Doing nothing

It’s 4 pm and I’ve done nothing today. Well, that’s not literally true. So what do I mean by doing nothing? I guess it comes down to not making any progress on the bigger projects, either ones that I’ve already started or the ones that are waiting in the wings. I haven’t been in the shop to work on the ukulele or on some of the things I’ve promised friends I would do. I haven’t figured out a stand for Odie’s small cage so it will be easier to move him when he comes out of his large cage so we can clean it. Every day I feed him and think to myself, I must make a rolling stand because dragging this thing across the floor and keeping my hands beyond lunging distance is driving me crazy. I guess it will drive me crazy again today.

I started the day by doing my 30 minutes of what I call ‘upright and locked’ after I took the osteoporosis meds. I could have walked on the treadmill or gone for a walk outside. I sat in my pj’s and watched a crazy guy from Yorkshire walk on a knife edge in a rain storm and then set up his tent at the top of a mountain in the Lake District. In the intro to the video he said that the helicopter and the mountain rescue folks he saw and captured on his camera were actually evacuating someone who died, presumably from slipping off the ridge this guy was climbing. The video was 50 minutes, not 30. That’s 50 minutes of watching a guy and his dog walk in the rain, set up a tent in a gale, make a meal on a camp stove, and lie in the flapping tent while he tries to talk over the noise of the wind. After I watched that one I watched another of his videos. I have no idea why I spend so much time watching stuff like this when I could be out walking in the sunshine or riding my bike. I really enjoy both of those activities once I actually pry myself out of my chair.

Then it was time for a cup of tea. Last night as I was rummaging through the cups on my tea shelf, I came across a mason jar without a lid. It looked like it would hold quite a bit. I like my tea in big mugs that are also microwave and dishwasher safe. I made a cup of tea and drank it out of the mason jar. (No comment from you Wallberg!) I put milk in it so it wasn’t too hot on my hand but then I remembered that I once had a fleece sleeve for a tea tumbler and went in search of that. I didn’t find it and it probably would have been too small anyway, but I have quite a collection of yarn leftover from various crochet projects so I decided to make a sleeve for the mason jar to keep the tea a bit hotter and the hand cooler. When I want to wash the jar, just slip off the sleeve, and, if I spill tea on it I can throw it in the wash.

I started it once, thinking I would make it the length I needed to go around the jar. By the time I had one row beyond the foundation chain done I could see that it was not big enough so I pulled it out and decided to make it the width I wanted for my hand instead. That worked much better and I finished it in probably half an hour. Of course, I had to make a cup of tea to try it out and lunch was on the agenda.

Wasn’t I going to have a shower sometime today? Before that I picked up my ukulele and, instead of playing my usual stuff, I started just messing around until I had a melody of sorts. Richard heard me and asked if I had made that up. When I said I had, he told me to record it and he would write it out for me. I did and he did. Cool! That’s the first time that I remember playing something that didn’t exist before.

All right. Shower. Although the upstairs shower has been working for quite a while now we tend to use the downstairs one out of habit. I wanted to test out the bath mat that I finished crocheting a couple of days ago so I used the upstairs shower. I ended up washing my hair in soap because the little tube of shampoo that I put in that shower was all but empty. The bath mat was most satisfactory and it’s hard to make it skid even though I haven’t yet tacked on bits of anti-slip material. Add that to the project list. Next time I use the upstairs shower I want to have shampoo so I found a bottle with very little in it and got some of the shampoo from downstairs put into the bottle and brought it upstairs. Note to self: do not buy a litre of shampoo at Costco ever again! I have short hair and Richard, well, let’s just say that neither of us needs much shampoo to take care of our flowing locks. I think that bottle has been hanging around since at least 2013.

And now, it’s time to feed Odie. There are many days when I berate myself for not accomplishing anything but today I decided to notice what I was doing by not accomplishing anything. Turns out it was a day of following my whims. That’s not a bad thing but it’s all too easy to have a whole run of those days and I do want to get the big projects done.

I have great plans before I go to bed to get up earlier in the morning and get a whole bunch of things accomplished. When I wake up it’s too easy to turn over and go back to sleep and then putter away over tea and watch the birds and the squirrels outside the front window.

This phase of life is so much different than I thought it would be when I was working. I remember thinking that retirement would be so cool because we could take extra time to go to the start of long cycling trips and take our time coming home. I never dreamed that I wouldn’t be doing long cycling trips or running half marathons. I probably still could do both if I wanted to put the work into getting into good enough shape. There’s the trick: I can’t seem to be bothered and that, in itself, is bothersome. I know there will be a time when I will be limited by my physical abilities and not my lack of motivation and I don’t want to look back and kick myself that I should have done things when I could have.

I’m not sure where the balance is in all of this. I enjoy myself when I make the effort to tackle the big projects and I haven’t found the right carrot to get me out of whimsy mode and into get-busy-and-do-it mode. Sometimes I have spurts of motivation and get a whole bunch of stuff done in a day or even a week. I would like to find a way to summon that up at will. If I figure it out, I’ll let you know but now it’s time to feed the bird, and that is not negotiable.

The silly tree

The silly tree

I’ve always had stuffed animals. When I was a kid I had a lot of them but I gave away all except my favourite ones. Now I seem to have acquired quite the collection again. Some of them I bought; some came from friends, and others I inherited. Each one has a story but that’s for another day. Today I decided to use them to turn an old lamp into a silly tree. When I look over at them I can imagine each of them saying something.  No, I haven't been drinking and, yes, I know my head is a very strange place to be.

Teddy: Look Ma I'm a firefighter!
Cat: I know I can get to those birds

Teddy: Look Ma, no hands!
Cat: I'm a cat. Of course I'm going to push him off.

Panda: Why is there a hedgehog on my head and a cat paw in my face?
Hedgehog: I don't think I like it here. It's too far off the ground

Ostrich: Why me?
Cat: What white bear? I didn't push him off.
Brown Bear: Just a little bit higher...

Stork: Do you come here often?
Duck: No. Do you know who owns those ugly orange feet? 

Yellow-headed parrot: Whatcha doin? Whatcha doin? Can I help?
Blue-headed parrot: How come I have to sit behind him?

Cardinal: Don't look now but I think there's a bear below us.
Googly-eyed bird: Maybe if I try really hard I can fly down to the desk.

Success!

practice saw

I’m way behind in my goal of two posts a month. I have had a few ideas but mostly they were heading towards rants so I decided to keep them to myself. Today I’m feeling quite smug. That is in direct contrast to some of the time I’ve spent on the ukulele build lately. There are so many things to watch for all at the same time and in three dimensions. Suffice it to say, that it has brought the concept accuracy to a whole new level and I’m not there yet. So today I decided to try something entirely new in a situation where making a mess of it on the first try wouldn’t matter.

I’ve shied away from sharpening my own handsaws because I thought it was going to be too easy to screw up a perfectly good saw. I was prompted to give it a go the other day when I seemed to be struggling through a cut with my favourite dovetail saw. I picked up a different dovetail saw and made the cut smoothly and quickly. Wait, aren't you supposed to be able to go several years before you have to sharpen a good handsaw? Then I thought back and realized that several years was probably closer to 16 years. I’ve been using the saw extensively since I got it and not only in good quality hardwood. I’ve used it in softwood which sometimes has resin in it and even (shhhh) in plywood. That is anathema to some of my woodworking friends.

So the light went on: I have a dull saw. A couple of years ago I picked up a handsaw for nothing. It was sitting out near the sidewalk with a ‘free’ sign on it so I took it. I had it earmarked to practice on thinking that it would probably take quite a beating in the process of my learning to sharpen. It had a couple of kinks in it and, although I’ve tried to straighten it out, it will never be a first class saw again, so I wasn’t worried about ruining it. I was just dreading the time I thought it would take me to get it right.

Three of my favourite YouTube woodworkers have assured me that sharpening a handsaw isn’t hard. I’ve heard that one before about cutting dovetails and that skill eluded me for years. The first thing I needed in order to try sharpening the saw was a way to hold it while I worked. The simplest way to do that is to put a stick on each side of the blade with a small margin between the top of the stick and the top of the teeth. Then you clamp saw and sticks in the vise. Okay, I got that part. In accordance with one suggestion I stuck a popsicle stick on the end of the file so I could more easily tell when I was tilting the file. I also went over the teeth with a sharpie so I could see when I had taken material away from the teeth.

I thought it would be prudent to see how the saw was cutting before I started to sharpen it. The answer was ‘not well. Not much to ruin then, I told myself. I clamped the saw between the two sticks in the vise, put a strong light on it and donned my magnifying visor. I oriented the file to the saw plate and made the first cut. There was the rather satisfying sound and feel of metal coming off. Being careful not to change the angle of the file I moved onto the next tooth, and the next. Pretty soon I was in a rhythm.

setting up to sharpen

When I finished I touched the tips of the teeth. One person described that feeling as the points on ‘cat’s teeth.’ The saw felt a lot more like a cat's teeth than when I started. I ran my hand very gently down the tips and some still felt like they could use a bit more attention. I decided to go over the saw once more.

This time the teeth were nice and sharp so I took the saw out of the vise and went back to the piece of 1” ash on which I had previously tried the saw. This time the saw went through the wood quickly and easily, and it didn’t pull to one side. Sometimes if you don’t get your angles right you can end up with one side of the saw cutting more aggressively than the other.

Okay, time for the dovetail saw. The advantage of my dovetail saw was that I knew it had been sharpened well when I bought it. I figured if I followed the angles already on the teeth I should be okay. More sharpie, a couple of thinner sticks to account for the brass back on the saw and into the vise it went. After giving each tooth two strokes with the file, I checked with my fingers to see if it felt sharper. It did. When I tried it in the piece of ash, it cut twice as quickly as it had before I sharpened it.

When I’m learning something new I never expect to get it on the first try. When it happens I have my own little party. Before, when my saws became dull, I took them into a place that sharpens blades for power saws and they sent the handsaws to a guy in Edmonton to have them sharpened. The saws came back nice and sharp in about two weeks.

sharp dovetail saw

I know not every saw-sharpening will go smoothly and the two that I sharpened today were both rip saws, meant to cut with the grain of the wood. Crosscut saws, meant to cut across the grain of the wood, are more difficult to sharpen because they have a different tooth geometry. I’ll tackle a crosscut saw eventually, but for now, I think maybe I can keep the rip saws in my collection sharp and that’s good enough.