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 Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 6:42 pm
@sunset: turns out the guy he was doing a job for asked him to do european mounts on about a dozen deer skulls him and his friends had taken the previous hunting season. Unfortunately the guy had left them in his barn while deciding what to do with them which caused the skin to basically turn into rawhide. Which will do a serious number on any knife. With his business though it probably won't be long before he needs another knife or tool sharpened.
Sunday i got motivated and spent about 5 hours in the garage despite the heat and humidity. Managed to grind out one knife and showed two friends how to grind out a knife as well. More practice more practice more practice.
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Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 8:27 pm
Today I did 3 loads of laundry-- by hand.
Yesterday I vacuum sealed a bunch of dried food.
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Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:23 pm
@ Wolfen: That's a full day's work, for sure. Did you have to hang them, too?
I remember a hot spell like this in 1986. I washed the diapers by hand, and hung them out to dry. It was so hot that by the time I hung up the last diaper, the first one was dry! So I just took them all down. It was just as hot as it is now. Bleah.
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Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 6:29 pm
sunsetsmile @ Wolfen: That's a full day's work, for sure. Did you have to hang them, too? I remember a hot spell like this in 1986. I washed the diapers by hand, and hung them out to dry. It was so hot that by the time I hung up the last diaper, the first one was dry! So I just took them all down. It was just as hot as it is now. Bleah. Yes I did. I have a set up in my bathroom where I have a spring loaded shower curtain rod where I hang up my clothes to drip dry right over my bathtub. Then I put what I wash on hangars and hang them up on the rod. the ends of the rod rest on where the tub tile goes just above my head. Then I have a box fan plugged in to speed up the drying process. You should see the set up I have, it works really well. It works even better on hot days, because I am washing my clothes out of two buckets, one to wash, one to rinse in the bathtub, then hang them up over head. Water drips down on you, and the fan is cooling you down. Plus you get the evaporative cooling effect of you and the clothes so I save the really large loads for hot days during the summer.
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Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2011 10:00 pm
I never thought that listening to almost 3 full minutes of rain could be so wonderful! Still lightning, so maybe there will be more. Picked 4 Roma tomatoes today, lots of chilies, and there are beans to pick in the morning, hurray!
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Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 6:12 am
Had a bit of a busy day yesterday playing phone tag and sorting some things out so i didn't get any sleep before i went to work last night. I've currently been up for 18 hours and i really wanted to work on something involving powertools today...but i'm thinking that might not be a wise decision given how tired i am.
Anyways guy at work needs another handful of knives sharpened soon i think its 3 fillet knives, and 6 hunting knives this time. Plus he wants me to make a custom tool for his taxidermy i'll tiny print this for those who might be offendedHe requires a tool that can fit inside of the hole where the spinal column connects through the base of the skull and can be used to remove the animals brain from its skull so i'm working on something that can be put into the chuck of a drill and used to sort of scramble the brains a bit to make extraction easier So i'll get some extra income this month which is nice. Anyways i need to make a phone call and fill out an application and then i'll be passing out.
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Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2011 5:39 pm
cleaning small bits of the garden during my days off. @_@
Tuesday: Cleaned porch, so...dirty.
Today: Weeded the side raised bed from trumpet vine and woody nightshade, and found that my bleeding heart plant is complete dead, the root and base were completely mushy. D:
Planted some sunflower sprouts and snap peas. Found, picked and ate a DELICIOUS strawberry from my garden, the first one that was UNTOUCHED by beaks or slugs.
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Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2011 9:47 pm
My cucumber is doing awful things, but my Mystery Pepper plant is doing things. It had some green dropdown "I think those will be flowers" things which, yes, turned into flowers.
I've got 3 open with petals so far, and at least 3 more than are still just the green part.
Hopefully I can figure out what kind of pepper they are soon!
(I planted Bell and Hot peppers, didn't mark them properly so I have no clue which type which plants are)
Also we had about 3 dozen moths on our patio door last night, so that was terrifying and gross.
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Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2011 9:07 pm
@Sunset: The storm brought us drizzle for about an hour, so it turned out to not be much help. Llamas, snakes, poison ivy, and rain... sounds like you've had an interesting time! I'm allergic to poison ivy, too. I got into it so badly when I was a kid that I ran a fever. At least I got out of school for a week xp The last time I got into it I didn't realize that I had. The doctor said I had eczema, but I had never been diagnosed with it before and I was old enough that I figured I would have shown symptoms earlier in life if that had been the case. I looked it up online and saw that the #1 cause of eczema was poison ivy. I went on a search of the area I had been working and sure enough I found some. Once someone who wasn't allergic cleared it out I magically stopped rashing out. Lol.
The drought continues here. No rain expected this week. This is also one of the hottest summers on record here. It is not going to be under 100F all week here. Normal is apparently 95F for this week. I'm watching the weather as I type biggrin
It is so hot that my car actually began to overheat twice this afternoon. There must be something wrong with the car, but I had someone knowledgeable thoroughly check it and he couldn't find anything. We checked the radiator, the cooling fan, the coolant levels... everything looks good. It is so hot already, though, that even a minor problem is exaggerated. My dashboard cracked in several places from the heat, too. A bunch of my friends and family have had heat-related auto problems. It is so hot and dry that plastic and rubber parts are breaking.
Its not just car parts breaking. Water pipes all over the city are breaking as the dry ground shrinks around the pipes. I saw about five major leaks today. Some people are hooking up garden hoses to submersible pumps and using the water from the broken pipes to water their yards and gardens. If a pipe on my street breaks I plan to also. The city told one of the news stations that they didn't care if we use the water from the broken pipes until they get a crew out to fix the leak. There are not enough crews to fix all of the leaks as they happen. At least people can salvage some of the water.
I'm thinking of breaking out the rain dance my friends and I used to do when we wanted it to rain so that we didn't have to work. We gave it up after TS Allison...
I truly feel that the situation is in His hands, and that He will end the drought in His own time. Maybe this is His way of teaching our entire region the importance of conservation. Many ornamental plants are dying while native plants are surviving. Xeriscaping is starting to gain popularity. People are more aware of their water usage. Even better, some people have seen that their water conservation efforts are saving them money. (Not the people who have tons of dead ornamental plants.) Time will tell if the changes last.
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Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:10 pm
Woke up very hungover and still sort of drunk much vomiting and unpleasentness...got to stop drinking so much. Anyways managed to make enough of a recovery to make it to my interview/assessment at Quad graphics on time and aced my assessment tests. Hopefully i get the job because it would mean a whole lot more time off with better pay and more money plus health insurance which i've been lacking for about 4 years now. Plus with all the time off (you work 3 day's get 4 day's off then you work 4 days and get 3 day's off but you work 12 hour shifts) I'll still be able to make knives on my day's off.
Got home from that at around 3pm and lounged around for about 2 hours before heading out to the garage to modify both of my grinders a little more. They are running pretty smooth now all thats left to modify is to get a stronger motor for them. Oh and i ground out another practice knife that came out pretty dang good. I figure i'll grind out another half dozen or so of the 3 patterns i'm playing with lately and then i'll try to sell a few.
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Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2011 9:53 am
I made geodesic dome houses for my cats out of old cardboard... they LOVE them. XD
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Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 11:33 am
I built a fence! biggrin Well, sort of. xd I reeeeealy tried, but it didn't come out as expected. I couldn't exactly get the shovel into the dirt redface which is more crushed granite than dirt. The ground is also super-hard because of the drought. And I'm weak. Not gonna lie. rofl I managed to make something that resembles a fence using bamboo fencing and wiring it to the existing fence. First good wind will take it out. I'm proud anyway. I think I'm half-dead from the heat, though. Over 100F again. So, about that drought: looks like it won't be ending anytime soon. Since we get most of our rain in my part of Texas during the summer in June and August it is increasingly possible that we will continue to have drought conditions for the rest of this year and into next year even if we eventually get some rain later in the year. In order to replace the water we have lost through the summer heat (and usage, obviously) and return to normal water/ rain levels for the year we need to be hit by a tropical storm. Some people here are actually praying for one. My fear is that our infrastructure in its current stressed state may not be able to handle a tropical storm. People think we have a lot of broken water mains now but just wait and see what happens when dry ground is suddenly and harshly saturated. It would not be pretty. With the ground as hard as it is, the rain water would have difficulty penetrating it and we would have massive flooding as well. How quickly we seem to have forgotten Allison rolleyes ! Some nice afternoon showers would be welcomed, though. There were two pretty cool articles in the Chronicle yesterday about our weather: one about the drought and one very short one about the heat. This is also the summer with the third most days (non-consecutive) over 100F. burning_eyes Just for laughs: Can Houston's heat melt playgrounds?
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Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 12:00 pm
I signed up for classes. sweatdrop
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Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 8:43 pm
@esiris: what kind of classes?
Played around with another knife yesterday, inching my way towards perfection. Also i got a phone call from the place i applied to the other day and got an interview next week so hopefully i'll have some more good news soon. It would be nice to be employed somewhere else by the end of the month...time will tell.
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Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2011 6:58 pm
Dehydrating 2 pints of blueberries right now. Mmmmm the smell of cooking blueberries... yum.
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