Rolling On One

Last weekend (I mean the weekend of March 18-19) we saw a sign on a farm stand, and ads in the local paper, about Maine Maple Sunday, March 26. It turned out to be a bigger deal than we realized.

First of all, let me say that I was wrong two weeks ago when I said you don’t see metal sap buckets hanging on trees these days. It was just a little early in the sugaring season then, and those were the first we had seen. Last weekend and this weekend we saw many more. It’s true, commercial sugar makers use tubing collection systems. People who have a few trees that they tap still use buckets.

OK, with that out of the way, I’ll get started writing. I took so many pictures, and have so much to say, that I’ll split this into three posts. The second two have all the pictures. Be aware that they’re image-intensive, or will be when they’re written.

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We started — probably the earliest we’ve been out of the house on a Sunday — at a pancake breakfast at the Webb’s Mills Community Center. We parked in a big lot at the Webb’s Mills Variety store. A woman getting out of the car next to us said she thought it would be OK to park there, since the store wasn’t even open yet. Jim, the former owner of our house, was at a table in the entry room, waiting for his breakfast. We paid for our meals and sat down to talk and eat with him. The menu was juice, two pancakes and a sausage patty (with seconds if you asked) and coffee. Coffee was in the main room of the building, which had another eight or ten tables and a stage. Of course the main point was the real maple syrup, from Sweet William’s sugarhouse down the road. Jim asked if we were going to go from one pancake breakfast to another. We weren’t, but we did want to go to the open house at Sweet William’s.

On the way back from a rummage sale (billed as “indoor yard sale” at the community center in Waterford, we finally got to look at Naturally Fuzzy Yarns, the little yarn shop in the woods, in Harrison.

Jan, who owns Naturally fuzzy, made me a copy of the announcement for the Denmark, ME Sheepfest which is going to be on April 15.

The shop is a separate building from the house. It’s the second house on the right after you turn off route 35 about 2 miles from downtown Harrison. It’s the kind of shop where you park in a pullout on the side of the driveway, walk up to the shop, and about the time you get to the shop door someone is opening the door of the house to come over and open the shop for you. Unfortunately by the time that happens you feel a little obligated to buy something, but face it, you were going to by then anyway.

She has lots of Bartlett Mills yarn, a big selection of sock yarn, Cascade, hand-dyed stuff, a little Manos, a little alpaca, and a good stock of needles and other supplies. For a one-room shop it’s really remarkably full of merchandise.

Also full of bright colors! There’s a big rainbow of Bartlett Mills yarns hanging on sort of an indoor gable visible from the door. Most yarn shops have lots of colorful yarn on display, but this one seems even more so.

My stash is plenty big for the moment, and I’m expecting to get a sweater’s worth at the Denmark Sheepfest, so I had my sales resistance up to a point that I just got one skein of Bartlett 2-ply fisherman yarn in a dark orange. It’ll be plenty for another hat, and I’ll really do it to. That’s easy to say now — you can believe it when you see it.

As seems to be the case in most stores in Maine, you can’t get out without having a chat with the owner. Maybe it’s just that people around here don’t interact with anywhere near so many other people in a day as city folks do, so they have more energy left for each interaction. I’ve always felt that one thing about being on vacation is that I’m allowed to talk to people in a way that I’m not around Newton. That’s the way it is here all the time.

I finally put grout in the tiled piece of plywood in front of the wood stove.

One of the first things I did for the house in Casco was to bring up all the extra tile from our bathroom renovation in Newton to tile a 2 x 4 foot piece of plywood so we would have a fireproof floor two feet in front of the stove. The stove opens on the side, and there’s plenty of brick on the floor on that side, so I’ve been able to use it without worrying about sparks getting on the carpet. But the stove also has a door in the front. We’ve kept that closed when we use the stove (which has only been three times, anyway) because it’s too close to the carpet. That’s where the tiled plywood is going to replace the carpet. But without grout, sparks from the stove could fall in the cracks between the tiles and ignite the plywood. So we still couldn’t use the front door of the stove, until today. Of course, now it’s getting to be spring so it’s less of an issue. But we’ll be ready in the fall.

On our way down Main Street, Bridgton, we stopped in a store that has touristy stuff, souveniers, and antiques, something like Cornfield Trading (but it’s not field — I can’t remember what). I saw an old brace and auger bit, $3 for the brace and $1 for the bit. I have better bit braces, but for the price I couldn’t resist. My dad collected antique tools (see ATTIC, Antique Tools and Trades in Connecticut). The display I inherited includes a bit brace lots nicer than this. This one just has a steel handle, no wood, no chuck, and no ratchet for working in close places; but it looked as though it could handle a bit just fine. On close inspection the bit turned out to be 11/16, probably just right to fit a tenon cut in green wood with the 3/4 hollow auger after the wood dries and shrinks.

I got to use the biscuit joiner that I bought last weekend. Table legs are now put together, though it would probably have been smarter to have routed out the cutouts for the cross brace before attaching the angled parts. I can clamp a straightedge to them to guide the router base rather than using the edge guide.

At the Koleinu-Zamir concert last Sunday, I was discussing the project with one of the altos, who used to teach woodworking (at a school for disturbed kids — that took some guts!). She said that the biscuit joiner is one of the coolest tools invented in the 20th century. Her recommendation is to cut the slots in the center of the edge whenever possible.

Anyway, here are some progress pictures:

That’s the tool. The big hose coming towards you goes to the shop-vac. Turn the shop-vac on first, and all the sawdust that the biscuit joiner makes goes right into the vacuum canister. Joan (see above) says that a vacuum dust collector connection is kind of standard for modern power tools. This is the first tool I’ve used one with.The little bench-mounted belt sander I use for stamp mounts has a port, but I’ve never tried to connect to it.

Here’s a slot cut, ready to put a biscuit in.

And here the biscuits are in place, ready for me to glue to the matching piece.

Arlene noticed this house, on North Raymond Road, several trips ago. We can’t figure it out, really. There’s a much bigger house across the road from it. This looks more like a playhouse, but it’s pretty big for that, or a guest house. At first sight it looks as though it’s falling down, but the windows are square and plumb. I guess they just felt like building it this way.

It’s just a few hundred yards more to the corner where we saw all the maple sap buckets last weekend. There are signs up at Harvest Hill Farm, and ads in the paper, saying that March 26 is Maple Sugar Sunday (or Maple Syrup? either way.) in Maine this year. There are going to be pancake breakfasts at volunteer fire companies all over, and I don’t know what other festivities. Here’s a picture of those sugar maples in better light.

At lunch one of our co-workers, a Chinese woman whose upbringing didn’t include shamrocks and leprechauns, was asking about St. Patrick’s Day. After we got the shamrocks and leprechauns straight, Colin recited the following rhyme:

Saint Patrick was a gentleman
who by quickness and by stealth
drove all the snakes from Ireland.
Here’s a bumper to his health.

But not too many bumpers,
lest we lose ourselves, and then,
forget the good Saint Patrick
and see the snakes again.

Matt said, “I can understand why the goshawk perched there. It’s a comfortable horizontal branch with a great view of the hors d’oeuvre tray.” He was talking, of course, about all the little birds that visit the feeders, which the goshawk is thinking about for lunch.

We’ve only seen a pileated woodpecker once in Casco, but there are downy woodpeckers frequently at the feeder and hairy woodpeckers pretty often. I was lucky enough to get a picture of both kinds at once, so you can see how much bigger the hairy (on the suet to the left) is than the downy (on the tree trunk). There’s a bluejay in the picture, but I wouldn’t want to identify it from this.

Of course we have squirrels at the feeder. This picture has three diurnal rodents, a chipmunk on the left just inside the shadow, a gray squirrel, and a red squirrel. Oh, and a black-capped chickadee on the bird feeder, as a bonus. I’m sure there are several species of mice and voles in the area, and porcupines and beavers too. The former owner of the house said he once heard a strange noise near the garage and found a porcupine gnawing on the shingles when he went out to investigate.
Here’s a better picture of a bluejay:

The other thing we wanted to see at the winter carnival was an astronomy program. We walked a couple of blocks down route 302, crossed the street, and looked around the municipal building. Nothing on the side. Front doors locked. Around the back was a station wagon with its tailgate up and a big telescope sitting on the sidewalk next to it. Nobody was in sight. Arlene laughed and said, “This isn’t New York City.”

The University of Southern Maine had brought its inflatable planetarium to Bridgton, set up in the lower floor of the municipal building. Normally they put it in a gym, or other building with a high ceiling, so it can get up to its full height. Today it was spherical up to the ceiling, and had a flat top. It’s a dome of opaque cloth, with a tube leading to the fan which keeps it inflated and a tube leading away from the dome for a light-tight exit. When we got there they were just finishing a showing. Several kids were crawling out of the exit tunnel. We crawled in and found spots on the floor to sit down around the edge in the dark. After a minute or two our guide came crawling in, turned on the projector, and started up with an introduction to what’s in the sky this time of year. It certainly wasn’t like being in the Hayden Planetarium in New York or the Boston Museum of Science, but after our eyes got dark adapted (which for goodness sake wouldn’t have been any sooner in a big city planetarium) you could get a pretty good idea of what constellations were where in the sky and how to find your way around the constellations.

When we left, the guy who owned the telescope on the sidewalk, a founding member of the Bridgton astronomical society, was starting to pack up. He had worked on the LEM, the lunar lander module, for the Apollo project. One week when he was at Grumman on that project he had bumped into astronaut Scott Carpenter at the water cooler, Bobby Kennedy at his motel, and knocked the briefcase out of Richard Nixon’s hand at the airport.

I guess just because someone’s in a small town at the moment doesn’t mean he’s never been anywhere else. When I think about it like that, I have to remember walking into a chamber of commerce information place in someplace out of the way in southeastern Idaho, maybe Rexburg, where the woman behind the desk was wearing an “I climbed the Great Wall” T-shirt.

Bridgton had its winter carnival this weekend, postponed from the middle of February because there wasn’t enough snow then for the sled dog races. There wasn’t any snow today, either, but the event went on as best it could.

We parked on route 302 and walked into Reny’s, where Arlene asked someone where things were going on. She directed us down Depot Street to the community center for the crafts sale. It was pretty small. We’re used to the superb quality of RISD alumni sales and the Paradise City or ACC crafts sales, and didn’t expect to find that kind of thing here. We did find —

— Black Swan Handwovens & Handspuns (yes, she’s African-American) selling soap, lip balm, and placemats woven from and socks knit from her handspun yarn. She was spinning peppermint-stick colored yarn from red and white merino roving. Matt said, “And did you notice Dean’s hat?” The spinner looked and said, “Oh! Who made that for you?” I said in my best pretending to be offended tone, “Now, what kind of sexist remark is that?” so we went on and had a good chat about spinning. She thinks my next project should be knit from something I spin myself. Drop spindle will be OK.

— a woman selling items, mostly pictures of flowers, made from fish scales and porcupine quills. The stuff didn’t appeal to me at all, but the craftswoman said, “My tribe is the only one that does that fish scale work”. She was from northern Alberta. I asked if she was from the Dene people, but that was the wrong thing to have asked. She’s woodland Cree, and there seems to be some bad blood between them and the Dene. But she told me more about the fish scale work, where she had lived and learned it. Even if there are only three people in the tribe still doing it, I didn’t want a piece.

— A mini-marshmallow blowgun. A guy was demonstrating his marshmallow shooters, made from elbows and short pieces of PVC pipe. It had handles coming off T connections that you could swivel to any angle you wanted. He was shooting at a soda can suspended in a corrugated cardboard carton. Marshmallows had ricocheted around the room. The dented, almost crushed, can was evidence of the force behind the marshmallow. If I were a good person I’d support the guy who invented that gizmo by shelling out $8 for his product. I’m more likely to buy a handful of PVC pieces next time I’m in Home Depot. Arlene and Anne say it’ll be fine if I don’t make one of ’em at all.