Which way up: the result.

So the votes on how my cabinet should be finished are in, with a clear majority in favour of having the open box on top, then the drawers in the middle, and the cupboard at the bottom. One of the people who voted for this was Beautiful Wife and that amounted to a presidential veto on the other two. The motion was carried and the cabinet finished. It is now in use as bedside table.

I took a photo quickly before I had time to make a mess around it.

You were right. It does look better this way. Not least because those sixty-eight dovetails which I painstakingly sawed and chiselled out by hand are the first thing you see, instead of the white-painted box made of MDF which I was planning on using. I’m not sure what I was thinking there, but fortunately you managed to stop me in time.

We invited all the employers and families to a grand presentation with food and drinks and everything. The quality of work made me feel pretty proud to be part of this group. Notice some people were allowed to put their units in all kinds of combinations. I’m glad I didn’t have that option as I think my head would have exploded.

Beautiful Wife told me she couldn’t make it to the presentation for work reasons, but was in fact conspiring with other students to turn up and surprise me. The boys were very quick to find the demonstration stands where they could do interesting things like use a hammer and chisel to make holes in wood. Watching them I was really impressed how they took on the different activities, and how my fellow students spent ages patiently showing them how to hold the tools and use them properly.

Of course, the year isn’t over yet. Next week is a major step towards it though with week one of the machine course, which gives us a sort of driving licence to use some very expensive, complex, fast, and dangerous machinery, with particular emphasis on not trying to push sections of wood past the spinning sharp bits with your thumb.

Which way up? (poll)

On the cabinet I’m making, the three elements can be stacked however I want, so naturally I can’t decide. Originally I thought I’d stack them in the way the demonstration model was built, (top to bottom: drawers, door, open box) but part of me thinks the white box is far too overpowering on top.

So I tried moving the white box to the middle which I think may be more balanced. (cupboard, drawers, open) It also means I can hide the screws holding the three boxes to each other.

But when I got home Beautiful wife suggested that the Open box would be better on top with the drawers in the middle and cupboard on the bottom, and would also show the dovetail joins and pear wood in the open box instead of veneer and white paint. I tried flipping the picture but it looked awful so you’ll have to imagine how it looks with the open, drawers, cupboard combo.

I’m taking votes until tomorrow:

In a reflection of current standards of democracy, the winning suggestion may or may not be the one that is used…

Mummy meets Droid

So a few weeks ago I mentioned I’d pulled my bicep muscles and I was now wandering around with mummified elbows. I’ve since been to a specialist who looked at my elbows and said it could well be a pulled bicep, x-rayed the elbow, winced when I said I was a carpenter and gave some less than reassuring career advice (“You should be able to finish the apprenticeship, hopefully, but then try to specialise in something that doesn’t involve lifting”), then sent me to have an MRI scan* (MRT scan in German) of my shoulder. Fortunately the receptionist spotted that one before things got complicated.

Having been scanned thoroughly with big magnets I had a week to wonder if I’d have to stop the apprenticeship before I’d really got started (and any thoughts of paramedic training would also go: can’t do that with duff arms). In my usual cheery optimistic way I started imagining various scenarios of being booted out for not being up to the job, and having to look for another apprenticeship.

This made me ever so slightly nervous by Friday.

In the consulting room. Enter Doctor.

Had a look at your MRI scan. The damage isn’t on the Bicep but another muscle. Common problem, a nerve which has a long Latin name and hurts inside of elbow when you lift things, making it feel like a damaged bicep.
Fair enough Doc. Can I keep doing my apprenticeship?
Don’t see why not. You’ll get some pressure armbands and you’ll need to keep wearing them all day every day until I tell you to stop. They’ll take the pressure off your muscles so it won’t hurt or make it worse, and they’ll help the healing process. Just don’t lift anything too heavy. It will fix itself in time, but the more heavy stuff you lift the longer it will take. Off you go to get your armbands, see you in a month and remember not to lift heavy stuff. See me in a month.

Armbands on, instant improvement. Much relief. Look like I’m part Droid but I can keep doing the apprenticeship. Emailed boss that I’ll be in work, but don’t ask me to lift fire doors.

Of course, that means I’m now stressed out with exams each week for the next month, but I’m not complaining.

*This was painless apart from having to listen to a truly awful radio station on the headphones.

Cabin fever

How the weather isn’t.

I should have been at the garden today. The beds need weeding again, and I’ve not had a chance to unleash the newly sharpened scythe on the brambles (although a trial swing in the veggie beds went through several varieties of weed and the side of a compost bin), the seedings are finally growing to a point they can be planted out and there are more steps to be dug than I want to think about, and I’m sitting in here with the rain beating on the skylight behind me like a British boarding house on a bank holiday weekend.

Usually the spring rain falls so hard the runoff on the roof pours so fast it misses the guttering altogether and pours straight on the garden below, then clears up by the time you’ve finished your bike ride*. This weekend we’ve had constant rain: heavy, light, and by way of variation this afternoon, angled.  There’s no point going to the garden in this weather as the shed leaks and the clay soil will glue to the spade leaving it useful only as a club to beat the weeds with. I know I keep going on about this, but I really need some reliable, comfortable shelter in the garden. I’m working on that, admittedly painfully slowly, but hopefully I’ll soon have some progress soon.

I’ve spent most of the day helping Eldest Son with a history of Hamburg, and sketching woodwork projects. I’ve discovered that dovetails are part of the test in a few weeks and my final project in 2015, so I really need to get some practice, which means ordering some wood at work, which means working out what I need.

I’ve also been wondering -in that melancholy way you do when the rain is hitting the window- about what to write about next: I can’t go cycling or gardening and a sane person can only take so much information about woodwork. I’ve lived here and this way so long I don’t really know what is interesting to someone looking in through these web pages.

Please give suggestions below. Or expect more entries about the weather.

*Usually about five minutes before you get back…

Just in case…

…the world isn’t going to be saved by technology, I kept working on a couple more low-tech projects this week.

For some strange reason we  hardly used the balcony for growing anything last year, which meant we had to go across the village every time we wanted a lettuce. Towards the end of the season someone I met on a permaculture course sent me a link to a pallet garden and I decided this was the answer to our narrow balcony. I scrounged a pallet from some people doing a house renovation, painted it liberally with wood preserver, and put this together.

The cardboard is to hold the soil back: the original plan says you should plant the pallet lying on the ground and then lift it up when the plants had grown a bit but I didn’t have space or patience for this. I’ll cut holes in the cardboard and push seedlings in as I go along.

The tomato plants were not part of the original plan, but you can never have too many tomatoes.

We turned the water on again, mildly surprised that none of the pipes had frozen in the meantime.

And while weeding the veg beds I found this mystery tree which I’m embarrassed to say I can’t identify. Does anyone know what it is?

Big Government.

Our state government has decided it wants to investigate sustainability and tell us all about how to have a small carbon footprint.

The best way to do this is with a big truck, so we can see they are really, really serious about sustainability. As long as it doesn’t mean changing anything.

Remember: Infinite growth is possible with finite resources. We will discover a cheap recoverable energy source to replace oil. Technology will save us.

Almost entirely about wood

Above are two of our project boxes being oiled. The one at the back is mine, the one in front belongs to another student.

We were supposed to allow the oil to soak into the wood for fifteen minutes, then wipe off what was left, leave the boxes to dry overnight and then sand them lightly and repeat. Simple enough. Unfortunately someone who will remain nameless misunderstood the instructions and applied two coats of oil on one day, which I now know is courting disaster and shame, or at least a slightly blotchy finish.

After an hour of sanding down the surface, and ruining about seven sanding discs, I started again, fretting all the time about the mess I’d made.

It seemed to work out. Below all the boxes are drying after their second coat of oil. Because I’m such a special person, mine has a trolley to itself on the left end.

Are you becoming subversive?

Cycling by itself is all very well, but it leads to other things, like permaculture courses and interest in alternative lifestyles and before you know it you’re seriously working out how to go off grid and build a house out of tree bark, so in case anyone out there is wondering, here are a few pointers that may indicate you are going down the same slippery slope…

You don’t know the names or personal lives of anyone who became famous since 1995.
When you go to the garage you fall over 3 buckets, a bike pump, and a breeding colony of pickle jars.
You sit in the doctor’s waiting room reading instructions on how to make compost toilets.
Social events are annoying impositions on gardening/bike repairing/chicken house building time.
You don’t see adverts.
You are genuinely startled how well roads connect into a network.
You’ve arrived early at meetings so many times you no longer remember to look smug.
Your mother has to explain what an ‘i-Pad’ and a ‘Kindle’ is*.
You haven’t been to a ‘high street’ store in months.
You don’t know why people are looking at your bike. (Thanks to Karl Mckracken for that one)
You don’t know the difference between a Porsche and a VW.
You go out for the evening wearing work boots. Again.
Your dream house is a yurt.
You don’t even know where the nearest Mc******s is.
The last time you went on Eb*y, you bought seed pots, a hammer and some chicken wire.
A ‘Good weekend’ means going to the garden and making a significant dent in the jobs list.

If you recognise any of these, then you could be on the way to becoming a subversive. I’m sure someone somewhere has a way to help people like me to get back into the mainstream, stop thinking and obsess about the lives of people far wealthier than I am. I’m having too much fun to find out though.

*She did.

Elbow room.

The sun is shining, the rain has stopped, the steep part of the garden is no longer a mudslide, and the seedlings are growing. In fact the only blot on the joyful horizon is that I’ve pulled my biceps on both arms. This is probably the result of suddenly going from a job sitting and typing to a job which involves lugging large amounts of timber about the place. I’m now written off sick for three weeks while they sort themselves out again. My elbows have been mummified in pressure bandages and I’m taking some pretty hardcore anti-inflammatory drugs. I’m now banned from the garden except for light stuff like seed trays and painting. Doing things like unloading trailers full of roofing tiles and building materials is out of the question.

Ahem.

Wash day.

Here’s some of the family transport out in the sun being washed for spring. I really should have done this a lot earlier: not only was there the remains of rust from road salt, but some bikes had autumn leaves stuck in the mudguards.

Cleaning bikes, of course, is a pretty sure-fire way of making sure it will rain for the next day or so. While I was washing the bikes the weather went from bright sunshine to heavy rain in the space of an hour and it carried on all night, so all the jobs I had lined up for the weekend in the Very Smallholding, like finish digging over the awkward veggie bed, get the scythe sharpened and cut the Almost Hayfield while I still could see over the top of the grass, and prepare some kind of space ready to stack the wood from the monster tree when I finally get someone to cut it, etc, probably aren’t going to happen.

This is frustrating, specially as I was already getting behind with everything. So much for this being a way to drop out of the rat race and relax.

On the other hand, I can still plant a fair number of seeds in my home-made starter pots, and the boys are all growing things in containers on the balcony, so we can make a start on that as well.

Having cleaned the Xtracycle I finally got around to replacing the brake blocks. The last ones are were cheap no-name parts and made a noise like fingernails being pulled down a blackboard whenever I used them. They were also nearly through to the metal. This time I got slightly more expensive versions in the hope they last a bit longer: the blurb claimed they are made of all kinds of high-tech compounds so they work better over time instead of squeaking.

They have orange bits and mysterious letters on the side which will of course improve their performance dramatically.