Rolling On One

For a change, I didn’t have anything I had to do yesterday evening. What I did have was two pairs of well-worn Gap Easy Fit blue jeans. Both had holes in the knees. The one with only one hole in a knee, and no paint splatters, had a big hole in a pocket, suitable for losing keys, a Swiss army knife, and of course coins. I guess I’m fairly hard on pockets, keeping keys in them without a key case. Certainly I always wear a hole in the left pocket, where the keys stay, long before the right pocket shows any signs of wear. I hoped that from two pairs of jeans, one unwearable because of the hole in the pocket, the other pretty bad because of holes in both knees, I could make one usable pair.
There’s a bolt of muslin in our fabric stash that would look at home in a fabric store. It’s not just a few yards. I cut the worn pocket out of the jeans with the better knees, put it on the muslin, and cut out a new pocket using the worn one for a pattern. It’s not easy putting a pocket in old jeans; the rivets, at least, get in the way. I’m not sure if I sewed the edges up all the way or if there’s a gap in the new one that things could fall out of. At least if there’s a gap it’s not at the bottom, so gravity will be working to keep things in.

Second I replaced the hip pocket. It’s just a patch pocket. All I needed to do for it was to take the old one (with holes that threatened to let my wallet through) off, cut a replacement from the leg of the other pair of jeans, press the edges over,  hem the top edge, and stitch the sides and bottom in place.

Last was the patch on the knee. It was trickier to get the stitching in the right place, even with the free arm sewing machine. I’m down on iron-on patches; they always eventually peel off, and end up looking worse than the original hole. The patch I put on is not the least bit hidden, but it’s going to stay about this bad until it wears through too. But the other knee will need work before that happens.

At the Koleinu rehearsal Wednesday evening (normally they’re Thursday, but Thursday evening was the start of Shavuot, so Hebrew College was closed. Because we have a concert in just over a week, we had to have a rehearsal, so it was a day early) Carol asked me if I could meet her at the concert site, Temple Isaiah in Lexington, to go over the setup requirements with her, the sound guy from the temple, and the facilities guy there. I’ve been responsible for getting risers to the concert the last two years. Two years ago I hired movers to move risers from Hebrew College to Temple Reyim in Newton. Last year I rented a truck, got three guys to help, and we moved risers from Lexington High School to Temple Isaiah in Lexington, less than a mile but of course too far to move without a truck. This year the facilities guy said, “Oh, we bought our own risers this year. Do you want to use them?” Do we ever! They’re not as nice for a choir concert as the ones the high school has, but they’re THERE ALREADY. So I had to get in to work early and stay late yesterday to make up for going to Lexington, but it was about half as much time lost and a tenth the effort as renting a truck to move risers. And Koleinu doesn’t have to spend money for renting a truck or hiring movers, and I don’t have to hassle them about reimbursing me, since I had to front the money the last two years. Phew!

I finished putting together the table top. Up to today it was made of six (I think it’s six) boards put together side-to-side. Besides those, I wanted a narrow piece running crosswise at each end. Probably you’ve seen cutting boards or bread boards made that way. That extra structure helps hold all the pieces together, keeps it flat, and mostly covers up the end grain of the boards. It gives the whole thing a much more finished look. Anyway, I wanted to do that.

First, I cut across the ends of the joined boards with a hand-held circular saw. The boards were lined up reasonably well but the edge wasn’t perfectly straight. Sawing after they were joined gave a much better straight edge to join the end piece to. Next, I used the router to cut tongues at the ends of the table top. I ripped a 5/4 board in half (not with my bare hands like someone ripping a telephone book in half, but with a table saw. Ripping, in woodworking, is cutting a board lengthwise, along the grain, as opposed to crosscutting, cutting transversely to the grain. If you’re doing a lot of it, you use different saw blades for the different operations. Then there’s resawing, cutting a board lengthwise, keeping the same width, but making it half as thick; but that’s done much less frequently.) Those halves became the end pieces, after I routed grooves in them to fit the tongues at the ends of the joined boards, and crosscut the end pieces to the precise length to fit the table top.

Of course the pieces didn’t fit at first. Remember, the table top isn’t flat, but the pieces for the ends are pretty much straight. I was able to bend the table top just a little, but I still had to make the tongues on it a little thinner, on the top surface where the table top bowed up and the bottom surface where it bowed down, to get it to fit in the groove. I have a little tiny plane that’s suitable for the purpose; the blade goes all the way to the edge rather than coming out a slit that’s a fraction of an inch narrower than the base of the plane. After making lots more shavings, I got the pieces all to fit and glued it up.
It still needs some planing to get the surfaces all to match (because I didn’t plane all the cup out of the joined boards the day before. But I’ll leave that be, and plane, scrape, and sand down the end pieces until they’re down to the level of the rest of the table top) and then needs edges and corners rounded.

The former owners of the house came over to take some baby trees from the garden. We got more information from them about the garden, drainage of the lot, and driving directions to Lewiston.

We walked down past the beach, talked to some people who were hanging out there, and walked on to the end of the road. There were some small birds up in the trees there — a good look at a Blackburnian warbler! We stopped at the cabin of the people who had been on the beach and relaxed on their deck for a while. Being on the beach and on their deck really felt like summer vacation.

The people on the beach warned us that traffic would be terrible on Memorial Day if we left before about six. All too soon it was time to admit that the weekend was over. By the time we got everything cleaned up and were ready to close the house it was a little past seven.  We zoomed back to Newton, happy to drive at normal highway speeds without any boats on top of the car, and got in close to 10.

I did a lot of planing on the tabletop. Although the surfaces align perfectly with the biscuit joiner, I didn’t get the top really flat; there’s a slight cup to it (in woodworking, “bow”, as in “and arrow” means the piece of wood has a curve lengthwise; “cup” means that there’s a curve crosswise.) I planed a lot. That’s why my arms are both sore on Tuesday. Even so, I didn’t finish getting it flat.

We looked in the “short hikes in the Lakes region” booklet (or whatever its name is) and found a candidate place to walk, Pineland Farms near Gray. We went down North Raymond Road, our usual route to Gray (and thence to Newton) but turned left at the crossroads to try to find the Shaker village. It’s actually just past the intersection with route 26. The road from the crossroads turns to dirt for a while, but it’s a good wide dirt road. The buildings of the Shaker community are beautiful, looking like a pristine untouched 19th century village. They offer tours of the place when they’re open, which they weren’t on Sunday, and a series of workshops on traditional crafts. We’re glad to know the way, because we’ll probably go to a workshop sometime. There were quantities of bobolink flying around a field just down the road from the center of the Shaker village where we turned the car around.

Pineland Farms used to be a state institution, School for the Feeble-Minded (which name dates it.) It’s now a working farm with all sorts of tours. There’s a visitor center selling beautiful Maine-made crafts & foods. I was interested to see the same ployes mix that I had got in Hannafords (and had made pancakes with this morning). It must be a bigger part of Maine culture than I realized.

Pineland has something like 17 miles of trails which are managed for cross-country skiing but not so great for walking. Maybe the thing was just that it was too warm a day, and the trails would be nice in spring or fall. We didn’t see any birds of note. The best part was a field of lupine growing on the slope above a small marshy area.
We found our way back through New Gloucester and Poland (stopping for frozen custard, naturally. They seem to have three flavors any day, vanilla, chocolate, and one that’s different every time (of course, it must repeat sometimes.) Arlene always gets chocolate. I always get the third one. This time the third one was butter creme, and it was not much special.)

I grilled a steak for supper. There was a barred owl calling when I went outside to check that the grill had cooled off.

Naturally we were in Maine for the long weekend.

It was raining, sometimes drizzling, sometimes raining hard, Friday as we were getting set to go. I wanted to bring the old aluminum rowboat up this trip. Since I had left work early there was a little extra time before dark; maybe we’ll get some use out of the boat there; and we’ve wanted to get it out of our backyard anyway.

My family bought that boat in the mid-’50s. Or maybe the early ’50s. I remember my dad sending away for lots of brochures and taking a long time to make a decision. It was small (all of eight feet long) and light enough that my dad and 8-year-old Dean were able to get it on and off our ’51 Pontiac. We rowed it around Lake Hortonia and several tiny ponds (for the first time, Google Maps is failing me; I looked up that area, and I know there are lots of ponds and lakes that should be showing up that don’t) in Vermont on our vacations in the ’50s.
The last time I know for sure that boat was in water was the spring of ’67, when my father was living in Suffield, CT, and my college roommate and I took it out on the Congamond Lakes.

Well anyway, as I was saying when I so rudely interrupted myself, I got soaked on Friday afternoon taking the factory carrier racks off the car, putting the Thule carrier racks on, and finally getting the boat secured. By the time Arlene and I both showered and put on dry clothes we had used up all the head start I got from leaving work early.

We drove slowly, keeping under the speed limit because of the boat on top of the car and because of the crummy weather. With a stop in Newburyport for coffee and some quick grocery shopping at Hannaford’s in Windham, we still got to Casco close to 11.

On Saturday we went to several yard sales. First we ran into one in Casco, on Route 121 across from Parker Pond, at a place we had been before. The people who live there seem to buy old furniture, or scavenge it from the dump, fix it up, and sell it at yard sales every couple of months. We got two chairs, one pretty nice “rabbit ear” chair with a cloth webbing seat, one pretty crummy one for $1. The latter has a small broken area of real cane that I want to try to replace. It seemed like a good small, inexpensive way to learn caning.

The second yard sale, and the one that was the main destination, was in downtown Bridgton. It was organized by LEA, the Lakes Environmental Association. They’re a local conservation organization. We’ve walked around one of their conservation areas, Holt Pond, and gone to a couple of talks that they sponsored. We got a couple of small items there, and I had a longish talk with a guy who was selling band method books. There’s a community band that gives a concert in Bridgton every Wednesday evening in the summer. Now that I have a phone number, maybe I’ll go and rehearse with them, and play when we’re up for a week.

The third one was the Harrison Lions club. The tag sale was in the cellar of the building, down around in back, off an unpaved parking lot. Some stuff was outside (a big metalworking vise that looked as though it weighed a good 50 pounds, with a beautiful casting on the side). Inside I overheard people talking about lots being developed for monster houses, I’m not sure where, but maybe somewhere in Harrison. We got a cheese plane for a dime, and then back outside Arlene took a closer look at a mirror with a nice oak frame that was priced $4. We decided we could indeed get it in our car. It’s waiting for some repairs to the back and some picture wire so we can hang it up.

When we got back we wheeled the canoe down to the lake (it might have been when I bought the kayak that I got a set of wheels that straps to the bottom of a canoe or kayak so you can roll it along. I don’t think we’ve ever used it before. It works pretty well) and paddled 2/3 of the way to the Heath Marina. The wind was behind us, so we knew it would be twice as much work getting home as going, so we didn’t go far. We did come back past our dock almost to our association’s beach, and had a tailwind again on the final stretch.

I roasted two cornish game hens on the grill for supper (we ended up with one left over), with corn on the cob. Later in the evening I baked zaatar bread. It needs a really hot oven. I set the oven for 500 degrees and the timer for 8 minutes, but it was either too hot or too long or both. Before the timer rang the smoke detector went off. One piece of the bread was really scorched on the bottom, but the other two were just a little overdone.

While I was bicycling to work a couple of days ago (and I got to bicycle four times this week — good stuff! I’m getting into much better shape, too — I can tell because I’m not in such low gears going up the hills as I was the first couple of weeks of April) I was passed by an elegant looking silver-gray convertible. Just in case people didn’t notice from the car itself, the owner had sprung for the vanity plate: ROLLS-R. Sort of the opposite of the recent VW Passat ad campaign pushing low ego emissions.

Seed packets often have a little drawing labeled “seedling identification” on the back, so you can tell that what’s coming up is what you planted, not a weed. Or rather, so you can sort out what you wanted from among the weeds that are also coming up. Here for your convenience are seedling identification pictures of peas (snow peas or sugar snap peas, but all the peas I’ve planted look pretty similar at this stage) and beans (string beans as it were, but again, I don’t think there’s that much difference between string beans and lima beans, etc, at this stage.)

The ones above are the peas. It’s really too bad I didn’t get pictures a day or two ago. The seedlings come up all pointy and curled up, and uncurl and open out. The thing that amazes me is that the leaves have several leaflets as soon as they open. I guess that’s what makes them leaflets, that they’re already there as soon as there’s a leaf.

These are beans. The amazing thing about these is that the bean almost just splits in two and the halves stay there as the first leaves, after developing their own chlorophyll and turning green. Relative to most seedlings, these are huge. Of course, beans are huge among seeds, so it’s in character. Before the seedlings get to this stage, the sprouts look like thick white staples looping out of the ground, roots at one end and bean at the other. Did you learn about monocots and dicots in biology class? The two halves of the bean clinging there as the first leaves are the cotyledons (phew, took me three tries on Google before I got the correct spelling of that).

Now for some flowers, if you’re still here.

Who can resist lily-of-the-valley? They’re so small and delicate, and smell so good, and you have to get close to photograph them so there’s lots of green in the background and plenty of contrast.

The bleeding hearts are another perennial. That’s what’s in bloom this early, mostly. The lighting was nice and soft and indirect when I took these.

Forget-me-nots. These are biennials, not perennials, and this is one of their years. There are a zillion of them in Arlene’s rock garden.

I finished, not without some trauma, kitchenering the top the second mitten. The first one went smoothly several weeks ago, but either I didn’t study the directions carefully enough this time, or I let myself get too distracted, but it took three times before I got the second one done. Here they are, ready for thumbs:

Note that I strategically posed them with the grafts facing away where you can’t really see any possible problems.

On my way bicycling home this afternoon I spotted someone putting most of an old bed frame out for the trash (along with a school easel). I stopped and said something like, “You’re throwing it out? That’s real hardwood.” He said yes, it was broken and it was about time to get rid of it. It looked like enough good wood to do something with. After supper I drove back and picked up the headboard, footboard, and easel. The easel is fine as it is. We’ll keep it in Maine for visiting grandnephews or other kids to use. The bed stuff looks as though it will be recycled into a night table or, possibly, two of them.

Here’s the footboard, as I retrieved it, leaning against the freezer in our cellar. Those are bins of indexed stamp mounts and finished stamps in the background.

Here’s the headboard on the workbench, in convenient bite-sized bits (or, pieces that I can easily transport to work on in Maine). Stamp mounts yet to be indexed are in the foreground.

Here’s the problem in disassembling the footboard (this happened not to be a problem in the headboard. The little plugs I’m going to tell you about had already fallen out or been removed, so all I had to to to the headboard was remove three screws from each post):

The problem is tha there are three screws holding the panels into the posts, and the screw heads are in counterbored holes which are plugged up with little wood buttons. I tried to pry the buttons out with a can opener blade on a cheap pocketknife, but it didn’t work. I looked in my rack of miscellaneous small tools for something more appropriate. (Digression: here’s something less than half of my rack of miscellaneous small tools:

It’s one of my three all time best yard sale purchases. I got it at a yard sale on Beacon Street in Waban. The person whose estate it was from had been, I was told, the first Jewish licensed electrician in the Boston area. The rack is a piece of 2×4 with holes drilled in it, most holding little things like dividers, small chisels, nailsets, needle files, bits for a bit brace, and a huge variety of little punches and picks that were handmade — cut, forged, and filed to the required shape, for some special purpose that only the original owner knew. Each one says clearly, “I’m not a piece of scrap, I was made to get some job done, and kept because a similar job might have to be done again.” And they do keep coming in handy.)

This one is going to be just right for prying out those plugs. It’s not really a chisel, and certainly not a screwdriver, but it has a heavy point at one end and I can hammer the other and pry with the whole thing.

Granted, there’s damage to the top of the post. But I’m not going to use it for a post. There’s a mortise cut out under those screw holes, so there’s not enough lumber there to do much with. I may eventually use part of that post as turning stock, if and when I get into woodturning, but this part isn’t useful. Here are the screw heads showing now that the plugs are gone, and now I’m ready to take the footboard completely apart (see “bite sized”, above).

That’s Newton Open Studios. Once a year a couple of hundred artists from all over Newton open their studios or homes to prospective customers or just people who want to see what they’re doing. Arlene was site exhibiting her monotypes this past weekend. The house was simultaneously cleaner than it’s been in years (there’s now an empty tabletop that I haven’t seen since Anne’s wedding, I think) and impossible to get around because we had a critical doorway blocked by a card table.

Arlene had arranged for another artist to be exhibiting in our house. Susannah Zisk does fabric art, mostly things like quilted placemats, banners, and other works in pieced printed cotton (mostly). She was in the dining room; Arlene was in the living room with the monotypes; and I was in the room that used to be a screened porch, years ago, with rubber stamps.

Most of the time there were people looking in one place or another. Arlene had sent out flyers to all her printmaking buddies, a couple of former (and I mean 25 to 30 years ago!) student teachers, and lots of friends. Besides those people, there were several neighbors from next door and way down the block, a few people who happened to be driving by, and people who were going to several of the open studio sites.

I got a couple of pattern repeats done on my cabled hat while selling stamps and explaining the whole stamp making process to lots of interested people. Arlene sold prints, one to a friend and two to people who just really liked them. A good time was had by all except Susannah, who had hoped to do more business than it turned out.

On Sunday afternoon another aspect of the Open Studios weekend came into play. The Jewish Community Center had set up exhibit areas for several of the open studios artists in its auditorium. The JCC klezmer band had been invited to play from 4 to 5 in the afternoon as part of the event. Around 3:30 I changed out of rubber stamp salesman clothes into klezmer musician garb, picked up my trumpet and euphonium and tote bag of music and headed over there. Several years ago the klezmer band used to play a concert in that auditorium about once a year, but we haven’t in a long time. Most of those times we had an audience of not more than twenty people. There were lots more people in the room this time, but it’s hard to call it an audience. At any given time there were probably two to five people at the front of the hall actively listening, but of course everyone heard us to some extent.There were five of us there, our leader Barry on accordian, Dimitri on electric bass, 80-something Sarah on violin (she’s switched from cello in the last year or so because carrying the cello was getting to be too much), 70-something Len on clarinet, and me on brass. We weren’t playing loud (except for a couple of the more raucous songs) so as to allow commerce to continue. Sarah and Len don’t put out a lot of volume anyway, Dimitri had his amplifier turned pretty low, and Barry and I were just trying to be balanced with the rest of the band. We did three good fast songs, freilachs or bulgars, the kinds of things you might dance to at a wedding; a waltz; Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen; Tumbalaika; and a couple of slow instrumental numbers.