Rolling On One

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 right after lunch for yet another bag of concrete mix. And that was enough, finally.

One more thing was how to get to the fire pit. It’s up above a retaining wall made of a pile of rocks, and we had been walking down past the end of the retaining wall, or either going up between a garden area and the near end of the retaining wall. Neither was really convenient. Matt had his eye on some big pieces of quarried granite that were on the far side of the driveway, evidently left over from building the retaining wall next to the driveway. We found the one rock at the bottom of the fire pit retaining wall that was most like a step, hauled three of those big granite blocks over, and placed them on the slope to form a rough stairway. For a finishing touch we put a couple of big round rocks at the top of the steps on the sides, to make it clearer where they were.

I have pictures around here somewhere…

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 it looks as though that’ll be the case. Oh, of course there’s the collar too, but that doesn’t count as work, does it?

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 horn, an older silver one. It looked like a tenor to me, and I said, “a second tenor sax in the group!” She said, “No, this one is in C, not B-flat.” Is that a C Melody sax? I had never seen one before, though I had heard that they used to be very popular. In the ’20s or ’30s a lot of people played them, and because it was pitched in C you could just look on over a piano player’s shoulder at the music in C instead of either to transpose or to have a separate part in your key.

Jaime was back this Tuesday after a long absence. He’s from Argentina originally, and knows about music traditions that the rest of us don’t. Alan had bought a melodica which added a lot in the alto section.

My lip held out on trumpet for about the first hour of class. That was pretty good for me.

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 lot more with fiber and wood, and even metalwork, than with stone and concrete. This firepit was my chance.

When we ordered the materials last weekend we asked that the mortar be left on the front porch, under cover. Since we wouldn’t be there for several days, and therefore wouldn’t be able to move it indoors, I was concerned that it stay dry. When we got to Casco on Friday night we were relieved to find nice dry mortar on the porch, along with forty fire bricks (which turns out not to be quite enough — and the mortar we got isn’t going to be enough, either, so we’ll go back to the stone yard. We won’t need to have them deliver one bag of mortar and a half-dozen fire bricks, though.)

The pallet of stone was exactly where I had asked them to leave it. Exactly to within three inches. I had staked out an area with yellow plastic tape. I tried to get it about the size of a pallet. I did better than I had any right to expect without a tape measure — my marked area was just a few inches different from the pallet size.

I asked for the stone to be left at the side of the driveway. They would have left it closer to where we were working, but I really didn’t want them to drive a forklift too close to my baby bartlett pear tree, so we — mostly Matt — hauled stone by wheelbarrow.

I did most of the spreading of mortar and Matt scrubbed dirt and moss off the stones with a wire brush and set most of them, trying to find stones that fit reasonably tightly against each other because after all we were trying to build the firepit out of stone, not just mortar. Matt likes to talk to the stones a lot, “How would you like to be next? No, I don’t think so. Maybe you?” We pretty much worked from lunch until it started getting dark. It’s a matter of one stone at a time, like one stitch at a time.

By the time it was getting dark on Saturday we had three courses of stone in place and it was time for a congratulatory fist bump.

We had put in one course of fire brick on Saturday as well, and filled in the space between it and the stone outer wall with concrete. The fire brick goes on with a special heat-resistant mortar, “heat stop” or refractory cement, that’s the right stuff to use if you’re building a chimney or putting a flue in a chimney. We might not have really needed it for this job, but the kid at the stone yard said we should use it and by golly, let’s do it right. This kind of work isn’t really possible to take apart and start over if it’s not right; once the mortar sets (which, granted, takes a few hours at least) it’s going to stay there for at least decades. Which is another thing that makes it different from knitting. In fact, I think in the overall spectrum of making things out of matter, masonry is diametrically opposite knitting.
This picture is from Sunday morning, when I was washing excess mortar off the fire brick to get a nice clean job. Matt had done the corresponding cleanup on the outside the previous evening.

By the end of Sunday we had two courses of fire brick and a stone wall higher than that. We still need to put in a third course of fire brick, build the wall up to the same height, fill it in with concrete in between, and put our biggest stones on top overlapping the fire brick and hiding the concrete filler.

I found this very satisfying work. My back wasn’t entirely happy with it. After squatting in the middle of the firepit spreading mortar for a couple of hours, it took my knees and back a while to adjust to standing up straight.

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 into the firepit to support a grate. We were thinking of sticking some pieces of rebar out of the sides. The kid at the stone yard said that wouldn’t be enough — that straight pieces of rebar would eventually come loose, and that we should get something welded across the end to make a shape that couldn’t twist or pull loose. So last weekend from the stone yard we went up to Bridgton.

Nobody was there at Iron Man that time, but we did look around. The sign says something like “Iron Man Welding and Handy Hands Property Maintenance,”

(do you love those weekend hours?) but it really might say “Iron Man Welding and Sculpture Garden.” Besides a couple of dozen faces made out of shovels,

there is a dragon,

a Pushme-Pullyou,

a turtle smoking a cigar, and an alien invasion.

… and other sculpture too numerous to mention. But nobody was there last weekend. I phoned on Tuesday to describe what I wanted. Iron Man said he’d make up the pieces and leave them out for me to pick up. Sure enough, there was a bill for me in the box by his door and the pieces were there on the table.

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) and a book about building with stone.

What impressed me most about the place was that it sold work gloves, those big canvas gloves with leather palms, by the dozen. I guess that people who do masonry work run through work gloves pretty quickly.

I’m looking forward to doing some serious building.

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 canned and processed this evening. It’s the third batch of apple butter we’ve made. With the first, I think I figured out what was in the sandwiches they used to serve at school lunches when I was in fifth grade. Since I’ve made this stuff, I’m sort of committed to liking it better than I used to like those. The recipe I used was from a web site “pickyourown”. I couldn’t connect to it last night, so I did my best from memory and some other web recipe.
I’ve lost count as to how many batches of applesauce we’ve made this year. Maybe it’s only four but I think it’s at least four.

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 to go to it the weekend before, but it had been postponed because of the rain. We were glad to have found where Stonehedge was, but the sale itself was disappointing. We bought a lot of books at one booth, but there wasn’t much else interesting.

We stopped at the hardware store in Gray and got a couple of bags of concrete mix so I could level out the base for the fire pit. The bags were pretty flat and hard. The guy who brought them out to the car said that they had been compressed from being on the bottom of the pallet but would be OK once I opened them.

We came home via the Shaker Village, which was having a cider making demonstration. The information we had on the event said, “bring your own apples or buy Shaker apples.” We had brought 2/3 of a basket of apples, mostly drops from the baldwin tree. There was one group ahead of us, so we got to see the process once through before we started.

The first step was to grind up the apples in an antique mill with a big crank which turned two wooden rollers about the size of big rolling pins with gear teeth running the length of the rollers. There were iron gears on the outside of the mill so the rollers weren’t really turning each other, just chewing up the apples. With enough cranking and some help from the guys running the demonstration, who had a big wooden pestle to push the apples down between the rollers, I ground up the apples.

Then the apple chunks went into the cider press. If you haven’t ever seen a cider press, start by getting the size — a little smaller than a five-gallon plastic pail, with straight, parallel sides. Now make it out of vertical wood strips instead of plastic, with a couple of iron bands around it to hold it together. Now make the wood strips half as wide, so there’s space between them for the cider to drain through. Put some a sturdy frame around it, and a crank on top with a threaded shaft so you can put a heavy wooden disk on top of the apple pulp and force it down as you turn the crank. The apple chunks are in a plastic mesh bag (obviously not how it was done 100 years ago. I wonder if there was a canvas bag in the picture?) inside the press, and the whole thing was on a plastic tray that normally lived under a dish drain, draining into a bucket. We had enough apples to just about fill up the press. You have to be careful not to turn the press too fast at the beginning, or the cider comes out so fast that it runs over the sides of the dishpan drain instead of going into the bucket. At the end of the pressing there’s no question of going too fast; you’re really working hard to press out the last of the cider. The people running the demonstration had a supply of plastic jugs and caps for them. They funnelled the cider into two half-gallon jugs (one was only 1/3 full. A full basket of apples would have made two full half-gallons) and capped them. We had to pay for the jugs, but the cider was all ours. The cider looked very official when it was finished, with the kind of caps that you get in a store that need to be broken to be opened, and tasted very apple-y.

I wanted to get going on the concrete right after getting home, lest the weather interfere. I cut up one rough-cut pine board from Red Mill into foot-long pieces and set them around the outside of the fire pit foundation to serve as a form, trying to get them level with the high point on the far side of the foundation. The bag of premixed concrete that looked worse compressed was almost useless — it wasn’t just compressed, it had hardened into concrete in the bag. That will happen to concrete mix that’s been exposed to humidity for too long. It wasn’t just that it didn’t pour. When I put it in a wheelbarrow and worked it over with a sledgehammer, it didn’t turn back into powder, it eventually broke into chunks of concrete. And I didn’t just give it a couple of taps with the sledgehammer, I worked it over the way you might pound a steak with a meat tenderizing mallet. The second bag was not quite so bad, but I think there was less than 2/3 of a bag of useful mix between the two bags. We still had a full bag from the nine that Matt and I had bought two weeks earlier, so I was able to mix up enough concrete to get the foundation close to level.

Sunday we went to the dump and the bulky waste area to try to get rid of the extra concrete chunks. Bulky waste wouldn’t take the concrete, but we did pick up some more scrap wood and a couple of long (four feet by six inches) strips of plastic tile surfaced masonite. It looked like just the thing to make a circular form for the inside of the fire pit foundation, which wasn’t yet as smooth and level as I would have liked. Then we went to the hardware store in Naples and got a sack of premixed sand and topping concrete. I put the masonite strips in place, got the top level with the high spot of the foundation, mixed up the sand mix, and ended up with a nice smooth reasonable level pad.

The big bird feeder that stands on a pole in the yard had fallen apart late last winter. Matt had made a temporary repair, but the wood was pretty rotten. Between some scrap wood, some wood salvaged from bulky waste, and the plexiglas and the hinges from the old feeder, I made a duplicate feeder and put it up. The crosscut sled my father had made for his table saw was essential for cutting the angles for the roof and kerfs to hold the plexiglas.

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 you deduced that it has a sort of new-age, counterculture orientation. Or maybe leftover ’60s orientation.

It’s pretty much in the center of the state, thirty or so miles northeast of Augusta, which makes it almost 100 miles from Casco. We hadn’t been able to go in past years because if fell on or too close to Rosh HaShanah; but this year it didn’t. We set the alarm for 5:45 so as to get there early and beat the traffic (remembering the traffic jam going to the Fryeburg Fair two years ago.)

Well! We were completely unprepared for how big the event was. Though it’s not nearly as big as the Fryeburg Fair, we were worn out walking by the end of the day and we’re pretty sure we didn’t see everything.

There were lots of very real agricultural exhibits, including a tent from the Maine Forest Service and the Small Woodlot Owners Association of Maine (SWOAM) which we possibly should join. There were craft demonstrations, including a canoe building display. There were native american craftspeople, including a booth where kids were decorating birchbark with porcupine quills. There were as many yarn and roving vendors as at the Fiber Frolic, and more fleeces for sale than at that event.

If you were looking for people to do henna designs on your hands, you could have found three booths. If you wanted to hear about Amnesty International or sign a petition in solidarity with the people of Burma, this was the place. If you wondered what were the best-looking organically grown leeks, or gourds, in Maine, you could have seen them.

(the rule for vegetables at fairs seems to be that you display three of whatever it is, to show that you can grow uniformly good stuff. Just one superb vegetable could be dumb luck, but three all just as good means you’re a good gardener or farmer.)

Or if you were looking for gourds painted as christmas tree ornaments.

There were several tents full of top quality crafts. I mean booths that would have been at home at the ACC crafts fair in Springfield or the Paradise City crafts sale, or at least could have applied to those shows with reasonable hope of being accepted.

I stopped for a while to watch a woodturning demonstration from a woodturning school we had passed on our way to Pemaquid Light three weekends ago. The guy was using a Jet Mini lathe that I’ve read a lot about on the woodturning newsgroup and that a lot of people seem to be very fond of.

What I liked even better was a guy who was really trying to demonstrate how he makes chairs, carving the seat out of a thick slab of wood; but when I started talking to him, he pointed out his treadle-driven lathe and told me I could try it. It was a blast, though I think it would take an awful lot of practice to turn a smooth cylinder with it since you only get one treadle’s worth of turning at a time. But it’s how woodturning was done from ancient Egypt until the development of electric motors.

My other favorite demonstration was a guy doing rush seating with real cattail leaves.

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 have several branch locations, but apparently all except the one in the Woburn mall have been closed for some time. I used to go to that one every now and then from work in Burlington when I worked there three years ago.

We stopped at the Woburn one on our way to Maine on Friday. There were big signs, “20 to 50% off everything in the store.” There was still a lot in the store, and we didn’t run into anything that was more than 20% off. I headed for the yarn department and got one ball of something gorgeous (artful yarns?) that had a one-skein pattern for an mp3 player sock on the ball band, two balls of silk-mohair-merino blend that ought to make a really comfortable watch cap (or maybe it deserves something nicer than a watch cap, but that’s the breaks) three 475-yard skeins of bulky Cascade Ecological Wool that ought to be enough for a really warm sweater, and what I really thought would be the reason for the stop. We got a couple of Kaffe Fasset books a while back, and Arlene was thinking she’d like a sweater with some color to it. Fabric Place had a good color selection of Classic Elite Renaissance wool. We got something like 15 skeins of mostly different colors. So when I get my aran sweater finished, that’s on the agenda for the next big project.