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Why I didn't write

2025-01-02T22:44:23Z

Adam "The Dork" Brodsky wrote a song "Why I Didn't Call". I'm not going to come up with near as many reasons and they won't be nearly as interesting. Why I didn't write is simple. I think of things to write as I'm going through my day: showering, driving, working. I think of just what I'd like to say, usually in a vague way, but sometimes with specific points or phrases. And in my head it's good.

Then when I have time, well, it's like the joke, "If you want a clean house, move in with a procrastinating writer." There is always something more to do.

Then when I finally sit down to write then the real problem is revealed. All those witty bits are gone. What actually comes out is blah and lifeless. It's like what was in my head was Season One of "Chef!" and what comes out is Season 3 of "Chef!" with dementia, in a coma. Most of the time I'm so disgusted I just toss it all. And writing is about habit. If you don't just do it, pretty soon you just can't do it. The demons of anxiety and inadequacy are more than delighted to remind you that you haven't written anything other than utter driven in a dog's age.

So yeah, that's pretty much why I haven't written anything on DW in forever.

Before I wrote this short bit I went to the gym. While writing this short bit I got up to get water and did the dishes. At least a clean house is better for my allergies.

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How about a nice game of chess?

2022-04-01T19:26:14Z

At the start of the war in Ukraine I bought the game "This War of Mine" because for a limited time all the profits were going to the Ukrainian Red Cross. The game was released back in 2014 and I might have heard something about it in passing around that time, but I'd never really looked into further. Probably anyone who regularly plays new games played it long ago.

Last night I finally got around to opening it up and starting a game.

I think players will probably fall into three groups:
1. Think the game is dumb and slow moving
2. Find the game depressing and never play it again
3. Find the game depressing and keep going back to it to try to "win"

The game only accounts for a few bits of the complexity of survival. It appears to give the player a pass on drinking water, which I can attest adds a significant level of complexity in real life. But even with its limited number of factors, it does a good job of giving the impression of the limited resources, the most precious of which being time and people.

The object is to stay alive until there is a ceasefire. But you neve know when/if that will come. I haven't played it enough to know, but my first impression is that it's a Kobayashi Maru. Just like Sarajevo or Mariupol.

In a bit of cold irony, I was so busy making sure the stove was fed to keep my characters warm that I didn't notice the fire keeping me warm had gone out.

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happy Spring or happy Fall depending on your hemisphere

2022-03-21T23:03:37Z

VLDL are doing a series of skits to raise awareness of mental illness. They have humor and heart. Check them out if you haven't seen them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8if3TZJfcY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApC4vJL9Dw

Then you can watch all the other VLDL videos, because "It's a nice day for fishin' ain't it!"

It was a moderately productive weekend, which means I was productive for about 1/3 of the time. Spring is definitely in the air. It rained all day on Saturday and we have snow and ice only in a few spots. One of those spots is the garden, which bears a close resemblance to a hockey rink.

On Sunday I got the last of the firewood out of the garden shed. It will probably take me through the next two weeks for heating and in two weeks there won't be much heating left to do. I'm trying to run the stove enough to keep the oil from coming on at during the night. Haven't made it through the whole night yet, but the furnace is definitely running less.

The ground was in that weird state were the very surface was mush, but half and inch down it was frozen hard as a rock. Like walking on a ledge which squishes.

A week ago I cut down four or five small trees. They were all either dead or dying and had been on my list last year. They are small, so in all they probably won't make a week of heating fuel. On Sunday I got the pile separated into twigs and small limbs. The small limbs will be cut with the chain saw and stacked. The twigs will be clipped and bundled for fire starter. There is not much on a tree we don't use. All the twigs are now in the barn ready for clipping. It might take a couple more sessions to get those finished up. The limbs will be quicker, there might be an hour of cutting and stacking there.

There is a big rotten tree up in the forest which has to come down. I noticed it last year, but didn't want to deal with it. Now it is leaning against the tree next to it and in the wrong direction (toward the neighbors yard). I have to get a rope on it and lean it back toward the nearby clearing. Maybe I'll get lucky and it will be willing to fall from the pulling, but I'll probably have to get near it with the chainsaw. That will take patience and ambition and derien doesn't want me doing it when she's not around. It has been dead for a while so I don't think there will be any good wood in it, just food for worms and mushrooms in ten years or so.

Saw some plants just starting to sprout in the sunny spots! I'm not going to have a garden this year, honest. Except for the garlic which went in last fall.

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all sweetness and light here, yeah you know better

2022-03-17T01:40:40Z

Wow, it has been a long time since I've posted. It's even been a few weeks since I looked at Dreamwidth.

I've been fighting a bought of depression. Nah, I'm just joshin' you, I haven't been fighting it at all. Cause when it comes down to it what do you do when you're depressed? You might sit in front of the computer and doomscroll. You might wander from thing to thing and never get anything done. You might try retail therapy and find it and your wallet empty. But do you really fight depression? Yeah, here's a broom why don't you go sweep back the tide.

Anyway enough of my privileged problems.

It's hard to believe that the recent legislative and executive antics in Texas aren't the worst news in the world, but Texas is going to have to up its game. Perhaps they'll outlaw wearing headscarves in college to kick it up a notch.

What is happening in Ukraine... well shit. It's awful to see that Georgia was the appetizer and Syria the first course. I hope we can avoid this being a formal French meal. There are plenty of possible shitty outcomes. My imagination isn't strong enough to come up with a possible good outcome. The best possible outcome is probably a horrific experience for millions of people and complete economic destitution for millions more.

Below is a work in progress, my apologies to Shinehead and Sting, goes to the tune of "Jamaican in New York"

Don't have coffee, I have nothing here
And I love it when it's quiet
You can hear shells in the night where we live
I'm a civilian in Kharkiv.

See me running down the street for bread
Hope I make it back inside
You can hear shells where we live

Oh, I'm a civilian in Kharkiv
I'm a human, just another human,
I'm a civilian in Kharkiv
I'm a human, just another human,
I'm a civilian in Kharkiv

See the cocktails stacked up in the crate,
We have to use them all some day
Takes a man to make a stand, sometimes he die
Be yourself, no matter what they say

Oh, I'm a human, just another human,
I'm a civilian in Kharkiv
I'm a human, just another human,
I'm a civilian in Kharkiv

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weekends go fast, even when they are long

2022-02-06T23:55:47Z

This weekend we got restarted on the siding project. Derien help me do blopentine on Friday and priming on Saturday. Having two of us doing it goes through twice as many roller covers, but it is a much less overwhelming prospect than 3-4hours of the same motions. With luck I'll be able to finish up the priming on that batch tomorrow night. Today I hauled all the short pieces from the garage up to the work room. Slowly, inch by inch, we make it to the goal.

Thursday night/Friday we had a sleet storm which ended as snow. We had 3 or 4 inches of sleet on the ground Friday morning instead of the 8 inches of snow which was predicted. The snowblower skated over the top of it and didn't want to bite in. Then about 9am it turned into big fluffy flakes and gave us some proper snow.

The snow has made it more challenging to get the wood down from the garden shed, where this year's wood sits. I use the wheelbarrow because you can carry more wood with the wheelbarrow and once you hit the downhill things tend to go quite swiftly. Sometimes it's like skijoring. After a few snowstorms the unpacked snow does tend to be a challenge on the up part of the journey and the flats. The down slope is still generally a mix between smooth sailing and uncontrolled terror because most of the time momentum wins.

After shovelling an obvious spot, I put out a mouse for the bluejay. It's a bummer when I drop a mouse and it is immediately buried in the snow, so I try to make a solid surface. Within minutes it was gone. I suspect a larger and darker corvid got it, because I saw one about. In the past our crows and ravens have been shy, never near the driveway and only in the lower yard if there were no humans out. But this year I've seen them near the suet feeders and in the trees around the driveway. I don't know whether they are getting more comfortable with us or just more desperate.

I managed to order more parts for the van over the last few days. The supply chain for obscure van parts is pretty sketchy at the best of times, lately it's been downright grim. I've been waiting for some things to come into stock for a year or more. Looking for parts is like playing where's Waldo. Order something which shows as "In Stock", get an email and a refund two days later, wash, rinse, repeat. At some point I hope to hear from the guys about the engine. It was going to be Fall, then "a few months", and the last I heard was "finish up the current project, do one engine swap, then you're next." They are having the same supply chain challenges as everyone else and it's not going to kill me to wait a little longer. It's not like I need to drive it for work, even when I am driving to work.

I'm vaguely lining up the van work I plan to do once the weather gets better, but a lot of that depends on the aforementioned parts. I would like to get the brakes finished up and the fuel system rebuilt. I've got the heavy duty sway bar for the front which I just need to get put on, that would go well with the front brakes because both will require an alignment (changing brakes, spindles, hubs, a big job).

We have been forced into new phones by carriers refusing to support our old ones. The planned obsolescence of the whole thing really pisses me off. It's such a waste to trash a perfectly good phone because the carriers and the manufacturers refused to support anything more than two years old. It's really unnecessary and absurdly bad for the planet.

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board, not bored

2022-01-31T02:08:32Z

Right now life feels like an endless series of boards. During the month of January I've made good progress on the siding prep project. I could have theoretically done more, but I'm not sure I could have practically done more. I started another batch of 50 today. By schedule I should have started it yesterday, but I wasn't going to open up the windows for ventilation with a blizzard blowing. After this batch I have two more batches of 8 footers to go, then I have some shorter pieces to do. So I might be able to finish all of it by the end of February. In the meantime, I'm doing that, work, and dishes.

In the product endorsements department: the Hobbyair supplies air respirator system is working well. In the last month it has probably saved countless brain cells. All of them mine. Ten or so years ago I didn't think anything of breathing noxious fumes, but I guess I should try keeping those little suckers alive.

The snow yesterday blew around a lot! One tiny part of the driveway was clear, most of it had about 8 inches, there were drifts on the driveway about 2ft high and in some places near the house around 3 feet. It was light and fluffy, hence all the drifts, so snow blowing was relatively easy. I did some of it last night and finished it up this morning in the sunshine. We have enough snow cover now for snowshoeing and maybe enough for some sledding.

This weekend I'm trying to reset my caffeine consumption. I'm avoiding the headache by having one black tea about mid-day. My consumption had been creeping up and I wasn't feeling as good as I could. The reset is a thing I do periodically because if I don't I just keep increasing my dosage.

But just because I'm doing without caffeine doesn't mean you should: Have some Koffee. She came up when I did a search on dancehall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8HoEvDh70Y Or if you like it Euro, try Seed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYg9omPYx_M

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feeling is good, lack of feeling and redness are bad

2022-01-31T00:36:40Z

Back in 1991 I think it was, I bought a pair of Perl Izumi Lobster gloves. I was bicycle commuting to work through the winter in Maine and I had arrived at work a couple of mornings unable to use my fingers because they were so cold. The lobster gloves made all the difference in the world. With the lobster gloves my hands still got cold occasionally, but the wind didn't go right through them and my hands remained usable through whole winter. If I remember right, I had to part with the equivalent of nearly a month of grocery money. I fretting seriously about sinking that sort of cash into gloves but they were worth it.

I don't bicycle commute anymore, but I still have the lobster gloves and they still work better than almost any other glove for cold dry conditions. They aren't waterproof anymore if they ever were so wet snow will render them ineffective pretty quickly. When my hands got too cold in insulated work gloves while running the snow blower today I switched into the lobster gloves and finished up with warm hands.

This thought ties in quite well with the Vimes Boot Index: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchett-jack-monroe-vimes-boots-poverty-index If you can afford to buy good gloves, you probably have good gloves for quite a long time.

Pearl Izumi still sells lobster gloves and the prices are the same or less than they were back in the day.

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it isn't a movie

2022-01-10T00:57:25Z

If my life were a movie, this would be the bit where the director cues up the snappy inspirational song, while visually doing lots of quick cut scenes of the main character doing the necessary stuff which take enormous amounts of time and are too boring to show in detail (becoming a karate expert, learning to dance, working as a welder to be able to afford to dance, fixing the space ship). Alas, life isn't a movie.

I've restarted the siding project, so much of my free time for the past week has involved applying concoctions to pieces of bevel siding. I'm using a roller now instead of a brush. That goes about twice as fast, a huge improvement! To make the most out of the rollers I'm doing two racks full at a time: 50 pieces. About 4 hours at a go to get it done. I put on the headphones and listen to music, but by the end I'm brain dead and body weary.

On the days I'm not spending all my time on siding I've been walking on the treadmill. I finished watching "The Fellowship of the Ring" and begun "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".

Friday evening I had to run the snow blower to clear off the driveway. The snow wasn't really deep, but it had 3 or 4 inches so it needed to get cleared before it froze into lumps. Even if it's quick, it takes an hour or so of back and forth. Much better than trying to do the whole thing with a shovel! Also Friday evening I got distracted by a tricky bit at work and ended up working on that well past my usually quitting time. It's nice that I can still occasionally get distracted by an interesting puzzle. Much of my work is repetitive and sameish at this point (it's kind of the definition of work), but I still occasionally get novel or particularly irritating problems.

We moved a lot of wood inside on Saturday in preparation for the coming week. It's nice to be able to start the week with the wood box full and more wood stacked in the laundry room. It is supposed to get really cold for a few days this week, true Maine January weather, but after two days it should moderate again. So far we've had an easy winter and it hasn't been as cold as it usually is, although were my desk sits tends to be cold even when the rest of the kitchen isn't.

Saturday was a busy day doing little things around the house. It had a feeling of perpetual motion. When I first went out in the morning I got to see the fresh tracks in the snow. Lots of deer and a fair number of other tracks. I think fox was one of them, but Derien wasn't sold on that. I hauled the siding primed last week out to barn and added it to the finished stack. It's nice to see the done pile growing and the undone pile shrinking.

Today I got the van started and moved it over a few feet so I'll be able to get my car out this week. I might have been able to squeeze by, but with snow and ice on the driveway I really didn't want to thread the car through a narrow space.

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fundamentally alienated from society

2021-12-31T22:25:12Z

While on vacation I encountered television. In my everyday life, I'm not exposed to the visual medium. Some of it's the same as it was years ago: seen one Hallmark movie, you've pretty much seen them all and if you're me you've seen one too many. But this time I encountered something I'd never seen before and I was quite disturbed.

On the Disney channel (or one of them) there was a show which featured teams of people building things with food. Now there are lots of shows where people cook things and some of them are quite good. But this was building. On a massive scale. Cubic meters of food. Which was not intended to be tasted at all. They were using food to construct creations or sculptures or sets (I wouldn't stretch it so far to say art). For a half hour show they are trashing literally hundreds of pounds of food. All of the themes involved a tie in with one of the major Disney franchises (Star Wars, Marvel). So we are wasting insane amounts of food for cheap movie tie-in advertising.

At the beginning of each show they announced that any food the contestants don't use will be donated (although they don't say to charity, so maybe it's to the staff cafeteria).

I find the fact that this is done with no sense of irony to be more dystopian than Squid Game.

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it was no picnic

2021-11-16T23:54:24Z

I got the second dose of shingles vax on Friday afternoon. My body was not amused. Nothing critical just typical in abundance. My shoulder started to ache within hours. I spent all day Saturday sleeping and aching. I was pretty much useless Sunday as well, but at least got back to sleeping normal hours.

So yeah, a wasted weekend. I'm glad that's over.

Work is very busy right now and I'm having trouble getting traction. It's frustrating, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

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Have I Got A Bit More News For You

2021-11-09T00:09:46Z

Have to go searching for this on YouTube because I hadn't seen any Have I Got News For You in a while.

I thought the guest comedians on this ep were quite good. Sometimes they get folks who just kind of sit there and let the feature guys do all the talking.

Season 62 E1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKDMIxu65Wg

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in the hood

2021-11-07T23:57:05Z

Ended up getting up earlier than intended today because we didn't change the clocks. That was actually a good thing because I was able to get more done. Split a couple of bags of kindling, swept the barn floor, got the winter tires down and into the garage, filled the wood box, mowed a section of the lawn where the grass was tallest, did two racks of siding prep.

Doesn't sound like much, but with feeding the fire it keeps me busy. The siding prep took most of the day.

Now that I'm doing the siding indoors with little air circulation I'm using a supplied air respirator system to keep from killing brain cells. Since I wear glasses I use a hood rather than a face mask. With the tyvek paint suit I've been using to protect my cloths, I look like a spaceman from a B-movie.

The supplied air system has taken some getting used to. The instructions say to connect the hose BEFORE putting on the hood. They aren't kidding. You don't have many breaths once you put that hood on without a supply of fresh air. Also, when you first put the hood on it hits all the claustrophobia centers in your brain full force. The hose is very heavy duty, which means stiff and easy to trip over. I've learned to do this little dance after each piece to uncoil the hose. But it works, I get a constant flow of fresh air blowing into the hood, the pressure forces the excess air out of the bottom of the hood. I have notice my eyes and mouth get a bit dry from the constant airflow, but that's an easy trade-off for fresh air.

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I'm well trained

2021-11-07T00:36:20Z

This morning I put a mouse out on the driveway for the blue jays and it was gone in under two hours. They have me trained. Then I was standing outside the barn and one of the larger woodpeckers flew toward me screeching. So I filled up the suet feeders (one was empty and one was almost empty). Later the chickadees started making a racket right near where I was so we went and filled up the other bird feeders. The chickadees and their posse started emptying them immediately.

Today started out quite cold, but was sunny and pleasant once the frost melted off. I got the new siding boards sorted and cut down to size for prep and priming. That took much longer than I anticipated. Derien mowed a chunk of the lawn. We are getting hard freezes now, so maybe it will stop growing. I tilled the whole garden again, flattened things out, and we got the garlic planted.

Tonight I started on the next round of siding prep and priming. If I work at that consistently I could possibly finish it by the end of December. If I work on it inconsistently it'll basically take forever. I don't like smelling like blopentine, but that appears to be my fate in the short term. Maybe I can pretend it's my new cologne.

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life isn't entirely doing dishes, but nearly

2021-11-03T23:08:58Z

Today we got another 2,800 linear feet of siding delivered. This time it was a larger truck which took some doing to get into our driveway, but the driver was skilled and didn't take out our mailbox or drop the truck off the side of the driveway. The truck had an intricate cherry picker and the guy could control it with a remote control panel he wore around his neck. It was pretty cool. With that he was able to put the siding half way in the barn right from the truck, which means I didn't have to carry it halfway across the the driveway.

The process of lifting a bundle from knee height, step up into the barn with it, carry it across the barn and set it carefully in the space I had to stack it was easy the first time. But after doing a sixteen bundles plus loose ones in 50degF temps I realized I might have overdone it.

Tomorrow I should probably go out and begin the process on those boards: cut the 16ft down to 8/8, stack neatly until they can be prepped and primed, cut the 14ft into 8/6, ditto, find someplace to stack the 30 pieces at 12ft because I'd like to use them whole if I can prep them at that size.

That set along with what we already have should give us enough to complete the barn next spring, or close to it. That is if I can get the preparation done this winter.

Tonight is supposed to be quite cold, down to the 20's. First night we've seen those temps this season and actually pretty chilly for early November. I certainly won't want to get out of bed in the morning. This time of year I suffer from the "it's cold out there and it's warm in here" syndrome in the morning. Once I get up it's not bad and I don't mind being awake. But I act like a shy hermit crab.

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the long memory is the most radical idea in this country

2021-10-31T21:36:43Z

Since I'm posting links, here is the Utah Phillips website. You can read about Utah and listen to his and associated work for free. https://www.thelongmemory.com/

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an apple a day

2021-10-31T21:21:47Z

Don't think I've posted this here before and I found it one my open tabs, so here you go:

Adam's Apples https://adamapples.blogspot.com/ a blog about apple varieties with lots of information and pictures of different varieties.

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In which I'm dull

2021-10-28T00:29:24Z

The last two months I have been working pretty steadily on the garage. When the weather and light permitted: getting the wall ready, siding, and painting on the prior project. When the weather and light didn't permit: prepping and priming siding. Each board was prepped with blopentine (boiled linseed oil and turpentine) front, back, edges, and ends. Then it was primed with oil based primer, ditto. That's an amazingly labor intensive job. In linear feet I probably did a quarter of a mile of board.

This all started because I had the windows to install on the gable end of the garage. The existing windows on the first floor were in really bad shape and I'd been intending to replace them for years. I decided they shouldn't go another winter. Usually you can pull old windows and replace them with new pretty easily. The trim comes off the inside, the trim comes off the outside, remove the sashes, remove the window frame, slide the new one in. Well, ours don't work that way because the previous windows were installed with the window trim inset into the sheathing and underneath the siding. So removing the window also means removing siding. With siding as old as ours is and as often re-nailed as our is, once you start removing siding it is really not easy to stop.

So to replace two windows I ended up stripping the whole end of the garage down to sheathing, adding new boards where the old window trim set in the sheathing, filling all the nail holes I could find, putting on new moisture barrier, flashing, installing three new windows, and residing the entire wall. All this was done with a bare minimum of ladders: step ladder, short ladder, medium ladder, big ladder which is too heavy to move. Putting siding on the 2nd story and peak from a pair of ladders is not a lot of fun and very time consuming. It was a constant case of always running out of something (painted boards, flashing tape, sealant, primer, turpentine, light) and getting rained on every time we got on a roll.

Along the way, I re-learned things that I hadn't done in 20 years, maybe re-learned things I hadn't done since I was 10, learned that some of the things I did in the past are no longer best practice (and maybe haven't been in my lifetime). If I was to do it over again, (I hope I don't have to do it over again) I would do several things differently, including not starting it in the fall when it's nearly impossible to complete any large project outside. I did end up making a very nifty little jig out of wood scraps which helps hold and end when you're doing 8ft pieces of siding by yourself.

Last weekend we finally got two relatively sunny weekend days and made a big push to get the last of the siding done. When it got dark on Sunday evening I had one piece left to put up on the very peak. It has rained every day since then and I still have one piece to put up at the very peak. We still have to put sealant on large portions, prime a lot of nail heads, and prime the sealant, then do the finish painting. I don't think there is any way that will get done before spring because there just aren't enough warm days left.

So that's why I haven't posted anything for months. I've been monomaniacally dedicated to getting the damn siding done and haven't had any life outside of that.

Having now learned just how much time it takes to prep the boards, I'm going to use the winter to prep boards. I have a room above the garage set up to be able to prep and prime and I will endeavor to get many boards done during the dark and cold months, so that come spring that will not be taking up my time. Because we really need to reside the barn, the rest of the garage, and some year the house. If I could get the barn and a significant chunk of the garage finished next spring, it would feel like a win.

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you can call it caulk if it gives you joy

2021-09-01T01:08:42Z

When I was a kid I never was any good at doing those models where you glue the tiny plastic parts together and paint the little grey pieces. My brother built a lot of models when I was a kid. He would slowly work away at them over the course of weeks, carefully gluing each piece and letting it dry. His models came out looking good.

I on the other hand was complete and total crap at the whole model building thing. I would end up with glue all over everything and would stick almost everything together except for the two pieces which I was intending on bonding. It didn't help that I had zero patience and wouldn't let things sit long enough before I tried to fix the next bits on. For a long time I had a poorly assembled jet with glue haze on its windshield hung from the ceiling of my bedroom.

I think I only left it there to remind myself of my failure and remind me not to waste my money on another model.

Some things don't change. Today it was sunny and warm so after work I was applying sealant to the siding joints on the resided portions of the garage. It is a job I am truly shite at. I end up with sealant everywhere. Apply twice as much as I need and end up taking half off. Fortunately, this is water based stuff so the mess wasn't lasting. The good news is that eventually it will be covered by paint and it'll be very difficult to see the smears. I think if I live to be 90 I still won't be able to build a model or apply a decent bead of sealant.

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a day late and a dollar short

2021-09-01T00:49:57Z

Didn't get this posted yesterday. I was trying to remember what else happened and ended up going to bed. My posts even bore me to sleep.

Last week I managed to get the trim pieces cut and attached for the garage door openings. Didn't really get much else accomplished during the week.

This weekend was mostly cloudy and drippy. It wasn't good weather for finishing up the garage project, so we ended up doing thing in the yard. Derien did get the nail heads on the trim primed and an additional coat of primer on the visible knots before it became obvious further painting or sealing was out.

A lot of time Saturday was spent mowing the lawn, even though there was the occasional raindrop, because it had been two weeks and the lawn really couldn't wait. Derien weeded around our most recent dozen high bush blueberries. We got most of the lingonberry patch weeded. Spread some grass seed on various thin spots in the lawn, not the best time of year for that, but getting it done at any point during the year is good. Finished the day with trying to move a good sized chunk of granite (maybe 300lbs) up an incline to get it from an area we mow to the nearest rock wall. Got it started but ran out of energy before getting it done.

Sunday we finished moving the big rock and the collection of somewhat smaller rocks from the yard to the stone wall. It is a New England tradition moving chunks of granite. I'm sure people have been doing it on this property for nearly 300 years. Funny how we never run out of rocks. Task number two for the day was harvesting peppers, got a lot, didn't finish cleaning off all the plants. Next was cleaning up the portions of the garden which had gone by and gotten overwhelmed by weeds. Finished the day with finishing the lawn and cleaning the chimneys. Came off the roof via climbing down the ladder, which is the desirable way to dismount.

Today I took the check down for the property taxes then came back and made some oversized cages to go around the above mentioned blueberries. The cages are basically the same as the tomato cages I made years ago, but 2ft larger in circumference. The deer can reach through the squares in the reinforcement wire so we will need to wrap these in smaller mesh wire to really protect the plants.

The days are getting shorter. When I get up in the morning it's dark out and if I work outside until 7pm it feels like time to go in. Hard to believe it's almost September already, where did the summer go?

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Tolkien never wrote about repairing the keeps

2021-08-24T00:17:59Z

Replacing rotten boards on the garage turned into an epic. What I thought might take a day or two turned into six days of doing not much else. In the end I got six of the eight boards replaced which I intended to replace. The other two, the left side of the left bay, have to wait until a long weekend. I'll be able to replace them fairly quickly, it'll just take a while to replace all the siding which goes along with them. Fortunately, I have all the siding primed, so a good bit of the time consuming work is done. I still have to finish the last of the trim on the right bay and do the painting. But we have replaced a lot of wood and all the siding up to about seven feet on the middle and right side. Honestly, most of the siding on the garage and the rest of the house is toast. We need to replace it all. I'm going to try to only think about that one section at a time.

Two good bits out of this project:

The contraption I made last fall for drying siding worked out just perfect. I had built the ends (picture combs with teeth on both sides about 6 ft tall) and set aside the ends and cross pieces so it wouldn't take up room until needed. Then last week I just screwed the cross pieces in place, creating something 6ft tall by 5ft long, by 2ft wide, and started loading it with siding. We put the unprimed boards in the teeth on one side, take them off one at a time and prime the front/ends/sides then replace them in their slot. Once they are dry on that side, we move them to the other side of the rack, then repeat the process for priming the back. Working that way, one person can be busy for hours or two people can work at once (one from one side, one from the other). The legs on the bottom will hold a bundle of siding waiting to be done on one side and we can probably stack another bundle or two of completed on the other side of the legs.

Because there was no way to buy a match for one of the pieces of trim at any of the local stores, I also tried my router set up for the first time. I was able to buy the regular (cheap) dimensional lumber and shape it to more or less match the existing pieces. My boards weren't perfect, but I had less router marks in mine than whoever created the old ones.

Not much else got finished during the week off, but that's what happens when you open a big can of worms. I did get the dying lilac cut down and transported to the brush pile. I also managed to bring down a maple limb which was dangling but still partially attached 25 feet off the ground. I always consider it a victory when I get one of those widowmakers down without making any widows.

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The Bad: No one expects the Spanish inquisition

2021-08-16T17:01:43Z

Since I didn't have the wherewithal to make camping reservations early and everyone seems to be taking camping vacations this year, Derien and I got the idea to skip trying to camp on the weekend and head out to find a spot this morning instead. We figured if we could get an early start today, we should be able to find a spot at one of the campgrounds which does first-come, first-serve. Mondays and Tuesday are usually the least popular days at the campgrounds.

We decided to make this a test run for multi-day backpack camping, as opposed to car camping. That meant different meal prep and different stuff to pack (less and in a smaller space).

So yesterday evening we started packing and preparing, starting last minute because we had been trying to get stuff done around the house and yard all day. We started by preparing camping meals from our dried components: five different meals from dried/dehydrated components. That took a while because some of the products had gone from being ground to being rocks in the time since we last any. We have a tomato rock. It reminds me of the old U2 video for Sunday, Bloody Sunday, live at red rocks.

After that we went through the hiking checklist and made sure we found everything to go in our packs. Then got our clothing together and got that into our packs. By the time we were done it was after 10pm and we were exhausted. Still possible to get a fair amount of sleep, get up a little after 5am, have breakfast, and be out in the mountains before 9am.

I was just sitting down to make sure I had directions to our possible campgrounds when my cell phone rang. It was sister #2 letting me know that sister #1 had taken a fall yesterday: cut on head, broken collarbone, admitted to hospital in MA. Tests so far all negative. MRI to be done. Didn't even get off the phone with her and sister #1 called, she sounded pretty good, clear headed, but didn't have any idea why she just dropped as she stood up. She has given the hospital my name and number in the event things go pear shaped.

So yeah, didn't get to sleep until midnight last night, didn't leave for camping this morning. We'll see if things define themselves today. Crisis may mean a trip to MA. Not crisis may provide an abbreviated camping trip. Vacation plans just don't seem to be working for me this year.

I decided to try to make lemonade out of the lemons, so I started working on replacing the rotted boards around the garage doors. That is rapidly turning into a nightmare of epic proportions. To replace eight boards (2 on each side of 2 garage bays) I'm going to have to disassembly most of the side of the garage, destroying maybe 25 other boards in the process. To quote Worf: "I am not a merry man!"

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The Good: Accolades & Unexpected

2021-08-16T16:19:45Z

The software which my team was developing and testing since January went live a couple of weeks ago. The end of the development cycle felt like Kermit trying to keep things together on the muppet show. Go Live was rough for us, with the usual too many deadlines in too short a window, long hours, many details which got missed and had to be accounted for late. The process was rocky for us, but smoothed out quickly (which is a good sign). Most of the problems which came to light we dealt with same day, sometimes within an hour. So although there were a lot of small things, the world wasn't falling apart.

Last week I set up a meeting with the boss to get feedback from outside our little bubble of fixing problems. The short version is, though we felt every rock in the road, our users are happy and really have no complaints. Which, considering our user base, it nothing short of miraculous. My boss was very effusive with gratitude. The CEO wants to have a meeting with my team and walk through some of the features of the system. For an introvert like me that is both scary and gratifying.

On the home front, last week I was finally able to get caught up on the lawn and finish mowing everywhere in one week. It was really only possible because it didn't rain at all in the evenings, so I could work on it an hour every evening after work. I did skip Friday because it was so damn hot and humid. It had been hot and humid all week, but Friday was just too much.

As I was mowing I noticed some more volunteers below the barn. In the spring Derien spread compost from our bins into the holes around the ash tree stumps (we had to take down several old dead/dying trees). We now have delicata squash an tomatoes growing around two of our tree stumps. The one above the barn has some really happy squash, with good size fruit and some green tomatoes on the vine. The one below the barn is more shaded, but there are tomato flowers. I'm quite happy to have volunteer veggies. It looks like we may get more squash from the lawn than we get from the garden this year, which I find quite funny considering how much time and money has gone into the garden.

I got a three day weekend week before last, worked five days last week, and have vacation scheduled this week. I've spent the time so far just trying to get caught up on all the little things I haven't been able to get to over the last few months. It's actually really nice to have a few days off to work around the house and yard. The wood is now all put up for this winter and next. With one more brush burn we should have all the brush from spring cleaned up (we produced a lot this spring and didn't manage to get it cleaned up). Still tons of things to do, but there are always tons of things to do.

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time flies

2021-08-01T18:19:47Z

It has been a crazy month and a half.

Item 1: Family Visits
Derien's family came to visit first. Right after I got back from camping, Derien's brother, his wife, and the niece arrived along with a stray aunt. They left in stages and we had I think three days before the stray aunt came back. The day after she, left one of my sisters arrived in state. She stayed until the day before my other sister arrived with my niece. During the visits various parties got to visit with other local or semi-local relatives and we did some showing of the benefits of Maine as possible.

All the visits were good. My family hadn't gotten together in years and I think Derien and I pulled off a passable job visitor appropriate of hosting. We managed to mostly walk around the minefield of divergent political orientations and lifestyles. Having everyone come at different times was good because we could visit with each group, but it did take up a lot of the summer. And honestly, we haven't had a chance to relax since the solstice.

Somewhere in there we managed to get the garlic harvested and put 3 1/2 cords of wood into the wood shed. Derien's family got to enjoy peapods from the garden and my family got some radishes and garlic from the garden.

Item 2: Work

For three years now my group at work has been trying to find and implement new employee scheduling software. We did vendor selection and started initial meetings with the selected vendor, but it very quickly became apparent that they couldn't meeting our needs. So we went back to vendor selection and the sales team for the second vendor we selected assured us they could do all the things we itemized as required. We were supposed to go live with that solution in January, but last fall it became very obvious that they couldn't do all the things we needed simultaneously (there were solutions which would meet each of our requirements, but they weren't all the same solution). We burned a lot of time trying to make their software work for us.

With no solution from the first two vendors and no likely third vendor, we set about building our own solution. We've been building and testing that solution and all the related interfaces to users and other systems for the last six months. We went live with that system last Tuesday evening, almost precisely 24 hours after the last of our visitors left (see item 1 above). Last week was of course crazy. The preparation for implementation was rushed because I had time off from work the prior and the tasks I expected would be done in my absence were not done. The implementation was rough from my perspective, although it sounds like the impression to the employees and leaders was still good. It was long days all week.

After all of that I was totally and completely knackered.

Yesterday we had our first real day off in ages. So we spent it doing housework. Laundry, check. Splitting and stacking wood, check. Mowing some of the lawn, check. Brush burn, check.

Unfortunately, this morning I woke up to the knob on my right wrist being swollen, sore, and limited wrist mobility/strength. Not sure what I did to it. It might have been when I was pulling things during the brush burn. Or I might have hit it without realizing it. Either way, it's a pain in the arm. Unfortunately, it's the opposite arm as the frozen shoulder, so I have one arm that doesn't work at the shoulder and another that doesn't work at which doesn't work at the wrist. I need more arms.

Today, I want to finish mowing the lawn, if at all possible. It has been months since we've managed to get it all done. Portions are long enough to bale.

I want to get two more cords of wood (seasoned this time) to supplement the wood up put up last fall and ensure we don't run out this winter. Then the wood for this winter and next winter will be done.

If this is scattered, it's because I'm scattered. I probably need a week of sleep before I'll be completely coherent again.

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it is beautiful out there in Maine

2021-06-18T22:49:20Z

Made the annual trip to Baxter this year. Due to health issues, Derien couldn't go along.

( Long post about camping )

Being out has reminded me of just how much I miss getting out into the woods and camping.

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exhaustion it's what I do

2021-05-10T19:18:32Z

Fell asleep before posting this last night, so a little delayed:

This has been a busy and exhausting weekend. Pretty much all of it can be summed up as yard work. The big accomplishments were getting the lawn almost all mowed and getting about 400sq ft cleared of invasive species. That bit was the largest chunk remaining in which we still had rose, Japanese barberry, and honeysuckle. It was mostly barberry, so I was pretty well perforated by very tiny thorns.

I also got my new sit stand desk assembled. Working from home I spend way too much time sitting in front of the computer. I decided to get the desk and try it out before deciding on things like keyboard tray and monitor mounts. It's an Uplift commercial model, which is not cheap! I got the 24x48 because I want a narrow desk. So far I'm impressed. The raise/lower is quick and quiet. Because I don't have everything set up yet, my monitor is on it's cheesy little feet standing on the surface. It doesn't wobble going up and down. Nor do I have to worry about a partially filled glass of water. I am a hard typer, which on flimsy setups will create resonance and monitor bounce. So far I'm not seeing any of that. If I intentionally hit the front of the desk I can see some vibration, but typing seems to be rock solid. So, overall, so far so good.

I do plan to get a pole to mount the monitor. That will allow me to bring it up into a little more ergo appropriate position (right now I'm looking down too far). I'm also planning to add a keyboard/mouse tray, so they won't take up much of the desk real estate.

What I will miss is having the small drawers which the repurposed Singer sewing machine cabinet provides (three, two usable in my config, on each side). I will probably work on pimping out my new ride a bit, maybe fuzzy dice and shag carpet.

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