I am always fascinated by the work lives and career trajectories of my friends. I’m in awe of others who are able to wend their way through a corporate ladder, and are able to climb up it successfully. Being able to give 2 or 3 years to a particular brand or job, and then use that to catapult to something bigger and better. Now I don’t know all the ins and outs, but from where I am in the spectator seats, I am captivated by their ability to navigate the system. I hated starting someplace new. It fills me with dread. I detest it. I don’t much like meeting new people because I get the same queasy feeling. So thumbs up to those who can, and are able to negotiate the scene and move up to something better. Be it the hours, the commute, the brand, the size of your available team, the title, the pay structure or bonuses. Whatever it is, I salute your ability to create momentum for yourselves. Well done. Applause. Hearty pat on the back from me.
Well it’s Friday. Halloween is drawing near. So is the cold rainy weeks of November. I have my next Covid shot scheduled for a week today. Gotta get it while the getting is good.
Work on the pine bed frame has progressed just a little over the course of this week. I’m sure that if I had of tried I could have done the whole lot in a very dedicated two or three day marathon. But I chose to do it little by little, with a mad dash sprinkled in every so often. Paid work, and house chores take priority over my hobbies. My main issue now is that to fine tune the bed I need to assemble it entirely, and my garage is not particularly wide, so a 44″ wide by 80″ long bed is kind of large for the space I have available. It’s times like these where I wish we had a double garage, so I could have a 4x8ft assembly table to work on. This is why I tend to focus on small projects. Don’t misunderstand me, I still drag my feet and work slowly on small stuff, but this big item does present a challenge I’m not too thrilled to have to work around. I’m happy I get to do stuff like build furniture for myself and family. I’m just unhappy with the space limitations I have. Creates a real mental block. Presents an unpleasant obstacle.
Next up is a book case, I think. That is more my size. Not too tall, and not too wide. I’m looking into a grid pattern cubby for my youngest daughter as well. I think these may get built in the spring. Unless it stays warm-ish deep into late Nov-Dec it will soon be too cold to work in my unheated, poorly insulated garage shop. I think I may need to switch focus from wanting to buy tools, and buy enough insulation that I can keep the garage from freezing solid each winter, or becoming swelteringly hot come late summer. Everything is expensive. Gah! Too damn expensive!
I think I have expressed a desire to both insulate, and cover my garage walls in a tongue & groove board or plywood sheathing so that I can properly hang/display some hand tools. That’s a pretty pricey endeavour. I’d like to get some more lighting wired in, and a heater and air cleaner too. The list grows every time I think about it. Exhaust fans for spraying finishes and not gasing myself, the list goes on.
If I had that kind of money laying about, our vehicles would be new(ish), and we’d have a new fridge, and any other household item upgraded, replaced, or fixed first. Then I wouldn’t feel selfish about buying a few larger tools, or building out the shop. Oh, oh! The floors in the garage are a rough mess, so I’d love to have the floors tidied up too. Pour some self leveling concrete, and put some foam padding down to stand on. I wouldn’t go epoxy, too fancy for my tastes. But a level floor that castors can roll on effortlessly and not catch/drag would be a big win.
I have a running list of upgrades I’d like to make should I ever win a lottery, or score a massive project/pay day pay out. It’s fun to day dream!
The grade ones and twos are missing nearly 50% of the student population from a new “Tummy Bug“, that is going around. Complete with fever, sore throat, vomiting, and so much more. Sounds familiar huh? Probably not. Probably is. Probably. What!?!
How is your Wednesday going? I feel as though ours is all over the place. The temperature is warm, nearing hot. The sky is dark earlier and earlier at night. Our mornings are getting tougher due to just how dim the sunlight is at seven am-ish these days. After all that Hump Day is here! Also Pizza Lunch Day. Less than a week until Halloween. So much left to do!
The kids decided to help decorate so they mixed up clear pva glue, red acrylic paint, and a touch of water and left hundreds of bloody hand prints all over the glass doors, windows, front walkway, and bricks by the front entrance. I somehow thought they would be more subtle. Nope. We now reside in an abattoir apparently. Very authentic. The porous brick work is going to hold on to the paint pigment for weeks, if not months to come. Merry Christmas from the slaughter house four I guess. What can I do? If the weather continues to hold after the big night I could try to pressure wash it. That’s November me’s problem to sort out.
Oh the dimness of the light. All it makes me want to do is go back to bed, or have a several hours long nap. I was going to work outside, but it began to rain as soon as I got home this morning after school drop off. Limits my desire to prune shrubs if I’m going to get poured on.
I could work on the bed project. I made considerable progress yesterday. I cut out all of the recesses for the vertical slats, by binding my rails together and using the table saw. I also cut the slat tenons too. I could potentially start to glue & screw much of this thing together. But it does need some sanding after all. The two additional feet I made need to get cleaned up. I have lots of round overs to do on several edges to soften things up under hand. All the feet need to be cut to their final lengths, and then I’ll have hole/gap filling, planing surfaces to meet nice and flush, even more sanding, then staining to do. Attaching the feet, and possibly adding a minor head board to stop pillows from pushing off the bed at night. Even with all of that left, I’m further ahead than I was before. And that’s what counts. If I was more exact when cutting I’d have a lot less touch up work to do, but I always seem to miss something, somewhere. I’ll have to notch out a few things I’m sure in order to get it all to come together in the end. Gap filling is going to be a must, I can feel it in my bones.
I didn’t want to swap out my regular saw blade for my dado stack, so all of my cuts took much longer than they needed go. But, I think I will have a better fit by moving slowly. So no harm done. Made a hell of a mess with saw dust yesterday, so I feel like I got enough out of my day. Today’s hand cramps bear witness to my continued use of the heavy sled I made. Much safer with the sled and my hold down sticks. My fingers thank me. Atleast this far in they do.
Is through a condensed high light reel with vibrant commentary. You can get the best of multiple games, across various leagues in the time it takes to watch one full game, anthem, to final buzzer. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Forget all the downtime, replays, flags, penalties etc etc… gimme the top line executive summary, and any of the finer points of interest. And no, I’m not much fun at parties.
Bullet point form sports viewing is my primary source of hearing about most games, leagues and players. I will, on occasion watch a full Jay’s & Leafs game, or watch a random football game, but those are few and far between. As much fun as it is to watch eight to ten warm up pitches for every pitcher change, plus game delaying call reviews, and injuries, and hitless pitching match ups. I’d much rather be doing something else with my time. Getting the best bits in a hurry is where it’s at for me, right now.
Tuesday is here. The childrens fall fair is today. Have already had some drama. My youngest has been waving her $5.00 bill around all morning in excitement for the fair, and then promptly dropped it, and lost it before getting to school. Leading to a meltdown and tears. Luckily mum found it, and drove back over to the school so I could hand it off to a late arriving classmate/friend of my daughter. Crisis averted. Potentially. Can always misplace it again. No point getting mad, you have to laugh about it. Children. Good grief.
The oldest is volunteering with the fall fair for all recess breaks today. Their only rule is to not buy any pumpkins. Especially not any of the 150 we donated to the school yesterday morning! Otherwise they could use their five dollars to participate in any other available activity.
I need to go do more laundry. Have a good Tuesday. One week until Halloween! Counting down the days!
You ever feel as though no matter how hard you work, things just don’t seem to break your way? Odds are you are trying to be a human, in need of things, and stuff. I have no answers for you. Sorry. I’ve certainly been there. The fix was costly and time consuming. Not for everyone. Not available to many. Life is tough, no getting away from that at this point.
Don’t you wish I had some convoluted answers to sell you though? I don’t know how people do it. Grifting, that is. Eventually people catch on, and then it’s all lawsuits, insults and stress. Maybe if you can take in enough people and make them feel so silly about doing the thing that they’d never willingly out themselves for having fallen for it, you can get a rather lucrative exploitation going. That’s a whole lot of dark karma for extra zeros in front of the decimal place in your bank account. Takes all kinds, I suppose.
Easy answers. Simple three easy steps. Read my book. Take my course. Subscribe to my podcast. Use these vitamins. Accept Athletic Greens into your life. Need a helping hand in the dark, try Fleshlite. Just make sure to wash it, before, during, and after each use. Fleshlite, the fresh maker.
Just now’s I sit here having a good chuckle, I am waiting on a pumpkin delivery to my kids school. I have around 150 pumpkins to give the Fall Fair. Gotta drive over, and make the hand off shortly.
Good news. Hand off of 150 or so pumpkins went smoothly. I have since cleaned my Van’s interior, and stopped off to pay the mechanic for my wife’s vehicle, and had a hot breakfast. Just put the last of the groceries away. I’m all set to start some laundry. Monday Funday every body!
Always. Build. The. Jig. No matter how laborious it may feel to do so. No matter how good you think your free hand skills are. Build the gods be damned jig. Did the box joints without one and realized I’d done them not only too shallow, but with a rounded bottom, instead of squared off like they should have been. Idiot.
So today I built the jig. And finished this portion of the box joints properly. Except you can now see just how wonky the first pass was without the appropriately build & oriented jig. What a fool. To save fifteen minutes of pre-planning and building I’ve gone ahead and added several hours of hole filling with wedges to hide my crimes on the outermost frame. Rustic look is one thing, Frankenstein’s monster another.
Let us hope that a dark stain, and a dim room will save this project from being cut up into a different project entirely. I will say this. I think the six slats will make this a very sturdy single bed. I could always make two additional feet to prop the centre of the longest span from sagging over time. Might feel even more rigid with that addition. Glad I thought of it.
As I said before in previous posts, slowly making progress! I really won’t want to be out there too far into December. So I need to work quickly to get this bed sorted out. Then transport it to the cottage, and up into one of the bedrooms. Still a fair amount left to do before that can happen.
We needed to grab about 150, but I lost count after 45 or so, as the kids were too fast for me. But we got the van loaded to the hills, and I think as far as a donation goes, we’re on the money!
Still have to save enough room for the kids who picked them. Gotta be able to reach their seats, belts and not be a Twisted up pretzel in the process. No harm done! Return each child in the same or better condition.
Not exactly a lazy Sunday on my behalf. Funny how other people’s plans tend to become my problem once feet have to hit pavement. Everybody loves to plan, but it falls to me to execute it, without fail. Whether I had a stake in the outcome or not!
Atleast I slept in until 8:30am or so, and actually felt rested when I woke up. Might have been due to the 5 mg of Spinach branded chewy gummies I ingested after I pit my kids to bed. Not out of the question.
The oldest is finally 54″ tall, so today we tackled all three super coasters at Wonderland in the cool drizzle. YukonStriker: check! Behemoth: check! And the big kahuna Leviathan: check! Plus a bunch of our old favourites aswell. We did three times as many rides in half the time, and then a whole bunch more after that. Way more fun when you can just walk on as opposed to a 45-60 minute plus wait for one roller coaster.
Then we stopped off for flu shots, and my youngest has lost her god damn mind. So that’s been our Saturday. Very eventful. Loads of heart racing fun.
For the life of me I can not recall a reason as to why I kept this writing streak going, other than compulsion, and daily habit. Even so, I’m awfully close to going a whole year without writing any short stories. I have written copious amounts of nonsense, and silliness though. Funny to think I felt my numbers of views were down in the year to year review, so I tried to write every day for a few weeks before I hit New Years Eve and was going to stop. Then the next calendar year had the best showing ever, and then dropped off again. Not as low as in years I posted almost nothing, but I failed to gain enough traction to warrant making the writing streak a compulsion. So what do I do now?
Did a few other things as of late too. I finished my sixteenth book this year, by John Scalzi, called “Starter Villain”. It was a fun little jaunt in a mixed up James Bondesque world of mischief and mayhem. Finished it in just a day or two. Very pleasant read. I’m back to the Adrian Tchaikovsky novel I tried to start several weeks ago. Hopefully now I’ll have the available concentration to read five or six hundred pages of science fiction. I’m still halfway through “American Prometheus “, so I should either finish that or hang up that particular book mark, and call it a day. It’s good, and thorough to say the least. A bit like reading a textbook. Something I haven’t needed to do in close to twenty years. I feel as though I should read it at a desk with a highlighter in hand. Gives off those kinds of vibes. Still a good read. Just more dense than I care for right this minute.
I got into the shop this week to work on my pine framed bed. I have some work to do on the box joints, as I didn’t go deep enough, and I need to square off the bottom of each joint, as I left them rounded over. But on the bright side I did some bandsaw work, some hand saw work, and got the project just a little closer to finished. I’ll take it!
We have a PA Day today, so the kids are up early, of course, not that we have to shake them and roll them around their beds to wake them up on a regular school day. Where they cry and moan about wanting to sleep in, but on the days they can do so, they are up earlier than usual without a problem. I can’t tell you what a surprise it will be once either, or both start to sleep in on weekends, summer days, and holidays. I imagine they’ll be up late making a racket around the house so not much of a win there anyway.
The other day I went out and picked all of the remaining apples off of our two fruit trees to send to my friends horses. I had a fair amount of quality sized apples this year. The red ones all fell off earlier, and the wasps terrorized those for weeks. Once the temp dropped enough to drive them away I came to claim what was left. A half a grain bags worth. No where near what was on both trees, but I don’t fancy getting swarmed and stung for apples. I thought we were going to get a bunch last year with all the blooms the trees had, but then no fruit was produced. This year however, whoo boy! If I had a bee suit and a cider press I could have picked all 2-300 apples between the two trees and made some cider or fresh apple juice!
Apple picking on the side yard.
Funnily enough I recently saw that an old acquaintance of mine was coming to the end of a contract position, and i saw a job posting that i thought could be right up their alley, and they complained to me about it. So don’t be alarmed should i not do things of that nature for other people. This year has really reiterated how bad of an idea it is to do anything nice for other people. Yet i keep on doing it. Going to learn my lesson at some point. Or become a jaded prick about it. Either way – we all win!
It is currently raining. It started to rain several hours ahead of schedule so I am happy we decided not to go back to Canada’s Wonderland for another Halloween Haunt adventure. Was supposed to start between eleven and midnight, but was softly pattering on the ground by eight o’clock. We’d have been there for little more than an hour and it would totally kill the vibe. Mist is one thing, but a full on rain would end the night. Precious few available days left this season. I think we might be finished, but perhaps we can get one last visit under our belts this year. I’d very much like to ride Yukon Striker one more time. It’s such a smooth ride. I like the articulated carriages. Plus I feel as though they weren’t concerned about the footprint so they were able to make softer transitions between tricks/gimmicks, and your neck and back are all the better for it. Five stars, do reccomend! Try it at night in the dark.
Off to a quick start this morning. Not a good week for meetings. Two ghosted, and one canceled. Hard to beat oh for three in the same week, and it is only Thursday morning. Had to miss school drop off today, and that’s proven to have been a mistake – again. Ghosted. Aggravating to say the least. An email notification of pushing the time, or canceling would have been much preferred. Oh well. The times they are a changing.
Nothing much on the radar today beyond this rescheduled meeting, moved over from Tuesday afternoon. But it looks to be a bust. 40 minutes late to starting. Not a good sign. I’ll go have breakfast shortly if I hit 8:50am and nobody shows.
How has your week been? We have a PA Day tomorrow, so a long weekend for us York Region folks. I think the kids have a crafting session planned elsewhere for part of the day. Should be fun. Have a good one.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
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