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Wednesday, April 14th, 2004
I have not blogged about woodworking for a long time because, well, I have not been doing any of it. But I am hoping to change that. A couple of nights this week I was in the basement, working on Ellen's bookcase -- she has given me a deadline of September to finish it or she buys one, and I believe I can do it. Also I got the garage cleaned out and have made some stabs towards planning the workbenches I want to build in there. In other home improvement news, Ellen is repainting the sitting room and boy, does it look good! (This is the room where I built in my windowseat, and it has looked funny unpainted ever since.) The color scheme is: sage green walls, bone white trim and doors and ceiling. There is a lot of trim in the room, doing it all took nearly two weeks (of quite intermittent painting). The walls and ceiling are going a lot faster. When she finishes I will put the final bit of molding on the windowseat (a cove between the top of the seat and the wall behind it) and put shades on the windows, and the room will get more use than it had in the past -- our plan is to have that be our general room for congregating in the evenings, instead of our bedroom.
posted evening of April 14th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, March 25th, 2004
What fun! this evening Sylvia and I planted some forsythias, she with her trowel and I with my spade. When I came home I asked if she would like to help me do it and she quickly said, "No." Then a few more "no"s while I was putting on jeans and work shoes and walking downstairs, followed by a sudden "I want to help!" as I opened the door. So we went outside (very warm today, I think in the 60's) and dug up some holes, and filled them with plants and soil. This weekend I will be acquiring my next big power tool; it is a 6" jointer, which I am buying from Matt Prusik (a former president of CJWA). The weekend is busy -- on Saturday morning we are going to the nursery to get bushes and trees, and in the afternoon getting a start on cleaning the garage; on Sunday morning I will drive down to South Amboy where Matt lives and back, and in the afternoon I'll be trying to set it up. The jointer may not be usable immediately as I think the power supply to the garage might be too small and need rewiring.
posted evening of March 25th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, March 21st, 2004
Today the garden started erupting. The crocuses have been up for a week or so -- some of them were crushed a bit by the snowstorm but others are in good shape. We did not really plant enough crocus bulbs for them to make a real impression of bloom. Tulip and daffodil greenery has been visible through the snow for a few days and after the rain yesterday that is the dominant thing in the garden. But many other bits of greenery are visible! We spent this morning doing yard work -- raked up remaining leaves from the fall -- aerated the lawn and put some new seed on it and some fertilizer -- turned the compost which I have not touched since the fall, there is some stuff in there we will be able to use immediately. The idea was to start cleaning the garage out, which I want to convert to a work space (from a storage space), but that did not happen. (The plan for the garage is to put a long table against both side walls, and to put a door in the yard side. And possibly to insulate and sheet rock the walls.)
posted evening of March 21st, 2004: Respond
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Friday, March 12th, 2004
Yesterday one of my batch processes stopped working. I was a little baffled. The batch downloads some files from an ftp site, then expands them using pkunzip, then sends them to a program for processing. Pkunzip was telling me that I needed version 4.5 or later to expand the files -- never a problem in the past. I thought maybe the vendor had changed zip formats, which struck me as pretty bizarre. Everywhere on the web that I could find pkunzip, it was the same version as the one I was using (2.03g). And then I thought to try opening the files in WinZip. That worked of course; and I was very happy to discover that a command-line add-in is now available, along with a new version of WinZip. So... problem solved! (And into the bargain, wzunzip is way faster than the pkunzip I was using.) But what was the problem? It hit me when I was reading the "What's New" page in the WinZip 9.0 help file: In addition to supporting the original Zip file format, WinZip 9.0 also supports the 64-bit extensions to the Zip file format. The extended format lets you store all the data you need in Zip files of virtually unlimited size. The original Zip file format limited the number of member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes, the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions. Using the extended format, the member file size, Zip file size, and number of member files you can add to a Zip file are limited only by your system's resources. So I checked and yep, the file size of the download is now a hair over 4G!
posted afternoon of March 12th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, February 15th, 2004
You'd think it would be straightforward enough; but: When moving a ladder, make sure no hammers are balanced on the top rung. And, Corollary #1Don't balance hammers on top rungs of ladders.
posted morning of February 15th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, February first, 2004
Here is another candlestick, that I turned last weekend -- the walnut that caused me a lot of respiratory distress:
posted morning of February first, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, January 29th, 2004
So here is the plan for the next few weeks, reading- and woodworkingwise: On the train to and from work, I am going to be reading After the New Economy by Doug Henwood until I finish it, then Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, which I bought today for Ellen -- I believe she will be finished with it by the time I want it. Come home in the evening, play with Sylvia, have dinner, recreate, put Sylvia to bed. Then I will go downstairs and work on a dust collection harness for my lathe -- or when that is finished, on Ellen's bookcase or turning projects. Then come back up and read Don Quixote for an hour or so before bed. This makes it difficult to figure when I will post my reactions to DQ but I will try and make some room for that as well.
posted evening of January 29th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, January 26th, 2004
My query on the turning forum has generated quite a lot of advice regarding how to control sawdust when using a lathe. I have ordered a Dustfoe 88 dust mask, and a dust collection hood to attach to the lathe. Neither is the very ideal thing, but both are within my budget and can be upgraded at some later date.
posted afternoon of January 26th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2004
Follow-on to the candlesticks pictures: This evening I turned another candlestick and it is way better than any of those. More interesting shape, better technique, and an actual finish! (By "better technique", I mean essentially that the surface of the turning is smooth almost everywhere, and that the cup for the candle is the right shape, tapering instead of straight.) The finish is shellac, which I mixed myself from Lee Valley's shellac flakes. I made sort of half-hearted efforts toward polishing it, that did not really work, but it is quite lovely anyway. I will post a picture of it when the roll is developed.
posted evening of January 24th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2004
Some new woodworking graphics in the photo album: Some candlesticks and The lathe I used to turn them.
posted evening of January 22nd, 2004: Respond
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