Finished Porch

Porch Replacement 2023 Jun 12-30

June 12: Demo the concrete porch and ramp

June 14: Pull the last of the concrete out of the wall.

June 15: Repair rotten siding and prepare it for wooden porch attachment.

June 21: Dig a hole to bury the concrete rubble - Create a French drain

June 23: Add a concrete landing at the bottom and replace the lawn. Almost finished!

Water the replaced lawn...hey, not the concrete! Almost finished...final photo to be posted later

Knitting for a Baby Girl

I found six skeins of pink yarn in my stash and I heard there was a baby girl due to be born in June. So I knitted up two pair of baby booties (one small pair and another larger) then knitted a big blanket, using up all of those pink yarn skeins.

Cleaning up an old hatchet head

I brought an old rusty, beat-up hatchet head to Lief's workhop and he built a new handle for it from a scrap of Walnut. He polished off the rust, ground out a new beveled edge, shaped the wooden handle, attached it to the head, then soaked the final result in linseed oil.

White Cross Garden Spider Babies - 2023 May 11

Another batch of White Cross Garden spiders has hatched and the baby spiders are making their way out into the world. Our yard usually fills with these spiders each summer. I'm careful to avoid breaking their webs unless they're in a critical pathway for humans.

Giant Cottonwood Tree - 2023 May 7

Look at the size of that Cottonwood tree James cut down. It made such a thunderous noise that several neighbors checked in on them to find out what had happened. James called Heidi immediately just to let her know he was OK. He wanted to open up the canopy so his freshly planted Cedar trees would thrive. Check out the moss on the trees in the background. This is certainly a rain forest.

I'm not sure if the dark wood at the center of the log is a problem. The lumber companies call this "Poplar" and it's commonly used for making drawers, at least the parts that don't show from the outside. We counted the growth rings. There were only thirty rings, spaced about a half inch apart. So the diameter of this tree grew by one inch each year, for a total of 30 inches diameter.

Check out the rectangular black marks on edge of the stump. That's where he drove iron wedges in to force the tree to fall to the right. It fell to the left anyway.

Tulips In Bloom 2023 April 26

This is the best photo I got of the blooming tulips. The camera is pointing straight down into the centers of the flowers. They also looked good when back-lit with sunshine but that type of lighting is even more difficult to capture on camera.

Homemade Scones Attempt #2 2023 April 17

These scones were crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, but they tasted terrible. I made them taste better by filling them with strawberry jam.

Homemade Scones 2023 April 7

I followed a recipe very carefully from scratch ingredients and baked these scones myself. They tasted good but were tough and shoe leather. Not that I've ever tried eating shoe leather.

Lug Nuts Over-Tightened 2023 Jan 5

Lief bought a used Subaru for Abby to drive while she's in college. It needed to have the brakes checked and in the process of removing the wheels we discovered the lug nuts were so tight they broke the lug studs on two separate wheels. I estimated that the lug nuts had been tightened to about 150 foot pounds. It took all of my strength to get them loose, and of course two of them snapped off. (The brakes turned out to be OK.)

Replacing the broken lug studs proved to be a challenge. We put the new stud in place and then tightened the wheel until the new stud had been pulled tight and reset into the axle hub. We checked the torque on all four wheels with a torque wrench and found them to be at 90 foot pounds...a bit tighter than recommended but soft enough for Abby to get loose in an emergency. A few months later she had a flat tire and had to remove those lug nuts herself. Lief talked her through it via cellphone: "Arrange the wrench so it needs to be pushed down, then shove it down with your foot." It worked!