Rolling On One

I walked around Cutler Park today for the first time in several weeks. Just when I left my building something big flew like a bat out of hell towards the p0nd. My first reaction was “pigeon” but it wasn’t. I think it was a falcon, maybe a merlin. By the time I got halfway along the first side of the pond I had seen chickadee, titmouse, bluejay, and downy woodpecker. A duck, maybe a common merganser but I couldn’t be sure, flew away towards the river. When I walked out to the river a duck, maybe the same one, flew away around the bend. Swans and a pair of hooded mergs were on the part of the river I could see. That was about all the birds for the walk.

I did some more on the step stool in the evening, all the router work on the rails to hold the steps, and rounding the outside edges of the rails with the rounding tool that I think of as being like a carrot peeler. That should be the hardest precision woodworking of the whole job.

For the first Sunday in a month I went to the bagel store to buy breakfast. It was pretty late and they were out of bialys, or I would have got one of those too.

Speaking of food, did I mention that on the way back from the caning shoppe on Saturday we stopped off at Sevan Bakery in Watertown? No, I know I didn’t. Well, we did stop there, anyway, and stocked up on string cheese, hot pepper and cheese bread, preserved green walnuts, halvah, and, mostly, oil-cured olives. Not to mention the pastries — tahini bread, a very rich heavy spiral of flour, honey, sesame paste, and sesame seeds which I uncoil in two-inch chunks and pretend to leave the rest for later, but usually come back to in five or ten minutes, and date cookies, something like industrial-strength fig newtons with big big date filling centers.

But the title of the post, and if I were going to be honest with you I’d probably change the title and split the post in two or three pieces, is because we went walking in Dunback Meadows in Lexington looking for an owl, or more than one owl, that’s been reported from there. Apparently Dunback Meadows has one of the biggest pine woods in the Boston area, and owls that like to hang out in pines find it a congenial spot. We found a barred owl there all by ourselves several years ago, well, nobody pointed it out to us, though we were following written directions as best we could. This one was a very unsatisfactory view, just something that was probably feathers visible high up in a pine tree. The people who were already there looking at it said, “Saw-whet owl is the only owl that small.” Other than that, there was no real way to know what it was. I wouldn’t even have been sure it was an owl. But if the good birders in the area are convinced that’s what it was, we saw one.

Also, I spent a lot of time working on a woodworking project, a little fold-up oak step stool. We saw such a thing at the Home Coming store in Newton Centre that closed back in November or early December, but it wasn’t for sale. It looked easy to make. We bought lumber for it three or four weeks ago, I bet it was the week of December 11. I finally said, “If I’m going to say I’m going to build a kitchen table, I ought to do something with that lumber I have here,” and got going. I have the sides of the thing cut to shape now. I’m not setting speed records building it or anything.

We stopped at Russo’s on the way home and gots lots and lots of fruit and vegetables, and two big plates of salad from the salad bar for supper.

Also, we went Israeli dancing at Temple Emanuel in the evening. This is the first time we’ve gone in months and months, probably since the early summer. I remembered just a little, but liked it anyway.

Every once in a while we go on a shopping spree and Arlene says to whomever is listening, “Today we were the great American consumers.” Today it was more like the great Swedish consumers. Yes, fans, we’ve been to Ikea. We were looking in particular for lamps and a TV stand for the house in Maine, plus anything else that’s helpless.

The place is HUGE. Both floors are laid out in a labyrinth to get you to go through the whole works, presumably buying stuff at every turn. We wrote down item names of a half-dozen things on the top floor and picked five of them, plus lots and lots more, on the bottom floor.

We came home, four hours and a plate of Swedish meatballs later, with a TV stand, a floor lamp, a table lamp, an Italian salad dressing kit (salt, pepper, vinegar, oil – every restaurant table in Italy seemed to have them), wooden coathangers, a lampshade, and smaller items too numerous to mention. When the cashier told us the total, I just said, “Holy smokes, that’s a lot of stuff for that money, and I saw you ring up the big items so I know we’re not ripping you off.” I thought that all the little items were going to add up, but they just didn’t add up to much.

We drove back to Charley’s apartment (he followed, but was much later than we were because he got stuck behind a funeral which we barely missed) and walked to the Mexican place, I think it’s Rudy’s, in Teele for a big lunch. Then I persuaded Arlene to let me go to the caning shoppe to get more rush to do a big rocking chair that’s in the living room. When I get to work on it I’ll undoubtedly post about it. They didn’t have any more, or at least not much more, of the rush that I had used before. I got two big reels of some other material, which I hope will be enough for this job.

Charley is in a 3-person show at the Cambridge Art Association. He’s one of two photographers who are mostly showing nudes, but neither is showing much in the way of whole people. Charley has lots of close-ups that are obviously body parts but not clear on just what, and several multiple exposures or, really, multiple photos layered over each other. The other photographer has a couple of soft-focus torsos and lots of unidentifiable body contours that concentrate more on line — curves and edges, where Charley’s seem to emphasise the surface contours more. The third artist does sculpture with pencil points. Maybe it would be clearer to say sculpture with inch-and-a-half-long sharpened pencils, hundreds and hundreds of them in each sculpture. We’ve seen some of her work before, but this was the first time we’ve seen work she’s done with colored pencils. The shapes are abstract, rounded (albeit with a pointy texture!) forms that work well with the body contours in the photographs.

I had to go in to work late this evening to check on the results of my tests. On the way down Winchester Street, near the Nahanton Street end, I saw an animal in the middle of the road. It was pretty small, nowhere near big enough to be a deer. I slowed down so as not to hit it and turned on the high beam to get a better look. It looked like a medium-sized dog with something in its mouth as it ran off onto the JCC land. I’m gonna tell you and everyone else that I saw a coyote retrieving a roadkill squirrel for its midnight snack.

… while I was paying for a quart of oil, conversation between the woman behind me in line and the woman I was paying:

“Guess who got to hold the urn. Me.”
“Better you than me.”
“It was kind of creepy. My brother. They brought him for Christmas.”

I almost forgot that I had an appointment for physical therapy for my neck today. It was out in Wellesley, at Sports and Physical Therapy Associates. My left hand tends to start tingling from time to time. The therapist said my neck muscles were really tight on that side. She gave me some exercises, put heat and some electrical stimulation (it felt as if it was buzzing, but it was really sitting still and making the muscles vibrate) on that area, and then put my neck in a traction device that pulled my head up for ten seconds and let it back down for ten seconds, for a total of seven minutes. After five minutes or so I must have relaxed into it, because it started feeling pretty comfortable. When I left my neck felt better than it has in months. The tingling is still there, but it feels as though I’m going to get it under control.

OK! So here’s the photo story of re-rushing that chair.

The seat is wider at the front than the back. When I took it apart I found that there were lots of tacks holding the paper rush material, which looped right back to the front rail rather than going all the way to the back. That continued until the un-rushed length of rail at the front was the same size as the whole back rail. I tried to do the same. Here’s the start —

— and a close-up of one corner —

The biggest problem with the first coil of rush was that it got all tangled. I didn’t want to pull the full length of rush through the middle every time, so I tried to keep it coiled, but didn’t do anything to bind the coil together. It was a mess! When it came to the second coil, I worked out a way to hold the coil together with rubber bands. In this picture, after three evenings work, I’m almost done.

You can see that the two coils are slightly different colors. Oh well. Whadda ya want with natural materials. That’s a lot of corrugated cardboard stuffed in between the layers of rush.

And here it is, in the living room, all set to sit on.

And sit on it I did. It’s good and firm. I like that it came out looking exactly like rush seating is supposed to look. Conoisseurs of rush seating will probably note that there’s a slight gap in the center of the chair where the rush is not really parallel. I say, not bad for a newbie, and it keeps my butt off the floor. Maybe next time, and in the right foreground of that last picture you can see a corner of a rocking chair which is a candidate for being “next time”, I’ll be better at keeping all the turns of rush parallel and perpendicular.

Oh, and that Lincoln rocker behind the rush chair? Needs recaning. That’ll be tougher, but some day.

I walked around the (largely frozen over) pond next to work today. Arlene came over at lunchtime yesterday to walk and we didn’t see any birds to speak of. Today I saw a red-breasted nuthatch and a brown creeper. Those aren’t really rare birds, but they’re things I’m happy if I see a couple of times in a year; so that counts as an exceptionally good lunchtime walk. There were also a pair of hooded mergansers on the Charles, and chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, and tufted titmice.