Scattered Thoughts . . .

B ack two or three years ago, I built a custom Giant Jenga game.  That required some planning, a lot of cutting, a really lot of sanding, and then quite a bit of waxing.  This unique game (because of its size) gets a lot of use whenever we have a barbeque in the yard though! My only complaint about this game is it is heavy.  All the pieces are buttery smooth and slick because of all the sanding and waxing I did which is really nice for this game in particular.  I designed all the pieces to fit inside the overturned base so it is relatively compact when stored but it is quite heavy requiring two people to safely carry it.  The base, when turned upside-down, is its case as well as a platform that can be leveled for play.  It is a great design...  just a bit too bulky and heavy to be considered "ideal".   In this first photo, below, the base is perfectly leveled even though it looks like the stack of Jenga pieces are leaning.  Well, the b...

W e had some friends and Sheila's dad over yesterday to christen our new grill.  The weather was great and it was nice to catch up with some old friends that we haven't seen since before the pandemic. I started the day by preparing some shish-ka-bob skewers.  Cutting up five filet mignons, red onion, an assortment of peppers and fresh mushrooms was time consuming and a bit painful with my broken cut-off thumb.  Skewering everything took a bit longer and was bit more painful than anticipated too.  I left the potatoes and cherry tomatoes whole on their own skewers.   Usually, people assemble the skewers with all ingredients on each skewer so that each person can simply eat a whole skewer of grilled shish-ka-bob.  I don't like doing that though.  Each of these ingredients requires a different amount of time on the grill so I prefer to separate them by the amount of time required on the grill.  The meat and potatoes require the most time... ...

W e have begun our outdoor shower project and we're looking forward to getting this fully finished and operational! The first step was the design including choosing finish materials.  That was fairly easy.  I roughly sketched some ideas on how to deal with drainage as well as what dimensions I should make this shower.  (The sketches are rough sketches and not close to being to scale.) We'll have a small dressing area when you first enter the shower.  The shower area will be adjacent to this dressing area.  In the dressing area, there will be a bench for sitting and hooks for hanging clothing and towels.   I did some online shopping searching for outdoor shower fixtures but I couldn't find anything that appealed to me so I decided to make my own fixture using black iron pipe, brass valves and a brass showerhead.  I'll write more about this later when I get to this part of the project... The next step was grading the area.  This took some time....

M y health has been quite lousy since returning from Long Island last weekend and it is still lousy...  perhaps even worse than I had thought it was this past week, actually.   Sometimes I don't realize just how poor my health is until I either get worse or start to improve.  Then I can better gauge just how miserable my health is or has been.  In this case, I'm very slowly improving (I hope) but, as I can think more clearly, I am beginning to see just how poor my health has been this past week.  A few days ago I couldn't think clearly at all! At this point, mostly, I am worn out...  too exhausted to even stand for more than a few short minutes.  I could easily sleep away each day and night.  The only problem is that I want to accomplish something!  This is a frustrating place to be...  wanting to accomplish something and not having the energy to even begin to accomplish anything. Today the weather was beautiful...  sunny, warm...

I 've spent the past few days adding more coats of paint to my locomotive project.  This is a large scale steam locomotive so it is a very large model and it is requiring a lot more paint than I expected.  I've been delayed while waiting on paint to arrive (the USPS is dog-slow lately).  Regardless of a few little problems, this project is slowly coming along. A couple of days ago, I painted everything using Krylon Anvil Gray.  I was hoping for a charcoal neutral color but this Anvil Gray turned out to be more closely resembling something I would call Midnight Blue.  Midnight Blue was definitely not in my plan for this project so I had to order a different color (and wait a bit longer for it to finally arrive).  I couldn't find a gray tone that I liked because they were all too light in tone so I settled for a flat black.  I plan to weather this locomotive so starting with a neutral black will work even though my preference was for a neutral dark gray/...