, a cascade of rain hammering down in sheets, and the prospect of a three hour drive home, and then school early in the morning. Our youngest has napped fr the first time in two years today. Not a good sign. But she doesn’t have a temperature and isn’t coughing or sneezing, so onward we press, towards home. Fifteen minutes into the drive, she begins to vomit all down her front, and into her car seat. She manages to do this in near silence. But my wife, whom is driving, notices her rolling forwards in the glare of the rear view mirror. “She’s throwing up!”. She says, nudging my arm. I turn to look into the back seat, and there is the eldest, hands on chin, deeply engrossed in her movie. “Not her, it’s Ashley!”. Twisting to look directly behind me, I can see the dark grime on Ashley’s chin and chest from where she has thrown up her chocolate milk and what looks like a first full of Cheetos. “Oh!” I say. I frantically dig around at the kids feet to find any old containers. Finding an old cookie tin I hold it up to Ashley’s face as she bucks and heaves into a coughing fit followed by a glob of vomit. “No…. no… I don’t want it daddy….!” She screams in between heaves. “It’s ok baby, this will keep you cleaner, I can tip it out once we stop off the highway.” Variations of this follow until we pull off the rural highway, and come to a stop under a street lamp outside of a road side restaurant. Opening the door to assess the level of destruction. It’s not too bad, a bit on her chest, face and hands, and a glob on her leg and a dribble or two on the chest harness of her car seat. In a wave of miasma the smell hits me full in the face. To my dismay I then realize, our Ashley has been out of diapers for more than a year, and we no longer travel with a diaper bag, or wet wipes. Thinking quickly my wife hops out of the drivers seat, while my eldest quivers at the sight and smell of her younger sister’s stomach contents. Rooting through her luggage to hand me an old worn t-shirt. I unstrap Ashley and proceed to wipe her down, face, chest, hands and legs. I pick her up for a look over and shuffle her off to the back of the car for a change of clothes. A few heart beats later we’re strapped back in, she is sound asleep, and we are back on the road. It is still raining heavily, and the night is both dark and cold. The youngest, Ashley, will not be attending school the next day.
Category: Uncategorized
A Slight Change of Plan.
Due to my missing a summer and early fall deadline for my hand built screen door build, I’m going to shift gears for a bit and move on to refinishing a table for my in-laws that has some water damage, fifteen layers of paint and needs some TLC. I’m going to break it down into the smallest allowable pieces and then sand the hell out of it, before I decide if I’m going to repaint it white, or stain it to make it look a little more classy. I had hoped to get further along on my screen door build, but my hand cut mortise and tenons are taking forever, and I can’t seem to cut a straight line for shit. On the up side, the reason I didn’t meet my warm weather deadline to hang the screen door, was because I used those eight weeks of school term without kids around to tackle every other home DIY project, so I’m not too upset about it. I may very well be worth it for me, to practice some of those mortises before committing to an exterior door. If I can remember to i will attempt to take some photos of the table to be finished, but I doubt I’ll remember. I was fortunate enough to get through one of this weeks two marketing reports over the weekend, freeing up some time to do more woodworking. I thought I’d have to wait to start until next week, but nope! I hauled ass, and did page by page proofing as I went. It also helps that I spent some time on the front end building up my pages so it could be a smooth process to build out my reports with actual, factual data sets. Time to clean up the yard, and put away the summer toys, as we’re in Canada and it could start to snow at any minute, and we’ll not come out of it until late April. Cheers! to you all!
The last big ticket project of 2021
Well, that is unless I decide to trim out the basement bathroom, but that’s another matter. This project that I picked up again today is the screen door for the back of the house. Now I originally started this last year, or possible the year before that. I know the Ash took forever to flatten on my Busybee planer, and it pushed my Ryobi table saw to the near limit. Since my project is just shy of 2 inches thick, and i had to cut all the pieces down to just under four inches wide. The snipe on such heavy pieces was a real nasty pain to have to deal with, but I went longer than needed to try and limit that to the outer most edges that I could cut off, which kind of worked, but not as well as you might have expected. Plus my garage is tiny, and building an eighty inch long door, that’s about forty inches wide is harder than you might have guessed. But I took a day or two’s worth of time and milled it all up, and jointed the edges and then left it to sit in my garage for a year or so. Now, after all this time, I am once again, back at it. Today’s foray into wood working saw me using a SKIL® circular saw to cut the beginnings of my tenons on the long pieces of the door body. Took some getting used to holding the saw 90 degrees to the floor, but I see it done regularly by Youtube® peeps like the Samurai Carpenter, and his stuff always looks clean AF (Never mind he’s been at that sort of thing for a decade or two!). So after getting my heart rate back down to normal, I put on my head phones and goggles and I fired up the saw and took to making all eight of my cuts. At least, that was the plan initially. Then I quickly stopped after only four, because I’m shit with the circular saw, and want to see how I progress with a hammer and chisel to take out the meat of my mortise. If that proved to be a less dangerous affair then I would cut those out now, and get my nerves back for more circular saw cuts later on. One hour of hammering, shaving, peeling and general buffoonery with hand tools later, I had my first full through cut mortise completed. And she’s a dogs breakfast if ever I saw one. But I got it done, and I think I know how to improve for when I go back for numbers two through four. The tenons will be done on my radial arm saw, because that I’ve done before and I’m more confident there. I also need to leave more wood on the tenons so I can make a snug pressure/friction fit due to my shaky saw work previously. If I don’t manage to get the door together and up by November first, then it’ll be a May 2022 project for sure. Don’t aim for perfect, aim for done!
Having trouble visualizing the headspace I need
to be in in order to write creatively at the moment. I have a couple of one off short stories rolling about in my head but I can’t seem to get them out on paper. I mean, sure I’ve done a very brief point form outline, but that’s not helping me find the voice of either set of characters. I have had a few spells of just plain day dreaming where I have thought up something fun, but then just couldn’t get it to come to life. Which is irritating to say the least, but at least I am not where I was a few months ago where I had no ideas at all. Here I was thinking that after I had published my book of short stories back in March, that I would wile away my time adding a couple thousand words more in the time I had before me. But besides three of four small posts here I haven’t written anything at all. I will amend my list of outstanding short stories as ideas come to me, and I hope that I will soon be able to work towards fleshing them out properly in my own idiosyncratic style.
Actually here I’ll just tell you what sort of short stories I have in my bag which I want to write out. I do usually tend towards micro short stories of about five hundred words or so, but if it really grabs me, I have been known to add on additional stories in that line of thinking. Sometimes there are multiple peoples perspectives in the same event, or just different people on the same side of a conflict having wholly different experiences. So the next three stories I intend to write revolve around the creation of the first AI in my interconnected space stories series, which revolves around a character named Kelvin, whom you may recall had a whole portion of my book; The Chronicles of Kelvin. I like him, he’s an interesting guy that has done some pretty weird shit. He’s also comfortable alone, much like myself. Now that story line could have one long but sort of abridged last chapter, or could be broken down like I have in my outline into five meaty chunks. But, you know, sometimes my eyes are bigger than my fingers and I can’t possible write interesting, character driven stories with that many chapters right out of the gate. I’ll have to build up to that, if I ever get a head of steam in me. The second story involves a father and his young daughter, where they are playing out of doors, in a forest, and the young girl is regaling her father with stories of mystical whimsy from her imagination, but the father is transcribing them and adding in all the sorts of details young kids leave out of their stories, but then she gets bored and he’s absolutely hooked, and she looses her train of thought in the middle of this fantasy of epic proportions (due to a vivid childhood imagination unencumbered by things like, logic, physics & linear thinking) and the father goes mental trying to tie it all together in the end. Which is a sentiment I understand completely. The third story is more anecdotal about one of many situations brought about by having Crohn’s Disease. It has a comedic bent to it, because how can you not when you are dealing with such a shitty topic. Ha. That’s all for ranting and whining right now. I’m off to get blood work done at the lab, so stay safe, and have a great autumn season.
Honey Do List
The first month of the kids going back to school has been a doozy. I managed to get through a laundry list of items around the house. I am so very happy that I managed to get these projects done, both the big ticket items and the smaller stuff. Things I’ve been able to do this September since my kids went off to school for six hours per day:
Paint Fire place – Paint the downstairs hall way – Cut and frame sixteen photos and collages & hang them up in the hall – Wash all household Cabinets – De-clutter upstairs of the house (That alone netted me 3 full over sized garbage backs of junk!) – Deep clean from exhaust fan, to tub drain the main floor bathroom – Sweep & mop the entire main floor to a sparkling shine – Manage children’s wardrobe – Clean front door cubbies – Clean front hall closet – Give to charity various boots, coats, hats and jackets – Resurface the dining room table – Clean off the kitchen island so you can see the counter tops again – Wash the winter coats and snow pants – Clean the girls rooms (under the beds and all) – Scrub, pressure wash, sand and stain the back deck – Sand and prime and paint the garage door and trim – Prune all of the trees and shrubs – Dig up 11 Black Locust Trees – Edges and weed all of the garden beds. All of that a more. It really has been a busy September and I’m pleased as punch about it.
Now that we’re into October I’d like to finally build my screen door for the back of the house, and start up on the Harry Potter trunks again. I have two left to go just sitting and waiting for me to get started. Haul away all of the brush that lies in piles around the property – Wash all of the exterior windows – Give both vehicles a fall clean both inside and out – Properly breakdown and store the pressure washer and hoses – Begin fall clean up of leaves and dead flowers. I think I might even tackle the trim in the downstairs bathroom if I get up the courage to try my hand at multiple mitered cuts. Depends on how expensive the trim is I suppose.
Hey not to mention during all this I’ve been able to read three books from cover to cover, which is really quite lovely. And not just doom scrolling on twitter, real paper bound books again. Ah, it’s been lovely. Work has even started to pick up a bit too, so I have invoices going out and coming in again. Plus I am still able to do school drop offs and pick ups every day, which is really great. I hope you are all doing the best you can with what you’ve got. Cheers! ~ M
Ticking projects off my to-do list
It has finally happened, after seven years, both of my children are off to in person learning at the local public school and I am left at home alone in peace with six uninterrupted hours to get stuff (and my paid day job work done.) However, seeing as i am self employed I am opting to use some of this new found freedom to knock a fairly hefty number of odd jobs around the house off of my honey do list. Last week the progress was slow going but it involved a lot of deep cleaning of the main floor of our bungalow home. Sweep, vacuum and mop the floors, wash the inside/outside of the fridge (yuck!), do the same to the stove, dishwasher and microwave. Wash the cabinets, clean out all the left over and accumulated junk from all of the random drawers. Clean off tables, and art stations and bedrooms and the main bathroom needed a total hose down. Gosh, and golly gee, that was a lot of washing and sanitizing. Glad the bulk of it is done, and now I can just maintain it (I hope).
But today, today was the start to the bigger items on my list, namely painting. Sanding, priming and painting the fireplace in the exact same white as it was when first put together. Looks good, but it also looks like nothing really happened. Which sort of sucks. Next step is to paint our back hallway and staircase to the basement. That looks like it’ll need at least three coats of paint, and has some really nasty looking tricky spots. I might make that stretch over two days, I’m not sure yet. Once those two jobs get done I’ll head outside to power washing and sanding our back deck, and then adding a weather sealer (colourless of course, going oh naturelle!) I’d love to get that done this week too. Then all that is left is to wash and paint the garage door, and my biggest jobs will be completed. I can then turn my attention to the basement, where I’d like to finish the trim in our second bathroom, and generally tidy up the basement.
Something I have been meaning to do and have felt great relief getting it done, is purging years worth of crap out of the house. Our home feels bigger, less claustrophobic. Smells a hell of a lot better as well. As we turn towards autumn I’d like to wash all of the windows and winter coats in preparation for that drastic shift to grey rainy November.
Truth be told I’d like to get the bulk of this work done soon, in case my eldest wants to build a Halloween costume from scratch and we can turn our full attention to that in early October. Without feeling like I am neglecting household projects and deep cleaning for the sake of candy, candy, candy, candy.
New Business Hours in Effect Come Monday September 13th, 2021.
Check this out at Amazon
The Company – A series of interconnected space short stories: Varied works of short fiction https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B091JB3MG7/ref=cm_sw_r_u_apa_glt_1ESEPBF46YCZSZVSNQM5
Here’s a few old packaging projects
Which I have finally gotten around to producing 3d renders for. The first is a plastic packet of gluten free chocolate crispy chunks. From what I recall of the project, we did up a few samples as spec work while we were submitting a bid to actually manufacture the wrapper. We did not win that particular job. The second is a paper bag soup pouch that was going to have an inner bladder to contain the different soups or chowders. Both were fun to work on, and far outside my usual alcoholic beverage wheelhouse.
I will continue to dig through my archives and see what else I can bring to life, whilst simultaneously working on my program skills, and completing my day job projects in a timely fashion. On a side note I’m well under way on one of the two Harry Potter trunks I have been commissioned to build. Sorting out the kinks on my box joint jig and I’ll be good to go. Might have to revert back to my mitered 45 degree edges until I get it up and working 100%, the box joint jig that is with my router.
Cheers! Stay as healthy as you can.
In regards to my previous post about 3d rendering.
I might be behind the eight ball here in terms of knowing about how to turn illustrations of uniquely shaped bottles into fully fledged 3d objects using Photoshop, but learning that work flow and then being able to chuck that stuff into Dimension and creating realistic looking mock ups is astounding. So glad I came across this stuff. No longer do I need to slave away drawing every bend of light or using finicky meshes. No no no, now you can draw up your custom bottle in illustrator, render the 3d shape in photoshop, with separate outer glass, inner liquid fill, cap and cork, plus add your various labels and tie that shit up with a fucking bow in Dimension with lighting effects, camera perspective matching to your background. Dear lord, it’s a game changer! I for one am pumped about what this could do for my beverage, and packaged goods clientele. Mind blown. I am tickled pink. Pleased as punch. Until next time.
Also – side note. I wrote a book of short stories available on Kindle, and kindle unlimited for $.99 USD. The Company – A series of interconnected space short stories by Mark Holyome. Available in 11 markets worldwide.
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