Scattered Thoughts . . .

I had a very rare, very productive day yesterday but I'm left with excruciating  spinal pain from my lumbar spine all the way up through my thoracic and cervical spine (I have significant injuries in all three areas).  The pain was so extreme last night that it was taking my breath away!  My extensive spinal injuries are still inflamed even today but down to moderately tolerable levels.   Today I plan to do a bit of plumbing work if my body cooperates. I managed to get the entire shower and dressing area enclosed which made for a really good day.  I even made a door and hung it!   The day involved a lot of cutting, ripping and making rabbits on every piece of wood.  All of these piece fit together nicely.   The hot and cold spigots are installed.  Today's job is to connect these spigots to the house water supply.  I already have the wall inside the house that adjoins with this back wall of the house completely opened and ...

W hen I got up this morning, it wasn't raining so I immediately went outside to collect tools and building supplies for one part of this outdoor shower project that has been nagging at me for quite a while.   I had originally planned to use some leftover roofing membrane as a sort of shower pan to lead the water away from the house and toward the French drain.  I couldn't find any of my leftover roofing membrane though.  My next option was to bend my own aluminum flashing in place of the membrane.   So, this morning, I collected the rolled aluminum, some shears, my hand seamer, a hammer, and some straight lumber to use as a makeshift bending brake.  I had planned to head indoors at this point to get ready for my day and eat breakfast but i t was quite nice out there this morning so I stayed out there and started working on shaping the rolled aluminum into a flashing resembling half of a shower pan.   This flashing would protect the exposed lo...

L ukey and Kenzie are both a part of the band at school and last night was their spring concert so we headed out to Cabot last night for a bit of middle school culture.   This was Kenzie's first time singing lead vocals in front of a crowd and she did well considering it was her first time.   Lukey already had another previous concert under his belt (their winter concert) before Kenzie joined the band so he moved around from instrument to instrument on stage during the performances.  I think he prefers drums but he spent time at the keyboard in addition to rocking a tambourine and singing lead vocals.   It was a fun night for all of us!  There is a short video at the bottom of this blog entry with a few short clips of the concert. Below, Kenzie is waiting to come out on stage... I've seen this Kenzie "dirty-look" before...  it is usually directed toward me when I'm joking with her about something.  I'm not sure what it was about on stage...

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....

W e've had nothing but rain for the past ten days or so which means nothing was accomplished outside.  And, before these past ten days, I had one half of a day to get the lawn done.  We had about two or three weeks of solid rainy weather before that one clear day.  Since it has been raining for the past ten days, this also means that the lawn was very overgrown and needed attention before I did anything else so I spent two or three hours working on the lawn. After getting the lawn done, I pulled out the table saw so I could do some work on our garden railroad.  This was the first bit of work that I've done on the railroad this year.  I have a few things I'd like to accomplish in detailing this little garden railroad which I hope to get done little by little throughout the summer. Today's project was to cut a bunch of long ties to make a deck for the long compound curved wood trestle bridge.  I needed about 90 long ties.  Fortunately, I had enough scrap...