Matt and I did finish the fire pit last weekend. Arlene and I went back to Gagne’s, the stone yard, first thing in the morning and got another bag of mortar (which we ended up not using), six more fire bricks, and another bag of concrete mix. Matt sent Anne back to the hardware store …
Author Archives: deanb
Closing in on a sweater
I’m up to 14 pattern repeats on one sleeve and 15 1/4 on the other. 17 will be plenty, 16 1/2 will probably be enough, and maybe 16 will do; so it could be done by the end of the weekend. I had been hoping to get it done around the first of November, and …
Klez update
Tuesday night klezmer band picked up again, after not meeting three of the four previous Tuesdays because of Jewish holidays. We have a new woman in the band, I think her name is Barbara, playing saxophone. The first time she showed up she had an alto sax. The time before this she had a bigger …
Masonry work
Just when you thought your bandwidth was safe, here comes another graphics-heavy post. What did a software guy do with his weekend? Build stuff out of rocks. Working with your hands and any solid matter is a good change from sitting in front of a computer and thinking for a work week. I’ve done a …
Ironman
We started out Saturday with a trip up to IronMan Welding in Bridgton. The kid from the stone yard suggested last weekend that IronMan was the person to talk to about making a grate for the firepit once we had it done. We’re not ready for that yet, but we do need to build something …
Firepit update
Last weekend Arlene and I went to the stone yard (is that what you call it, the way some businesses are lumber yards?) and ordered materials for the fire pit, one pallet of stone, 40 fire bricks, and three bags of mortar. Also a pointing trowel (for getting the mortar into little spaces between stones) …
Applesauce
The score for tonight is six half-pints of apple butter and six pints of applesauce. Arlene says if we do one more batch this week we’ll be caught up with the apples we brought to Newton. The apple butter was started last night, cooked overnight and much of the day in the crock pot, and …
Back up a week
The weekend of Oct 4 we pressed some cider, poured some concrete, and made a bird feeder. On Saturday morning we went to a big flea market at Stonehedge, an outdoor music venue between Gray and Windham. Arlene had seen an ad in a local paper a couple of weeks before. We had been expecting …
Common Ground Fair
One of the big annual events in Maine is the Common Ground Country Fair. It’s not so splashy as the Fryeburg Fair, and doesn’t have the harness racing or the midway, but people do seem to know about it. It’s run by MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. You would be correct if …
No more Fabric Place
Arlene and I both noticed a story in the Boston Globe about Fabric Place going out of business. Fabric Place is out in Framingham, about 25 minutes from our house. It’s (or should I say was, but it’s just barely still there) by far the biggest fabric store in the Boston area. It used to …