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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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?