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We were up by 7:30am, and then off for a morning walk before 8:00am. The grass is positively wet from all of the dew, and all of the runners were out. Every single one. Nobody missed it apparently. Gold star morning for joggers and runners alike. Oh, and us dog walkers. Lots of spray patterns around to keep the mutts interested. Not too hot, not too cold, and with those golden rays at our backs for a good half hour trot about the neighbourhood. To the park, up the street, through, and around the cemetery. Back home by the opposite route to smell something new every ten feet.

Then home for breakfast, made up of duck jerky strips for the dog, and a bowl of cereal for myself. Polished off the last of the Trix. Not my favourite cereal ever. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Then I answered an email, filed some paperwork for the board, and then went to cut the grass. The front yard takes about 45 minutes or so. Depends on whether or not I also do the back yard,  plus any weed eating (which I skipped this time around).

Now I’m sat down debating what else to do. I swept, vacuumed, and mopped the floors yesterday. I cleaned the kitchen sink, counters, doors, and kick plates. I cleaned up a portion of the island. I cleaned the bathroom toilet, sink, and floors. I could wash some sheets,  towels and utility items. I washed doors, and walls too (in spots, not the whole lot). My quiet purging has taken me all over the house in a criss cross pattern. If I could call a dumpster I’d fill it in a snap with random junk. But alas I cannot, so I will not.

It worked out that my wife and kids went to the cottage for the night, and the dog & I stayed home. I kept cleaning, and then had my friend, along with his girlfriend over for a very pleasant two hour or so chat. They’ve never been to our house, not together anyway. My friend has, his girlfriend hadn’t.  So I gave them the ten cent tour, and we talked over drinks, and a bowl of chips. Out by ten pm, and no mess to pick up after. Great!

Sounds as though a breeze is kicking up, welcome around here now that I’m so sweaty from mowing the lawn. It gets so warm in the day, but so cool at night I don’t want to turn the AC unit on. If the breeze can move through the house it’ll remain a good 23-24°C in here which is very reasonable. Space smells better with all the windows and doors open. The Honeywell air purifier goes a real long way towards keeping our house smelling neutral over the winter months when an open window isn’t something you want to do. The last two years that we’ve had one the air quality has been, I don’t know if it’s any “cleaner“, but certainly less odorous. Which, not for nothing, is a total step up in my book.

Happy sunny Saturday. Hope it’s a good one!

Used a bunch of Xbox points to help me with my Diablo 4 questing, but it turns out I have to activate a battle pass in order to claim them. I’m playing offline, and not on multiplayer, so basically I’ve wasted about 6,000 points. Damn. On the other hand I downloaded Minecradt to the local Xbox so that should keep my youngest occupied while I attempt to fix her busted gaming cell phone. She’s notorious for dropping it off of every bed she can climb up onto, so even with the Tuff case it didn’t stand a chance. I already paid to swap out the front screen because she shattered the first one. Now this second screen is cracked too. Oh and the entire rear panel has popped off. Battery doesn’t look like it ruptured or ballooned, but somethings going on. I wonder if the phone has twisted, bent, or bowed so now the backing plate won’t stay put. Conundrum.

I’m toying with purchasing Space Marine 2, but I know I’ll either play it every second for a week straight, or I’ll grow bored of it almost immediately and won’t play it all that much. I got a few hours into Gears of War 4, and  Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, but haven’t gone back to either game in a while. Hell I’ve bought and played Slien Fire Team Elite a bit in the last couple of weeks, so there’s that to consider too. I do enjoy Diablo 4 a fair deal. I just get lost in all of the detail. I never know if I’m going about the skill tree correctly or not. I’ll play until I get stuck and then will put it down for a month of two, like usual.

Oh man, 1:00pm all ready! I need to eat and fast. I knew I put more into that Diablo play through than I had first thought. It was 10:00am just a few moments ago. Damn. Time vampire got me again. Ha. Maybe I’ll have some time tonight to devote to gaming if the kids go off to the cottage for a night or two with my inlaws. Who knows, stranger things have happened.

Happy sunny Friday to you all. Take care. Ciao Bella.

Thursday is in the house, and I have had this cough for fifteen days now. It is very slowly getting better, but taking its sweet time in doing so. I felt well enough to hit the driving range yesterday morning to test out my new chipping wedge, and it works! Whee! Has a pretty good loft to it. Nice. I then proceeded to hit two large buckets of balls alternating between my nine iron, and a #1 driver from my partial set of clubs. It was warm but not hot. Sunny with a slight breeze. Really just a lovely morning at the range. Made me want to hit the links, but I’m a terrible golfer without the attention span to play 18 holes. But I find a nine hole par three course to be too short. If after every third shot I had to mini putt a hole too that might be a better simulation of the real thing. What a hoot of an endeavour that would be.

The dog has been walked, I’ve dropped the kids off, and eaten breakfast. Shortly I’ll had down into my office to build some artwork for the rest of the morning. Not sure what to do about lunch today. That’s future me’s problem to solve.

Although it was rather painful at the time of impact I don’t think it was bad enough that I will lose the nail. That’s a good start. Also, not broken! Yay. I can bend it, and put pressure on it without wanting to pass out, so definitely not broken. Love it. While there is a good patch of skin & tissue that has changed colour and looks pretty angry, the whole toe didn’t change colour or swell up so I’m happy about that. I can also walk about freely, which is handy. So not my strongest performance ever, but one I will walk away from – mostly. Ha!

While cleaning and reorganizing a basement closet (or one of them anyway) I found a garbage bag, and a carrier bag full of trash. Damn. I was already at our town limit for items to go to the curb yesterday, so it’ll be two weeks until I can toss this new found stuff. Gah! The closer I get to cleaning this house top to bottom, the more I find random hidden garbage caches. I’m happy with the progress, but short of calling in a dumpster or bin, and hauling away everything all at once, I think there will always be something hanging around that I don’t want to keep holding on to. We have storm doors, closet doors, a fire door, paint cans from multiple decades, different flooring tiles or laminate, and vinyl planks. Bins of random junk. I hate all of it. Well the vinyl tiles should be kept, as that’s our current flooring choice, so those boxes make sense to have. But… always so much accumulated crap. I still have an old water softener and brine tank. Which were too heavy for me to lift without my dolly last year when we replaced them. Though now after evaporating all of the water inside the brine tank, it could go upstairs in a pinch. But I need to put it somewhere (not in the garage). Drop ceiling tile bundles hidden in the back of the laundry/furnace room. Old bits of trim mouldings scattered about the property. I’m certain I could nearly fill a dumpster if I included items from out of the garage too.

Where does it end! A lot of those items are an annoyance, but beyond select times when I see them they don’t impact the operation of the house. More of an eyesore than anything else. Even if I scaled way, way back on the things that occupy the interior spaces, our house wouldn’t get any bigger. I may have minimalist leanings sometimes, the rest of my family sure as hell doesn’t. And though it may feel like it, I am NOT throwing things away just for the sake of throwing things away, nor to create the excuse that I must now go shop for replacements.

I have reasons, and a logical rationale for what I’m choosing to toss away. I’d rather be in control over what items of mine get thrown out now, than have my kids or spouse do it under duress when I’m sick, incapacitated, or dead. A touch morbid, but if I can reduce the amount of headache now, and it’s my choice, my decision then I feel pretty good about it. I have no delusions that my kids or spouse will want to keep a hold of every single thing I’ve accumulated over the course of my adult life. I’d hope they would keep some items, but I go whole hog, and my collections get big – fast. So if I can pare it down to just the best, or most meaningful items to me, then there’s less to worry about, and an easier job to clean up after me if/when I’m gone.

In my office I was most saddened to see that two tubes of modelibg/air dry clay had gone off. That was about seven pounds of unused clay that went in the trash. No point holding on to that. It was cheap when I bought it, bust ultimately wasted. That stuff has doubled, nearly tripled in price if I did want to replace it. So not the bargain it once was. I had dreams of using that stuff on my next war gaming terrain build. But you can’t really expect this stuff to sit tight and last for years on end while I get my thoughts together. Oh well. To what might have been! **sobs emphatically **

I am kind of surprised that when I dropped the entire table on my foot it all managed to land, and strike but one single solitary toe with all of the impact force. My big toe on my left foot to be exact. I must have had it raise up in order for it to be the sole benefactor of the blunt force trauma. I would have thought it would strike all the toes excepting maybe the baby toe. But what do I know. I’m a guy whom dropped a hard wood table on his foot, and managed to change the colour of one individual toe in the process. Oh boy did that smart. Kept me awake the first night when my sheets caused that toe to flex or move unexpectedly. Then there is the dog which layed down on it in the middle of the night. And then proceeded to find multiple causes throughout the day to stand directly on top of my bad toe. What a douche. Loveable eight month old puppy doucher.

We’ve reached day fourteen of the cough. Far fewer bouts of extreme coughing now. Still feeling a bit off because of it. When I get going my throat gets sore, and my ribs/abs ache, but it is slowly going away. Thank god. It could have been worse, much worse. Have a wonderful Wednesday everybody. Ciao Bella.

I have been sorting the house ever since the day in late August when my wife returned to work, after a 14 month long sabbatical. I have cleared out closets, drawers, toy bins, toy boxes, baskets, clothing, boots, shoes, coats, and junk of every shape, size and colour. Once we removed all of the easily accessible low hanging fruit I had to get a bit more inventive, and really knuckle under. So for me, and my various collections, it was a matter of paring down the number of books, magazines, and such that I have been hoarding. Earlier in my life all I wanted was a massive library, type of books be damned. Now that I’ve had to lug those self same books about for twenty five years or more, and make allowances for how much room they take up, I’ve had a bit of a shift in my thinking. So I went through, on three separate occasions to donate books to the care and share. Books I read and didn’t like. Books I nolonger have any interest in reading. Out of date text books that serve no purpose anymore. And several book series as a whole that I don’t care to ever read a second time. Besides my new books, and those on the TBR list which I do plan on reading at some point, the only books I kept are ones I loved, and if I could never buy another new book, would be more than happy to read a second, or third time. You’d think after donating, recycling, or burning something like two hundred or more books that my collection would be small, but that isn’t the case. I still have quite a few left! Outstanding.

I am now trying to clean up other areas of the house. I have gone through my CD collection, where I was gifted a bunch of random CDs from Universal, but never opened them, and don’t much care for the artists in question. So those will go out too. Along with any of those monthly distributed demo games from the old Xbox magazines. I didn’t make a huge dent in either of those areas, but some is better than none. I wish they still sold CD books, so I could dump alot of the dvd cases. We tend to buy Blurays if they offer physical media at all now. I’m keeping the disks, just not the cases. Waste of precious space in our small home.

That’s also why I removed all of my dust jackets. The shelves that continue to house books are stuffed right full. Now you can remove a single book without five on either side coming out along with it. Just a few additional millimeters of space on each shelf has helped immensely. Not that I was really a “get rid of the artwork” kind of guy, but a lot of the second hand books I owned were pretty badly ripped. So off they all went. I’m not sad about it. The good part is still here, the book, with the words! That’s what was important to me, not the randomly shifting jacket designs.

Part of the purge/clean up was bringing the refurbished table inside to swap it in for the old folding table that was in the middle of the room. Now the fixed table is sturdier, wider, and longer to boot! The kids can play Legos, and have room for multiple mid size puzzles, or one really big one. Nice. The black legs don’t look out of place, so I’m happy.

Opening up space on the shelves, and keeping things more tidy is a real chore. Coming together though. Still have boxes & bags of crafting materials to sort through. Not looking forward to that – at all. Moving in waves does seem to help. Big stuff first, then work your way down organizational level by level. How deep into the organizing game I want to get will determine how many times I go over an area. Right now it is just a surface level thing. I could get a label maker out, and sortimoes and get real near OCD about it. But it isn’t me whom uses it. That level of fine tooth organizing will stress out my wife and kids. So I won’t go that far with it.

I do plan on taking my totes out to the garage at some point, if I can’t get them into the crawl space under the stairs. That will open up the basement closet for all of the spring/fall coats. It will also mean I can keep all of our winter gear in one dedicated closet all spring/summer/fall. Which will allow me to actually use the closet in my office, which currently has coats in it, and not much else! One easily accessible coat closet would be really handy.

Funny story about the refurbished table. I managed to drop it on one single toe yesterday. It has throbbed ever since. The dog continues to find said toe, and stand on it – repeatedly. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, dropping a wooden table on one toe. It’s not broken, but it isn’t a very pretty colour anymore I’ll tell you that much for free.

One day you’re sweltering in the heat and 72 hours later we’re all bundled into sweat pants, fleece lined sweaters, and huddled under blankets on boat rides across the lake. Now here we are second week of school and the kids need a jacket in the morning, and a sweater for the chill winds blowing. These seasons change on a dime, about 3 weeks earlier than they should. It’s not autumn until the 22nd of September, but you wouldn’t know that if you looked outside, or took sight of a thermometer.

Not that I want it to be all humid and gross forever more, but these quick dips makes it easy to get sick. Now my cough is likely to be from running my dehumidifier at too high a setting to keep the basement from being damp and musty, but in the process drying out my nasal passages, and hurting my lungs/throat with the constant dryness. I hate damp feeling sheets, so it’s an issues I’ll need to live with until the snow comes, and the humidity evaporates anyway. Life is a delicate balance.

Day 13 of my cough and it does seem to be getting better, slightly. No meds since Thursday morning, and I have longer stretches with no coughing. Leaning back, reclining and lying down will still trigger a cough, but oh well. I pulled a muscle over the weekend in my abdomen from coughing. That hurt. Like doing too many crunches/sit ups without a break. Could have done without that!

Domestic Duties Monday is here again!  It’s two of my brothers birthdays today. They are 47, and 49 respectively. Happy birthday!

Managed to find a free moment to add the dark ebony stain to all four ash table legs yesterday. I applied it pretty thickly with a sponge brush, but it went on evenly, and I think it will look ok. The wood itself was not the best. Has a fair few knots, and some cracks I had to glue & clamp. Some of which held up, and others failed. On the plus side the stain was not bothered by the glue residue. Score one for me! I just want to hide the legs as much as possible. I’m looking for a sturdier surface to play on, not a gorgeous finished product. I still have a few steps to go, but I should be done this coming week. Yeah!

In other news I have pulled a muscle in my lower abdomen coughing in the night. That sucks. It hurts a bit. Feels like I tried to do five hundred sit ups while I should have been sleeping. But only on my right side. Strange. I remember pulling a muscle in my belly from throwing up, that was a decade ago. Also turned out to be EBV, so I’d love to not experience that again. What a shite three months that was. No thanks, I’ll pass.

Taken the oldest child to an outdoor laser tag combat party today. Looks awesome. I never did stuff like that as a kid. We didn’t really have it as an option as far as I know. When I did do paintball I kicked ass, and had a blast doing it on the company dime. Too rich for my blood. The paintballs alone are fairly cost prohibitive. Let us see what laser combat costs. Maybe we’ll add it to the list of potential fun family outings.

Happy Sunday!

Well, first off I started the sanding process on what I had thought was a hardwood table, to find out later that I had in fact sanded through some badly gouged veneer whilst attempting to restore the eating surface. I was very disappointed by this revelation regarding veneer. That took the restoration job down a peg to a mere repair. So I ended through all the grits I felt it needed, stopping at 220. I stained it twice with two heavy coats of Danish Oil Dark Walnut Stain, and eventually caved into adding a spray on Varathane brand diamond clear satin finish. Very light mind you. I sanded that with 400 grit once dry to take down any micro bubbles or lumps. My shop is dusty and particles get everywhere regardless of how much I vacuum the space.

Once that was all squared away I turned my attention to milling up some simple Ash legs, instead of gluing up a bunch of Walnut legs. So I spent a full day jointing, edging and then planing some three inch thick legs. I rounded those over with a repeatable stop at one end. As I need to capture the square end against the table to properly align the inserts for the bolts. I’ve made the legs 36 inches long, which feels like the right height. I should double check that though. I’ve sanded all four legs up to 220 grit. I am going to stain them a dark black/ebony to hide the lesser quality wood used. We’ll see if that works at all. Ha. Then I need to build the caps, match the drill holes, countersink the rim of the holes, add the inserts, and assemble. Take a photo for my records, and then bring the whole lot down to the basement for use with Lego, puzzles, and homework. The folding table currently in use can get put away beside the basement fridge where it lived for ages, out of the way, but accessible.

Besides the table, I  did a fair bit of reading, played some video games, worked a little, did the lawm and gardening, laundry, dishes, and floors. I didn’t do any fair entry stuff, but I still might? Hard to say. I really was focused on the table because I had high hopes it was of a better quality than it really was. I was terribly disappointed to find the veneer. Just gutted. What a let down. On the upside it is still real wood through, and through. Just not the rich Mahogany of the top most layer.

Doing wood working with a cough is not much fun. Wore my dust mask so as to not make things worse for myself. Still floats up into my eyes though, goggles be damned. I think I will turn my attention to a new sculpted fair entry once I get the table build completed. I’d like to keep making furniture as my time in the shop is limited by the weather (temperature). By November it’ll be too cold on there to use hand tools comfortably without them making my hands go numb. My tiny little heater may keep my back hot, but it’s not enough to warm up the entire space, and everything contained within it. I usually like to spend June/July in there, and Sept/October too if I can find the time away from paid work. May not be as big a concern this year. If we get a warm spell in November I can be out there between 10:00am and 2:00pm to putter around. By then the leaves take up 90% of my outdoor activity. Raking, blowing, vacuum bagging, mulching, and dumping them all back into the beds to protect my flowers through the winter, and add clean fill for the following growing season. Soil levels drop faster than I can replace them!

Happy Saturday out there in internet land. May your coughs be short lived, and not aggravate your throats/lungs too much. Ciao Bella!

Feeling more gurgley now, than in the early days. What started as a throat clearing tickle, is now a very phlegmatic hacking, wracking cough. I could honestly do without it, but that’s not my path right now it would seem. NyQuil at least gets me better quality sleep, even if my mornings are more groggy than I care for. Oh well! I feel like, now that there is a physical aspect to the cough, the gurgle of mucous in question, I’m making headway towards getting over it. Eight days of just painful coughing with no real definable source was annoying. Now there’s phlegm, so… that’s the point to attack I feel. That’s where I direct my attention now. So – is it really getting better? I don’t know, but if history serves as any guide, I’m going in the right direction. I think. But after looking up a few things, I do not believe it to be Whooping Cough. A sigh of relief was had by all.

It’s Friday today! End of a short week. The first four days of school have come, and are almost gone. No major morning melt downs – yet! So that feels promising. Have yet to lay eyes on my oldest child’s teacher, so I need to figure out who it is, beyond just a name. I’ve met my youngest’s teacher a number of times through the years, so no issue there.

My table project is progressing, albeit a tad slowly. If I can cut, and round over, and sand the legs today, then I can stain them on Monday, and build the capture point, and drill them all out, and think about putting it all together downstairs at the end of next week. I’d love to let the stain off gas outside of the house before I bring it all downstairs to stink up the basement with stains, oils, and sprayed clear coats. But likely I’ll rush to bring it inside just to have it done, and over with. So there is that to contend with. The kids don’t spend a whole lot of time downstairs, so I don’t think the smell will bother them. Just me. My office is downstairs, and that’s where I spend the majority of my day.

What else to say? Oh yeah – wife has been back to work for two weeks now. House feels empty with just the dog and I here. I have yet to venture out to grab a hot lunch. I do make a mean sandwich here with all my fixings, so it’s not really a problem. Work has quieted down a touch, but that’s because all of the marketing interns have returned to school, and the brand people are circling wagons, and looping back to see where they stand on any given project. Could be a few more days before I see any new items become available. It’s to be expected.

Still have not found the time to go see Deadpool 3, nor Alien Romulus. I’d like to catch at least one of them in theaters, but streaming will suffice if I end up having to wait even longer. I will eventually see them. Just a matter of time.

Well, I should get back to my table project. It won’t finish itself. Ciao Bella!

In his shop, sanding unknowingly through the veneer top of what was assumed to be an heirloom piece of hard wood furniture. Upon closer inspection it was then decided, by our intrepid friend to continue to upgrade the table into a suitable crafting/homework/Lego station rather than completing the original quest of a complete restoration. Now it’s a mere refurbishment meant to keep the table top level, and free of gouges. No more, no less. Also the idea to stop the Walnut leg build and course correct to simple Ash legs was implemented. Saving an expensive resource for another project. Also relieving himself of a rough sawn Ash board he’d been hoarding for nearly a decade. A Win-Win if you will. Hold for applause! Divine.

Also – yeah, day eight of this cough. It sucks. Day-Quil, Robitussin, Benalyn all seem to be next to useless once the fits kick in, but otherwise, no fever, no nasal congestion, no fatigue, no nausea, no upset guts, no nothing. Just a cough that has now aggravated my throat. I can still eat & drink without issue, so… there is that. I hope to be rid of it by this time next week, or I’m going to have to see a doctor about it. We’ll wait and see what shakes out. NyQuil however works extremely well, as I had the first good nights sleep in seven days last night. So, much obliged NQ!

I did manage to put two thick layers of dark Walnut stain on the table top yesterday, as well as complete all the initial sanding needed to apply them. Which was nice. Looks great where there is still veneer! Less so otherwise. But I’m in no position to reapply veneer to the top so it is what it is at this point now. Table clothes or Jraft paper will cover the top from now on. No so much to protect it, as to hide my discovery of the falsehood behind this table we’ve held on to for nearly 20 years because we thought it was better than it really is. No matter, another solid work surface is always appreciated. More horizontal space to hoard “things” I guess.

It is now Thursday, the third official day of school, out of two hundred and sixty some odd. So the next ten months are firmly in motion. I think we have about four weeks until the classroom assignments are set in stone, so the kids could still move, get bumped, or placed elsewhere before October 11th (which was a previous years deadline for such things, if I recall). So no cause for celebration just yet.

Back to school means birthday parties are kicking off again! No shortage of friends with gift requirements at my kids school. I think both of them have something or other coming up in the next ten days. Lots of weekend shuffling about from venue to venue, event to event. Fun, fun, fun.