Nice spring weather this week. We enjoyed it by taking walks in the woods.
I was mostly recovered from strep by Wednesday, which was good because Amanda was in Austin for work from Wednesday morning to Friday night.
Charlie and I spent Wednesday and Thursday evenings at playgrounds, then on Friday we went to Home Depot and got some soil and planted potatoes.
Charlie has been refusing all medication, even if he feels super sick and really needs it. We have to dupe him by mixing liquid medications into either yogurt or gatorade. Thankfully he hasn’t caught on yet. I hope by the time he does he can be reasoned with a bit more.
Which books still pop into your head at least once a month, even if you read them years ago?
For me:
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
The Founding Fish by John McPhee
These might not be my all-time top picks, but I can’t get them out of my head.
We went to dinner on Friday with one of our high school teachers, Chas Deremer, and his family. It was nice to catch up, and now that we are adults with a child of our own, we have much more in common with him and his wife than high school Chuck and Amanda could have realized.
We spent most of Saturday and Sunday building some stuff for Charlie in the backyard: A mud kitchen and a sandbox. Not ready to share photos yet, but everything is coming along nicely. We’ll finish the sandbox on Monday or Tuesday and put the finishing touches on the mud kitchen next weekend.
I made a circle cutting jig for the bandsaw to cut nice circles. Burners for the mud kitchen stove.
Charlie is showing some interest in baseball, so I decided to turn a small bat for him. Started tball bats are roughly 24″ long, 13-16oz, and 1.9″ in diameter. I turned down a piece of 4×4 pine to roughly 2″, which I need to finish shaping one night this week. I know bats are usually made from ash, but I don’t think I’d get down to 13oz with a hardwood, and he’ll start using softer baseballs anyway. I’ll make a bigger one out of ash in a few years.
More on the carbonation front: I carbonated a 1944 recipe mai tai. Very good, though didn’t hold the carbonation when I added ice. Some ways to try and remedy that:
Triple carbonation over the course of 2-3 hours.
Get the drink as cold as possible before each carbonation. Aim for 20F.
Clarifying the drink? Not really worth the hassle, IMO.
Grilling more again is nice! I got my first sunburn of the year today.
I’m writing this while recovering from strep, which I also got last year. Probably the same source (Charlie via daycare.) Hopefully the antibiotics kick it quickly. I’ve avoided the worst of it by catching it early. Both Charlie and I had two days of being properly sick, then back on the upswing.
It put a damper on my weekend plans. Was hoping to get some yard work done and drill the bench dog holes in my workbench. I did get some reading done, though. Still reading Children of Time.
Before my energy totally crashed on Saturday and I had to admit to myself that I was sick, I cleaned up an old Craftsman scroll saw, lubricated the arm, replaced the blade, figured out the tensioning, and got it running. It will be nice to use that to make tighter turns than I can make on the bandsaw.
Would a whole grilled duck be good? 🤔 Perhaps spatchcocked like a chicken.
I should listen to more Titus Andronicus.
Further carbonation adventures:
I overcarbonated some imperial cider I brewed. Every drink let off way too much carbonation and it foamed too much in the mouth. Next time I’ll try less. I did ~50PSI and about a minute of shaking. Next time ~35PSI and 30-45s of shaking.
I carbonated a standard negroni to share with the folks at Benny’s Brown Bag. It came out quite nice. Also ~50PSI, and two rounds of carbonating since I decanted it into a glass swing top bottle for sharing.
A wooden tball bat for Charlie. After some research, I think it should be ~24″ long and 13oz. Still trying to decide which wood to use.
FreedomBox server updates:
I installed Kiwix and downloaded the entirety of Project Gutenberg (~80GB) to add. It worked great, but now the server crashes around midnight each night, which is when updates and backups run, so I’m trying to exclude Kiwix from the backups to see if that solves it.
I have email running on the box now! It took a while to get the correct ports forwarding and DNS records set up, but it works! Got my first DMARC report the next morning.
House project updates:
Fence contractor is secured, materials ordered, proposal signed. I couldn’t find two critical pins with my metal detector and survey, so a surveyor is coming out to stake the lot lines.
Sump pump installation proposal signed, too. Should happen within the next month, which should help with the basement flooding.
Things are moving forward.
I made some Matzo Ball Soup on Sunday for the first time. Fitting, because it was cold, it is Passover, and I wasn’t feeling well. It was good, though I think I still prefer chicken noodle soup.
We were able to spend some lunches and pre-dinners on the porch. Amanda took a moment to press some of the violets in our yard. Charlie enjoyed looking up at the sky.
I didn’t take many photos this week. The sickness and rain really put a damper on things. But two more photos for fun: Charlie and Amanda explored the football field and track while I was sick. And before I was sick Charlie and I were silly at the dinner table.
I didn’t write last week because I was out of town. Here is a recap of the last two weeks.
As I wrote about in the last post, my Mom was here to visit and watch Charlie since he had the week off (daycare closed for spring break) and we still had to work. It was a rainy week, but Charlie and Grandma made the most of it.
That Saturday we drove to Ohio to take Grandma home and to witness the eclipse in the totality path. Charlie had a blast playing at my parents’ house. The eclipse was incredible, well worth the trip. It didn’t get as dark as I expected, it was more like twilight. Something I’m probably (hopefully!) going to remember for the rest of my life. It was nice to get some family time, too.
The day after the eclipse we took a drive down to Holmes County (Amish country) to visit Colonial Homestead, a hand tool store owned and operated by Dan Raber. They have probably the best collection of traditional hand tools in the midwest, if not all of the United States. Dan is knowledgable, helpful, and friendly. I bought some holdfasts made by a local blacksmith, a Millers Falls low angle block plane, a large gouge, and The Guide to Woodworking with Kids by Doug Stowe.
Dan said he works with local schools to assemble sets of hand tools and kid-sized benches for their sloyd classes. They start in 2nd grade! Inspiring.
Dan had copies of Emmet van Driesche‘s Greenwood Spoon Carving and had read Emmet’s other book, Carving out a Living on the Land. Emmet is a friend of mine, so it was cool to see his book there.
I’m intrigued by these axes and this is a reminder to myself that I need to look them up in Eric Sloane’s A Museum of Early American Tools. I also liked these smaller benches with removable legs and plan to build one with a 3″ thick oak board. Perhaps with two sets of legs, one longer and one shorter.
It was plowing time in Amish country. So many teams of horses out plowing the fields. Cool to see. It was also a beautiful warm day, and every Amish schoolhouse we drove by (we took the back roads) had the yards filled with children enjoying the sun. Lots of baseball games happening, too.
I took the opportunity while we were at my parents’ house to back up my pre-2008 digital photo library. Everything post-2008 was already backed up on a drive I have in NY, but I was missing pre-2008. Glad I got it before that computer crashed (one of the original Intel-based iMacs). I also found my old OPML of circa-2007 blog feed subscriptions.
We drove back home on Wednesday. I’m thankful that Charlie is a pretty good traveler. Most of the credit for that goes to Amanda, who sits with him in the back set on longer trips to keep him company.
Hectic catch up days at work on Thursday and Friday, then a birthday party for one of Charlie’s friends on Friday evening. Afterward we got dinner with some friends and kept the kids out later than we should have, but they had a good time.
Signs of spring in the yard:
Not pictured: The peonies, rhubarb, and lilac producing buds!
This week a friend sent me a photo of a swing set he just built for his kids from my plans. There are now 5 of these in existence in 4 US states. It makes me so happy to know there are lots of kids enjoying them.
Later I put a new gauge and washers on a CO2 regulator and tried my hand at carbonating various liquids: Water, grapefruit juice, and margaritas. While we were in Ohio I mentioned off-hand to my Dad that I was thinking about getting a CO2 tank to force carbonate things (you can only do water in a SodaStream… anything else ends up in a huge mess, which I know from firsthand experience), and it turns out he had a 5lb tank in the garage that someone he knew was getting rid of, and it just needed a new gauge for the regulator. Thanks, Dad!
I’m still getting the hang of how to carbonate different liquids and what PSI works best for water vs juice vs cocktails, but I’m excited to sip fizzy cocktails on the porch this summer, and maybe even fizzy cold brew coffee.
It took me two tries to get the water carbonated how we like it (halfway between regular seltzer and Hal’s). The grapefruit juice was fun because it had a softer, almost velvety mouthfeel. Smaller carbonation bubbles compared to water. The test margarita was tasty, though I prefer it without ice, as pouring it over ice immediately released the carbonation. Perhaps I need to slowly add the ice after pouring? We’ll see.
Sunday Charlie slept in much later than usual, then woke up sick. He had a fever most of the day and just wanted to snuggle with one of us on the couch for most of the day. I took the morning shift while Amanda went horseback riding, then after lunch I worked outside for a while. I repurposed (planed and cut) old lumber to make a mud kitchen for Charlie, which we’ll assemble next weekend. Then I made three new french cleat holders: First aid kit + paper towel holder, squares holder, and jig saw holder.
By the time I was wrapping up, I was more tired than usual and started to get a headache. Amanda felt the same way, so we are probably getting whatever Charlie has. Yikes. I decided to muster the rest of my energy and go to the grocery store to stock up in case we all wake up with fevers tomorrow. Let’s hope we don’t.
