Making the gear closet doors – There have been a few upgrades in the workshop. Black Friday Grizzly had a drill press and bandsaw on sale at a price I couldn’t refuse. The pair cost less than the bandsaw normally retails at. The bandsaw came in particularly useful for all the joints I had to make for the gear closet doors. One-minute read, +1
Gary in the workshop – Hindsight being the gem that it is, I now know it was a huge mistake to make the doors and not get them ‘off the shelf.’ +3
Distractions – A couple of weeks before Christmas the dryer broke down. We were just about to have the utility room, painted, so Ginger decided that she’d pop out and buy a new dryer and washer for the freshly painted room. And that’s when the work began. Two-minute read, +1
Essential Supplies – What the Brit abroad needs.
Fronds and bottles – Testing my new cell phone’s camera in the dark. +3
Gear Closet update – Still plenty left to do. Bottom shelf and kick space, shelf fronts, and … doors to make.
The soft light on a dull rainy day on these flowers Ginger picked and placed on the kitchen table caught my eye, and prompted a discovery. 2
Waiting for watching – it’s a dull rainy day, and I liked the light.
Early morning clouds – Too much work equals awake at 4 a.m. and up and working at 5 a.m. Ginger dragged me away from my work to take a look at the play of daylight on the clouds while the street below was still wrapped in darkness.
Hall Gear Closet – taped and first skim coat applied. Ginger, “Most people just buy furniture, they don’t build things in.” Gary, “It must be the Frank Lloyd Wright in me.” +1
Monitored. Today I had a stress echocardiogram and was fitted with a wireless Holter monitor.
Hall Gear Closet – Framing. New project. We have two-and-a-half closets in the house full of backpacking gear (and some overflow in the shed too). Doing something about it is long overdue. I decided to use the space that used to be occupied by the piano and convert it into a gear closet. Today I started framing the new built-in closet. +3
This would have been a great weekend to get away into the woods. The temperatures are in the low eighties, and the rain has cleared out for a while. Instead, I decided to do some chores at home. One-minute read, +1
Gary: “I’ve worked nine of the last ten days. I’m taking the afternoon off.”
Garbage Disposal Unit: “Today is a good day to spring a leak.”
Feeding the obsession – It’s not really an obsession, more of a passion. I like leather journals. I enjoyed my new Field Notes sized journal so much I decided to buy another one. +2
Trail journal – don’t knock my writing. It’s not easy to write neat notes while you are hiking. Note the tiny mechanical pencil I bought just for hiking. I included a normal-sized one in the picture for comparison.
Photographs, inks, cell phone, and Buck 110 knife on my monitor stand – and no I didn’t arrange them for the picture. Me, OCD much?
Weekend cleaning – To paraphrase the immortal line from ‘Apocalypse Now,’ I love the smell of gun oil in the morning. Many years of backpacking have certainly taken their toll on the finish of my Beretta.
Unused pencil and old plans – While the pencil remains unused, the plans at least have been implemented with the completion of the storage area in the garage in 2019. +2
How many journals do you need? I’d say three binders holding a total of seven notebooks. That’s what you can see here, and each has a purpose. 4 3
Behind the lens – I thought I’d grab a quick selfie in the bedroom mirror.
Breakfast; crispy bacon, eggs, and tomato – Yesterday, Carol gave me two farm-fresh eggs. She said she wished she could be there to see my face when I cracked them.
– Ginger made this luminous plant sculpture several years ago. It’s recently appeared more prominently in the bedroom following a tidy-up
Ginger – Breakfast at Denny’s.