Rolling On One

We went out early last Saturday to get some lumber. I’ve been wanting to make benches to put around the fire pit. Not fine furniture, something to sit on. Matt had piled some stones up to make seating, so we have a start; but I was still thinking wood seating.

I enjoy getting out to the Red Mill. It’s off route 302, out of sight of the highway (though there is a sign on the highway, if you have a rough idea of where to look), down its own road. It makes the lumber department at Home Depot, or even a good suburban lumber yard like National Lumber in Newton, look like Disneyland. The Red Mill looks like where the wood comes from. I have the impression that the sheds are built far apart so that if one catches fire there’s a good chance the other sheds can be saved.

I told the guy in the office that I wanted some rough-cut lumber to make outdoor benches, and he said, “How about 1 x 8 hemlock?” OK, that would do. We went over to that shed by the black pickup in the picture and found two sixteen-footers, which he cut into 8 footers with a cordless circular saw. The owner of that black pickup, who was loading his purchases, said, “Making benches out of that stuff reminds me of playing on a seesaw one time when I was a kid. When I got home my mom saw that I had a problem — my butt was full of splinters from sliding back and forth on a board like that. Make sure you sand it really well before people sit on it!”

Here’s one of the benches at the end of the weekend. It’s still three separate pieces; the legs are all done, but the top is just nailed in a few places to hold the braces to the top, and the legs aren’t fastened to the top. I still have to do all that sanding!

When you buy a 1 x 8 board at a lumber yard, you expect it to be three quarters of an inch thick and something like seven and a half inches wide. The difference between the nominal 1 x 8 and the real dimensions are because of planing it smooth. The rough cut board is really an inch thick and really eight inches wide. I wanted the bench more like a foot wide, so I ripped some of the pieces to four inches wide. The braces are holding the eight inch part to the four inch part. I  had to learn a little about what was keeping the table saw blade from tilting before I could cut the legs and leg braces to the angle I wanted.

On the way home from the Red Mill we stopped off at a second-hand store on the other side of 302. I remembered having seen a clarinet there the other time we were there. It was still there, and the guy said he wanted $45 for it. I had no way of knowing if it was in playable condition, but I sprung for it — and he took $5 off the price because we were also getting a side table / bookcase for $20, and a Poland Springs gin (!) bottle for $5. So now I can learn to play the clarinet.

I made the collar somewhat bigger than it really wanted to be, I think. Here it is:

In contrast to the fair isle one I did last year, the sleeves are plenty big. The tops of the sleeves are more than roomy, I’ll say baggy. But I’m happy with it!

A few days ago Sheeping Annie blogged about having to stay in her classroom in the evening because it was a parent conference day. All her conferences had been scheduled for the afternoon, so she was very bored. Someone commented, “go play Fantastic Contraption.” I finally had a chance to try it today, and I have to agree — it is a blast! I don’t know if I will completely stop playing solitaire, but it might happen.

The idea is to design mechanisms which will move an object from its starting position to a goal. You build a mechanism by dropping powered wheels (choose a direction for it to rotate) and unpowered wheels into a work area and connecting them to each other and to the payload object. Then you click “start” and watch to see if your gizmo can get past all the obstacles.
Here’s my design to solve the puzzle “Junkyard.”

My aran sweater is basted together. The neckband is sewn down, and the rest is ready to finish. I couldn’t wait to try it on and take a picture. It’s a little big — better than uncomfortably small like the fair isle one I made last year.

I’ll tell you one thing — it is warm!

I was a little busy yesterday evening stamping copyright dates on stamp mounts that I had indexed last week and stickybacking stamp cushion.

The copyright date is easy to explain. We have a set of stamps with our copyright notice, two (one larger and one small enough for our smallest stamps) for each year we’ve been in business. The only subtlety is that the stamps are mounted on the side of the mount. They’re intended to be stamped sideways, not up and down, while the indexing stamp and the stamp mount I’m marking are both flat on the table. That keeps the print level and a uniform distance from the bottom of the mount — pretty important when the impression is almost as big as the surface I have to stamp on.

Stickybacking cushion is less obvious. Cushion is a sponge rubber sheet that we get in 36 x 44 inch pieces. It’s too big to handle conveniently, and takes up a lot of space until we’ve used up enough of an order to put the rest under a couch. My first step in working with it is to cut it in half, to 22 x 36. At that point I can get it onto the kitchen table, if we’ve cleaned that off. We buy double-sticky tape in a big roll nine inches wide. That’s four strips of tape to cover the 36 inch width of cushion. I wash the cushion off with rubbing alcohol first to remove any mold release compound that may be on it and let it dry. Then I roll out the four strips of tape and cut them off with an X-acto knife. I cut the cushion into strips, using a metal straightedge and a self-healing cutting mat, so that each piece of tape is on a separate 9 x 22 inch strip of cushion. I trim the edges (the very edge of the cushion isn’t the full thickness. We don’t want that under a stamp, because the stamp wouldn’t print evenly if it weren’t evenly cushioned. The first time we bought a sheet of cushion we were upset at losing that last three-quarters of an inch, but the people who sold it assured us that it wasn’t counted in the overall size.) Then comes the most strenuous part of the job: rolling the tape down with a rolling pin. I start at the middle of the strip and work toward the ends. This is double-sided tape, with release plastic in between layers of tape on the roll, so the release plastic is between the tape and the rolling pin at this point. Finally I wash the untaped side of the cushion with rubbing alcohol and let that dry. We end up with cushion with adhesive under release plastic on one side, ready to put stamp dies on.

Did I mention that about a week ago the Boston Globe started carrying a new puzzle, Kenken. It’s a number thing that’s like Sudoku in that one important clue is that no digit may be repeated in any row or column, but it works with arithmetic as well as logic. It comes in different sizes on different days; I find the four-by-four puzzles, which are printed on Monday and Tuesday, pretty easy. The six-by-six are a lot harder, but easier (for me) than a medium sudoku. At this point I like it better than sudoku. If your newspaper carries it, give it a try — on a day when they have a four-by-four, to get started. Or try the online one.

The weekend of Oct 25, I guess, Anne said, “darn, another year has gone by and we didn’t plant any Christmas trees.”

Neither Arlene, Anne, nor I ever had Christmas trees when we were kids. I wanted one when I was little, but my parents were against it. When I started going to sunday school at the Flushing Free Synagogue in Flushing, NY, I heard a sermon by a slightly older kid about why Jewish kids shouldn’t have Christmas trees, and I was convinced, and didn’t ever want one of my own after that. But I spent a Christmas vacation from college with Peter Brown’s family in Lexington MA, and one when I was in graduate school with Keith Allen’s family in Fredricksburg VA, and enjoyed those times a lot. I like the Christmas spirit, and I learned that there really is a Santa Claus. Matt grew up with Christmas trees, and wasn’t going to give them up just because he married a Jewish woman. So he and Anne have had one.

I said, “Go look on the internet, and I bet you can find a place to buy seedlings for two bucks each.” Sure enough, she found Nurseryman.com. Matt wasn’t sure he wanted to spend $75 on a lot of seedlings, but I asked, “how many would you need to grow to break even at Cambridge prices?” Really, only two good trees — so Anne ordered 25 blue spruce and 25 Fraser fir seedlings.

They arrived in Newton on Thursday. Arlene and I spent most of Sunday planting them in Casco.

Oops! I shouldn’t have rotated that picture. That’s fifty trees between the two packages, with an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper with planting instructions next to them for scale. The planting instructions say, “you should really think of this as having bought root systems.” The trees will grow, but it’s the roots that really count, and many of them are twice as long as the trunk part (if you can call it that without giggling.)

It’s hunting season in Maine in November. You don’t want to be out in the woods without a whole lot of hunter orange clothing, and probably not even then, except that there’s no hunting on Sunday. That was a reason we didn’t hurry north on Saturday; we wouldn’t have wanted to be working outdoors any distance at all away from the house that day.
We put about a dozen seedlings along the driveway. We marked off an area of “the logging road”, sort of a continuation of our driveway that had been clearcut used as a road when the previous owners of the property had sold the biggest trees on the property to a logging company, as a planting area, and cut down the weeds, brambles, and small pine trees on it, and planted twenty-five or thirty seedlings in relatively neat lines. Then we went out to the far side of the property to a little clearing we call “the patio” and planted the remaining dozen or so out there.

I put a little tag of yellow plastic tape in the ground next to each seedling to make them easier to find. And they need some help! They’re tiny.

Here’s an overview of the tree farm plot. We left a few larger pines which I should prune and maybe they’ll be suitable for Christmas trees too someday, but they tend to look like the one in the Charlie Brown special. See what I mean about needing the yellow tape to find the seedlings? I photoshopped in an arrow, too, because even the yellow tape isn’t enough in this picture.

We went to Maine on Saturday instead of Friday evening because we had stayed home for Halloween. We stopped first at Salisbury Beach state park to look for birds. We didn’t see much in the grove, but on the way out I did spot some birds we were looking for — a flock of snow buntings gleaning seeds from the weeds growing through cracks in the pavement of one of the big beach parking lots. We’ve seen them there before, so I looked hard and sure enough, there they were.

Snow buntings are another of the birds that you wouldn’t give a second look to if you weren’t interested in birds. They’re only about sparrow sized, fairly drab white, tan, and brown. They’re here in Massachusetts because they went south for their winter vacation. In the summer they live in the arctic. In fact, the Inuit consider them a sign of spring when they show up on the shore of the Arctic Ocean after being in Salisbury all winter. I guess you’re not going to find out what they look like from this picture, but those white dots are them, flying to another crack in the parking lot.

We took the slow road, 1A, up the New Hampshire coast. If you’re not strong on New England geography, take a quick look at a map and you’ll see that there’s about 15 miles of coastline that’s in New Hampshire between Salisbury MA and Kittery ME. Usually we breeze past it on I-95, but there are many state beaches and some very pretty spots to stop and look at the little harbors and the ocean.

After yesterday’s historic events it seems silly to go back to Halloween. Even though it was just last Friday it seems like a long time ago. If I don’t, though, I’ll miss a good chance to get in an easy post which would help me meet a goal of 30 posts in November. Even though I haven’t posted every day in the month, if I can get up a number that works out to one post per day on the average, I’ll consider that I paid attention to NaBloPoMo.

So, last Friday I put on a pair of khaki pants and noticed my paisley western shirt in the drawer. Oops, I thought, if I wear that and blue jeans I’ll be halfway to a cowboy costume. So I changed my pants, added a leather vest and a bandanna and the leather hat I got from the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen years ago, and became Hopalong Dean for the day.

We had bought a good big pumpkin, which became a jack-o-lantern after my usual style:

We stayed home Halloween evening and had more kids coming by than we remember in several years.

Here’s Arlene with the pumpkin, in Casco the next day. It was so big that when I cut it up to cook half of it filled up our large pot. One pumpkin pie barely made a dent in the bowlful of pumpkin puree.

Our house is less than a quarter of a mile, but probably about 300 yards, from our polling place, the local elementary school. Cars were parked on the street in front of us this morning; I imagine they were people who had driven to the polls and thought that was as close as they were going to be able to park.

I left the house a couple of minutes before 8 and walked down to the school. Phew, I thought as I got there, there isn’t a line out the front door. I walked in and was relieved to see that there wasn’t a line all the way down the corridor into the lobby — just the PTA bake sale in front of the office, as usual for an election.

The corridor past the library going down to the gym was divided lengthwise by a line of masking tape on the floor. A sign said, “students to the right, voters to the left.” It’s just that the door to the library was on the right — honest. Even though this is Massachusetts.

The line from the checkin table did extend out of the gym into the corridor, but there were only four or five people in front of me. The checkin table has two people working there, divided by your street name, streets starting with A to I in one book, J to Z in another. Fran from down the street was working at the J-Z side, and there was no line in front of her. She kept calling out, “If your street with J to Z, come right up here.” That’s how the system has always worked, even in primaries where there’s never a line. If you vote all the time you should expect it. If you’ve ever voted here before you might expect it. There must have been a lot of people who have never voted before, or at least never voted at this polling place before, because there were a lot of voters who didn’t seem to know the system.

The tables where you mark your ballots — Newton uses paper ballots where you fill in a balloon with a black felt-tip marker to be read by an electronic optical gizmo — were mostly occupied. I didn’t have to wait for a table, but I did have to look around and move quickly to get one without waiting.
There was a slightly longer line at the table to check out than at the checkin. It was probably just that the people checking voters in were more efficient at finding the right page on the voter lists than those at the checkout table.

After you check out you feed your ballot into a ballot box that has an electronic counter showing how many ballots it contains. I was voter 316 at my polling place today at just a little after 8 AM.

My summary is, voting is going smoothly but just about at capacity in ward 6, precinct 6.